PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack

Julie188 writes "This should make VMware nervous. PayPal and eBay are yanking VMware software from some 80,000 servers and replacing it with OpenStack. Initially, PayPal is replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer."

Comments

Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[alen]

Nice for public facing websites and custom software but for a lot of enterprise apps they are certified only on VMware or hyper-v. You lose support on any other hyper visor

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.

Vmware is arguably facing a serious structural squeeze: Outside of a few neat-but-not-necessarily-all-that-widely-used features, virtualization technology is being commodified pretty aggressively. Vmware is still arguably the easiest to use; but that doesn't help them much with customers who are running enough servers that having a few gurus in house is cheaper than paying the license fees. Even worse, at the same time that team FOSS is chipping away at the large-scale market, Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.

If it were just a squeeze from one direction or the other, I'd be less pessimistic; but forces are converging on them from both sides. Unless Vmware discounts their licenses to nearly free, their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, and having strong enterprise support and brand recognition isn't exactly going to save them from Microsoft(who has the same thing) on the low-volume smaller shop end. Blood Bath.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MightyMartian]

For now. But I've found hyper-v is at best an adequate product and VMware is obscenely priced, so in the end enterprise software houses will adapt as they did to a landscape that shifted away from closed source *nix solutions like SCO and Solaris. Sure, they may only support Redhat as far as distros go, but the fact is that VMware and Microsoft's shoddy little product hardly rate as the only virtualization solutions out there.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

This story from Gigaom is a little more tempered than the article on Businessinsider. It quotes the Paypal director, saying they will continue to use VMware - if you read right through to the end of it.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/25/mirantis-open-sources-its-openstack-cloud-management-tools/

This, in any case, is not a "tipping-point" indicator.

With or without Mirantis or Fuel, Openstack is a tool kit for building your own CloudOS. Unless you can make a business based on the internal IP generated, there's no win here for most enterprise shops.

Amazon did this sucessfully - getting value from reselling access to raw infrastructure, based on development created for internal needs.

Yahoo failed at this, after more than a decade optimising their own OS layer for internet scale-out. They would have been better served to eliminate their OS engineering unit, buying common OTS Linux/Windows.

PayPal are somewhere between these poles. Having been on their own linux-based, scale-out physical architecture for more than a decade, they are well-positioned to derive value from Openstack. If you were Williams-Sonoma or Chevron? They do not want or need to become an OS developer/integrator.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

This has been a long time coming, but before going all crazy on knocking VMWare... we wouldn't have VMs without them? VMs that revolutionized IT infrastructure.

I don't think they've even begun to react to the competition or perceive it, maybe this move by paypal will put Xen on their radar, but for the longest time they were THE ONLY virtualization provider because nobody else could do it, people who call VMWare a monopoly simply do not understand the nature of technology and innovation.

Ex. name one anti-competitive practice they've employed? I can name one that's not ESXi has always been free, and that is actually what openstack is starting to surpass ESXi making it a viable alternative to the ESXi full blown vizor.

You folks are right though, the licensing structure completely bends the little guys over, a simple solution (w vCenter) can easily run up in the 50k range for like 200-300 users, unacceptable. But... all they have to do is bring their licensing costs down... right?

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have nothing against them as a company, or as innovators(for reasons I'd rather not revisit, I once enjoyed the better part of a day grovelling through their documentation on simulating various PC timers, while ensuring certain sorts of consistency under varying CPU loads and across host migrations, a surprisingly hairy business).

I just strongly suspect that they are pretty much screwed.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

HyperV isnt really an option for a lot of things, since its support for non-SUSE, non-Windows stuff is, shall we say, "lacking". Certainly you'll have a lot of fun getting pfSense running on it.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

Well, up until the point you realize that there's a bug in the hypervisor which affects networking which affects the thing you're trying to virtualize.

In THEORY, the hypervisor you use doesnt matter. In practice, it absolutely does. For instance, pfSense (a firewall based on FreeBSD) has no integration tools from HyperV, and I dont believe has any virtualization drivers for VMXNet3 on ESXi. So HyperV will have no integration in being able to safely shut the VM down, and ESXi's performance with the networking will be less than optimal.

There can be other issues; the virtual hardware presented by one hypervisor or another may cause problems with certain OSes. Theres also big differences in performance; one chart I saw indicated 2-3x better performance on large numbers of HTTP requests to apache-on-ESXi compared to apache-on-HyperV.

Incidentally, the 3 top hypervisors (Xen, vSphere, HyperV) all fit that definition of enterprise that you linked.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

Theyre screwed becuase they have the best product? They can change their pricing to be competitive if they really want; apparently they just dont see the need yet.

They wont be "screwed" until their competitors have better features than them, but if you check their competitor's marketing pages, you will notice that none of them claim to be better-- just that theyre a better "value". If / when VMware has to start claiming that, then theyre in trouble.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MikeB0Lton]

You assume too much. Support for RedHat or Windows Server is not a 100% guarantee that a product will work fine when the OS is virtualized. There are many products out there that are not supported when virtualized, or that have support for specific virtualization platforms. Typically the compatibility issues surface when a product is extremely sensitive to time or where performance has been a problem in the test lab. This extends into desktop virtualization as well.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Ex. name one anti-competitive practice they've employed?

You cannot replace the vSwitch. (Unless you are Cisco and give Vmware a lot of money).

You cannot replace the vShield Edge router and VXLAN implementations if you use their cloud management software.

These are critical components and VMware made sure they cannot be replaced with competition.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[khasim]

They can change their pricing to be competitive if they really want; apparently they just dont see the need yet.

That's going to be a problem for them as well. Because their customers who have been paying the current price will be annoyed if the price drops just so VMWare can maintain marketshare.

They wont be "screwed" until their competitors have better features than them, but if you check their competitor's marketing pages, you will notice that none of them claim to be better-- just that theyre a better "value".

Except that "good enough" is good enough.

And once the smaller businesses go with a particular flavour of virtualization it becomes somewhat difficult to change. Their in-house expertise becomes focused on that flavour.

I started with VMWare back in the 90s. But I think that they're products are massively overpriced now.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[alen]

sort of true

you can have memory and other similar bugs come up when you are running an untested and unsupported app/os/hyper visor combo

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[matrim99]

First to market != monopoly

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Darinbob]

Actually I never unstood why you have VMs on a system that you don't have to emulate. Ie, I use VMware on a Mac to run Windows stuff, but I can't figure out why run Windows on top of Windows? Sure there's the issue of making a sandbox, but surely there's more to it than that, it's an expensive and slow way to get something simple done. Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same server do both jobs directly.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Bengie]

OpenStack can also manage HyperV and bare-bones HyperV is free. And by "bare-bones", I mean doesn't come with a UI, otherwise has all of the other bells and whistles.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[sjames]

No knocks from me on VMWare itself. It's biggest failing has always been it's licensing.

I think you may be over-valuing them though. We had VMs on mainframes in the '70s (VM/370). VMWare brought full virtualization to PC class hardware (as opposed to the lesser capabilities of DOSBox and company). In part, it was simply a matter of waiting until x86 hardware was sufficiently capable. I have little doubt that we would have VMs today with or without them.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[DarthBart]

I virtualized a Windows system a few years ago via Parallels Workstation. Application A ran on the host machine under server 2008. Application B ran on the virtualized machine under server 2008 as well. Application A talked to B and vice versa. *Every* problem with either application was immediately blamed on the virtualization. And a good portion of any other network problem in general was blamed on that one virtualized system. There was one afternoon where the satellite we were using decided to lose lock and go for a spin and before anyone even bothered to look at the spectrum analyzer, they called me and said "There's something wrong with Vipersat, are you sure it isn't that virtualization stuff you're doing?"

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Tacticus.v1]

Service isolation is a nice one.
hardware and infrastructure abstraction and guest portability

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[EzInKy]

Even if the solution is inferior, I've always favored investing in solutions that don't require lock in. If VMware fails, it is their own fault for not providing their users freedom.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[TClevenger]

Microsoft is essentially offering 'Buy Windows Server, get Hyper-V for free*', which is a pretty attractive offer for the outfits who aren't going to go for Xen or KVM; but need to run Windows Server stuff anyway, and probably have some MS-comfortable guys in the shop.

Better yet, that's also "Buy Windows Server Datacenter Edition, get Hyper-V for free, as well as free licensing for as many Windows Server guest OS instances that as you want to run." That is a huge money-saver for Microsoft shops even over the Free alternatives.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[mysidia]

You folks are right though, the licensing structure completely bends the little guys over, a simple solution (w vCenter) can easily run up in the 50k range for like 200-300 users, unacceptable. But... all they have to do is bring their licensing costs down... right?

They have a solution for the little guys.. Essentials+; 3 or fewer hosts.

50k buys the highest level of licensing they offer, for several hosts. Now if you are buying extreme-high capacity hosts which you should be using for virtualization with more than 3 hosts, to maximize efficiency, the VMware licensing cost is small relative to the cost of the hardware.

You might finance the hardware and the vmware licensing...

VMware may prefer to further differentiate their product, so that it saves you more money, rather than lowering their price.

The problem is lowering their price creates unwanted speculation, grants unwanted potential legitimacy to the competition, and tends to undermine their pricing power going forward.

Making their product better justifies higher cost, and helps protect them against competitors which are unable to innovate as quickly, because they're still trying to catch up to past versions of the VMware software.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[k8to]

Enterprise customers have been using a wide variety of linux virtualization solutions for many years now. Virtuozzo, kvm-based systems, xen based systems and many others are the norm. It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.

They're the new version of "let's store everything on netapps".

FD: my company makes both these nonsense choices, but most of our customers don't anymore.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[RabidReindeer]

Actually I never unstood why you have VMs on a system that you don't have to emulate. Ie, I use VMware on a Mac to run Windows stuff, but I can't figure out why run Windows on top of Windows? Sure there's the issue of making a sandbox, but surely there's more to it than that, it's an expensive and slow way to get something simple done. Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same server do both jobs directly.

Because they don't run twice as slow. One of the MAJOR Sun servers in a shop I used to work in normally ran at 14% CPU capacity. Add a few more virtual servers to the box and you can get a lot more for your hardware buck. And, incidentally, save electricity - they were blowing breakers because of all those mostly-idle boxes each pulling power.

With a suitable high-performance host, which can be hardware-optimized or simply running para-virtualized, the actual VM overhead is quite low. In the mean time, you're saving hardware while still isolating services. And if you need to load-balance VMs, many systems support box-to-box migration while the VM is still up and running.

VM appliances are wonderful things. I can clone and boot one up in a lot less time than it takes to provision a general-purpose stand-alone machine. I can sandbox a sensitive machine. There are lots of good reasons for virtualization.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[elashish14]

But on the other hand, if an application is dependent on a platform that is not desirable, that reduces the overall value of the application, and it also opens the doors to competitors arise in other areas which could take their market share away.

Plus, an open platform's most valuable asset is its mindshare, and if large companies contribute to their development and invest more in the platform, that will bring more developers and more available software. There will always be managers who jump to choose platforms solely based on the availability of third-party support, rather than technical merits, but for those real engineers who want to move forward, more choices like this will enable much more progress.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[TheLink]

Does pfsense support automatic shutting down from UPS/low battery alerts?

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Darinbob]

Hmm, must be different on windows. On the mac vmware sucks up too much memory and cpu, and the system runs slow and jerky when one is active even if it's idle.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[elashish14]

Nah, no matter what their licensing costs are, there would always be other competitors - especially open source/free platforms which would be impossible for them to compete with once they reach feature parity.

Their real failing is the fact that all their revenue is derived from one product. VMWare Company has zero diversification. That is why they are toast - because once that rug gets pulled from under them, they have nothing left to bring to the table.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Bert64]

Unfortunately it doesn't matter if they have the best product or not, they are competing with "free" and "bundled with windows"... There is a long history of inferior products taking over a market because they were cheaper or heavily pushed.

And when it comes to large scale cloud deployments, where you have huge numbers of servers and are looking to shave anything off the server cost in order to be competitive, the price of vmware adds significantly to the cost of each node.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Bert64]

There have been virtualization tools in the form of emulators for quite some time... For instance on the Amiga is was possible to run a virtual mac as the main cpu was compatible. You could easily run multiple instances of macos.

Similarly, there was "mac on linux" which allowed powerpc macs running linux to run one or more instances of macos on top of linux.

The idea of virtualizing servers is also not new, there were plenty of hosting environments based on a form of chroot(), usually to keep customers separate from each other.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Anonymous Coward]

People here talk mostly about hypervisors, like ESX. What you run on Windows or Mac (vmware workstation e.g.) is mostly irrelevant when talking about enterprise server virtualization.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[drsmithy]

Some people have virtual servers, but what's the point of that if you end up with two servers on one machine that run more than twice as slow than if you just had the same server do both jobs directly.
Because 99% of the stuff that is on servers requires <5% of a modern CPU.
So you don't get twice as much stuff at half the speed, you get twenty times as much stuff at the same speed. With better reliability and flexibility.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[greatpatton]

Because sometime you work on virtualized networks where you need virtual appliance to keep the benefit of easy deplyoment...

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[funkboy]

Does pfsense support automatic shutting down from UPS/low battery alerts?

yep

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[TheLink]

In which case maybe VM vendors/users could use that as an option for graceful shutdowns.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

I don't run two servers on one machine; I run 40. That one machine costs 1/2 of what the 40 used to cost after accounting for the fact that everything is now stored on high-end enterprise storage devices rather than local disks that die all the time and those VMware licensing fees. The amount of money saved in datacenter space and power costs is absolutely staggering. That one machine is also vastly more reliable than any of the 40 it replaces. If it dies, I have many others that all those VMs can come back up on automatically with HA and DRS ensuring everything remains balanced and performing as expected. A dead server becomes a rare event that costs me as much downtime as pressing the reset switch on a physical box.

When I have a virtual server that's running low on disk space, I can simply increase its disk space either by adding additional disks on the fly or by enlarging the existing one. When a virtual server has an increasing workload that demands more RAM, I can hot-add it from 30,000 ft with no downtime. When someone's about to do something potentially risky like a software upgrade on a virtual server, I simply take a snapshot. If the whole thing goes wrong, I revert it. It takes 5 minutes and again, can be done from 30,000 ft. Need five new servers by the end of today? I can have them up in 2 hours. Need an identical copy of one that's already configured? Give me an hour. Need a demo system for one week out of each month? Easy, and it costs me nothing but some storage.

I don't know if you work in the tech industry, but if you do, I don't understand how you're still working in the tech industry without having at least some idea as to at least some of the advantages of virtualization. I have more control over more systems that cost me a fraction of what they used to and are now unimaginably more reliable. Even if you have 5 servers, I don't see how miss the benefits of virtualization. As for the overhead, if ESXi takes a GB or two our of the hundreds on a given physical box, so be it. It's saving so much money it's ridiculous.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

You're running an emulating application on an OS. We're talking about running a bare-metal hypervisor on hardware. There's a huge, huge difference.

Common wisdom is that ESX will eat around 5 - 10% of the system's total performance doing all its work to keep all those various VMs up and running. When you look at the cost savings and increases in reliability, you can't beat it.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[ByOhTek]

VMware is not in a monopoly position anymore and can no longer dictate prices to people who have free alternatives.

Using VMWare player myself. Of course that's free as in beer rather than open source.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Karl Cocknozzle]

It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.

Or perhaps they have different needs than you. Perhaps they have a budget for 1-2 personnel to manage their virtual machine environment, not 5-10. Perhaps they have a budget to spend about $70k for salary rather than the $120k linux virtualization guys go for. Or the extra few hundred grand for the five-times-as-many people required to carry it off.

Or perhaps they want to be able to easily replace those 1-2 people when they quit, retire, or die of old age with somebody else who already knows the product instead of finding somebody who knows Linux and "sort of" knows your distro and "Sort of" knows your VM solution and giving them a few months to "ramp up" and "figure it out."

"Free" is great, but you're the only guy in town who understands you can't be replaced--You instantly become the "key man" and are thus an instant liability to the company.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[bluefoxlucid]

Kepner-Tregoe problem solving appears novel. Their Decision-Analysis stuff appears to be an evolution of Pugh Charts, while their Adverse Consequence Analysis and Potential Problem/Opportunity Analysis stuff seems to be directly applied ORM. You aren't applying enough Kepner-Tregoe Problem Solving; and your decision to go with Virtualization wasn't backed up by a good DA, so people are gently trying to pressure you into going back to the old and familiar. Listen to NASA.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[stiggle]

FreeBSD (on which pfSense is based) has Hyper-V support since last year, but as pfSense and other firewalls are slower in their updates the current releases are still using FreeBSD 8.1. the beta snapshots of pfSense 2.1 use 8.3 which can include Hyper-V integration.

Currently it installs fine using the legacy network adaptors (so you only get 100MBit links).
If you want full OS intergration and to use non-legacy network adaptors then you need to use the latest 2.1 beta & install a rebuilt FreeBSD kernel with Hyper-V support.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has Hyper-V support out of the box.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[pnutjam]

To be fair, you could already do alot of this stuff with a SAN (virtualized storage). Snapshot, migrate, resize disk on the fly. All of this is very simple if you are booting from a SAN. Virtualizing the OS gives you more efficient use of your hardware if you are running low resource servers, sandboxing, and a base hardware layer that simplifies upgrades and deployments.
If you are running a bunch of Databases or time sensitive equipment you might be better off with a physical hardware layer and just virtualized storage.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[gbjbaanb]

the one thing that VMWare did that really changed the world was to give a host VM system, available for free. Before that, all the VM software was very expensive stuff, but suddenly, it had grabbed everyone's attention and turned "virtualisation" into a management buzzword.

Of course Microsoft then brought out a VM platform and gave it away for free too.

They should be given some kudos for what they did for us though. Sure, they need to evaluate how they brand their products (I still have flipping idea what vFusion or vSphere actually is) and their licencing costs. I hope they do,. as I wouldn't like to see them fail and leave everyone using crappy hyper-v.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[pnutjam]

Xen is already on the enterprsie radar, http://www.citrix.com/products/xenserver/features/editions.html.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[pnutjam]

This is a good point, openstack does not appear to be something you can setup and plop redhat or windows onto, like vmware or openbox.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[stiggle]

You don't even need Windows Server - they've bolted it into Windows 8 Pro too (seems to be as a Virtual PC replacement).

Can someone hit me with a lInux penguin or something - I seem to be supporting Microsoft.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

Thats fairly impressive, good to know, and opens the door for HyperV for me on several projects, thanks for the heads up.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

Because it allows you to do inter-VLAN routing right on the virtual infrastructure, with several big benefits.

1) your infrastructure no longer needs to have separate warm-standby appliances / routers to keep everything up during an outage; your firewall now gets in-built protection from HA / DRS

2) you can now centrally monitor and control inter-vlan traffic that comes from and goes to the virtual infrastructure, without sending that traffic out to a router and waiting for it to come back. If your firewall supports VMXNet drivers, your routing speed can easily exceed 10gbit/s, even on very modest hardware.

3) no additional costs for hardware, batteries, etc

4) ease of configuration, and ease of expansion. Need another VLAN for another class of server? Add a virtual NIC in VMWare, attach it to your virtual firewall, set up rules, done. No need to worry about additional traffic flying down the wire to / from your router.

I've done this both with Microsoft ISA 2004 (which is wonky) and pfsense; it works incredibly well in both circumstances. With ISA we could easily fire up wireshark if there was any odd traffic going around and capture everything, or limit to specific VLANs. Im not sure if youve worked with packet capture on Cisco, but its not nearly as easy to use or filter as wireshark.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Again no, AC is 100% right, anybody who puts a firewall within their virtual stack needs to not work with virtual machines, there's no justifiable scenarios for doing so in a production environment. Your switch would double up though running the traffic around effectively reducing network performance by a minimum of 50% or greater at high load.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Support for RedHat or Windows Server is not a 100% guarantee that a product will work fine when the OS is virtualized.

I'd love your source on that, I've never had an issue with either OS you mentioned on VMWare. If somebody screws up sysprep, that's their fault, not the vizors.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

No need to worry about additional traffic flying down the wire to / from your router.

How does this work?

If you have more than one host, the v-firewall can only reside on one host, causing the other host to fire through the switch to get to the firewall which then fires out = redundant, thus the popularity of physical hardware firewalls. Prove me wrong?

P.S. my knowledge applies to corporate and business environments, what people do with virtualization on their home machines is irrelevant to what we're talking about.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Performance i agree on, there's definitely differences, do you realize VMWare is at the top of this category?

Also, I happen to know that all major OS are supported just fine by any of the vizors we're talking about.

Also #2, it's been established that the networking works in these vizors by people better than you or I, so if it doesn't I'd blame the admin.

In regards to pfSense, it's an OS project, so they probably either haven't gotten around to offering support, or have principals against it, I doubt there's a legit reason they don't support VMWare / Hyper-V outside of that. Also a virtual firewall is a horrible idea on a network where performance matters.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Lol, you must work for tonka.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[cdwiegand]

Uh, not if your whole network is virtualized. For example, I don't have a single real physical server running a real OS, we run a virtualization platform and run our public and private servers on the boxes, and a VM running a firewall to manage access.

As far as our laptops, those are in a whole 'nother office, with a separate firewall. But if I deploy something on amazon and want an OpenVPN connection back to other clusters of servers running in other data centers, yeah, I'm going to run pfSense on a VM.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[k8to]

You clearly didn't read my post, nor understand the issue.

We didn't choose to do the smart thing, so our needs are irrelevant.

I'm in regular contact with a larger percentage of large enterprise IT shops, probably over 20% of the total base of sizable IT departments, and I speak from the experience of what *they* choose.

Meanwhile, if you need to deal with virtualization management at large scale, vmware is worse in terms of staff efficiency, because you can't do custom automation in a reasonable way.

Your numbers are about optimization for some medium-sized business, and it may well be the right choice there, but that's just barely "enterprise".

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[BigDaveyL]

One way to look at it is you do not have to buy 10 servers, that will end up sitting idle most of the time, while they take up space in your data center sucking up power. You can get better utilization by combining some of them.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[sjames]

You're forgetting Xen, KVM, and Virtualbox.

Re: Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[claybats]

Never tell the vendor when you are virtualized. Even if the problem is in the virtualization setup, it only delays rca. The vendors should always assume the issue was their fault and be required to prove that it was not.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Darinbob]

I'm in engineering and software, but not IT. Seems to me like you used to have 40 underused servers. Maybe they all did indepedent jobs, one service per machine. Why not combine all servers into one machine, but not virtualized? I can see if you're a really large company that you have flexibility. If a machine crashes then it's bad because you have to restore, but you still make imaged backups same as if you're on a VM. And aren't VMs lots slower than the actual machine?

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[LordLimecat]

When you do a VMWare infrastructure with multiple VLANs, one typical setup is to have a trunk port comes from the switches into each of the VMWare hosts. You can then assign "port groups" to a VLAN and VMWare will take care of tagging the traffic. Additionally, it will automatically create those port-groups on other clustered VMWare hosts, so that in the event of a fail-over the VM guest will continue to have network access.

You are right that some of the traffic would indeed have to go across a wire between VM hosts, but there are several possible scenarios; you could affinity several high-traffic VMs together with the pfSense box so that they all lived on the same host; you could dedicate a switch and some NICs to the inter-VLAN traffic; and Im sure there are other possibilities. But regardless, in most scenarios, less traffic will be hitting the switch and routing infrastructure than with a physical box, and certainly it is easier to monitor and control the traffic.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MikeB0Lton]

The source is me. I work with one such enterprise product (IP telephony) and know for a fact that some software will not work properly. It has nothing to do with sysprep and everything to do with how the software is designed.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[sjames]

I said grammar Nazis suck big gangrenous donkey balls.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Putting the high-traffic VMs on the same host makes sense and so does the host's internal routing via VMWare. I'd put this one in the works with best practices category.

What about when you have 20-30 VM hosts? :)

I can kinda see the usage in the small / mid business world and maybe a super solution for something larger involving multiple firewalls. And between recommending a 5-6 figure firewall and the vmware package that contains it I can see the justification.

I did read: http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/when-to-use-a-virtual-firewall-14564/ and found two things: these guys actually think a software firewall is more secure than a hardware firewall... a firewall is a firewall, wasn't sure if I should keep reading, but ultimately they say exactly what I'm saying, on a high load network it's not an option.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[gbjbaanb]

all post-VMWare.

VMWare workstation was released in 1999

xen - 2003
kvm - 2007
virtualbox - 2007

Before that the only virtualisation was on mainframes.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

your software does not interact with the VM, the OS does... Application > OS > VM.

One more time: your software as far as it's concerned is running on a physical OS, it has no way of telling it's virtualized.

Don't blame the vizor for something it'll never logically be responsible for. Now if somebody misconfigurated the networking that's operator error and can happen in any stack as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MikeB0Lton]

The "vizor" is responsible for providing the hardware virtualization to the guest. This does not perform 100% the same as the physical host. Even if the host is empty save for this one guest VM, it will still not perform equally to an identical install on the same hardware. You'll get great results for simple shit like file servers, but your stance is simply not true for all enterprise applications.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[sjames]

DOSemu and Bochs both predated VMWare. VMWare was an improvement and a good one at that, but it's not like nobody ever thought of virtualizing a PC before.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Compaqt]

All of this is compelling, but what about where you need high-performance disk? Up until virtualization, DB admins went crazy on various physical ways to optimize database disk access (spreading out on physical spindles, etc.). Now, you just get a virtual drive, what does that do to performance?

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

What something like VMware gives you that most SANs don't out of the box is extremely simple point-and-click manageability. Yes, you can do some of the storage-side stuff with SANs, but who cares if I can clone the data for an app server if I don't have an app server to use it?

So while some SAN technology can do some of the stuff VMware gives you (and a lot of these vendors now interact directly with VMware via APIs), you've never really had the complete package to make use of it before things like ESX.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

You have any number of options for disk. First of all, pick your disk technology. Need lots of space and very little actual performance? Go with SATA. Need a little more performance? SAS. Even more? SSDs. Still not enough? RAMSAN has products that'll knock your socks off and give you better performance at the disk than anything you've ever set up on a physical server before. You can even mix and match these technologies. Vendors like NetApp will let you attach disk shelves to filer heads of all different types. Put your disk-heavy VMs on SAS or SSDs, your backup/dump space on SATA, or install read cache with either flash memory or SSDs. Vendors like EMC give you true storage tiers wherein you have some SATA disks, some SAS disks, some SSD, etc and the system automatically moves data to faster or slower tiers of storage depending on how often it's used. So your most-used data ends up on extremely quick SSDs while the files you haven't opened in six months sit idle on cheap SATA disks.

You can then choose any number of ways to attach this storage. iSCSI, fibre, NFS; you choose. 10gig NFS works nicely in most cases, scales really easily, and requires very little in the way of infrastructure build-out. You can also limit how much storage performance an individual VM can grab to ensure nobody is getting starved. With things like Storage DRS, you can automatically have VMware Storage vMotion VMs between storage devices as load changes to ensure you aren't overloading one particular device.

With physical servers, you've got whatever the disks in there can give you. You might have 3, 5, 7 disks at most to work with and if you kick off some big job on that box, you're limited by what they can put out. The rest of the time, they're sitting there with unused performance. If you lose a disk, you need to get it swapped ASAP since you only have one or two spares in most cases. With VMs talking to enterprise storage, you've got your data spread across dozens of disks, so you've got all the performance you need when you need it. With tiers, the data you need most is coming very quickly. The storage space is better used because they're de-duplicating 4k blocks of data (your OS library files are the same on every box, why store 500 copies of them?). Lose a disk? Hot spares are ready to go and the SAN will phone home to the vendor for them to ship a replacement to you and to you so you know it's coming. In the meantime, it just drops a hot spare in and rebuilds parity with that.

There's a ton of other features you can use with enterprise storage, but the basics alone make it worthwhile. Disks sitting in a physical server are slower, less efficient, less resilient; just downright awful by comparison.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Loki_1929]

I'm in engineering and software, but not IT. Seems to me like you used to have 40 underused servers.

Bingo. This is the major driving force behind the move to virtualization: underutilized hardware. But systems don't scale up and down perfectly, so I can't pay $30 for enterprise grade servers with the processing power of a Pentium II and 10GB of RAM and disks that do 20 IOPS because I'm only ever writing some log files. I have to spend $3,000 for a server that's going to have much of its hardware sitting idle most of the time.

Maybe they all did indepedent jobs, one service per machine. Why not combine all servers into one machine, but not virtualized?

Because having one broken service bring down 40 others is bad and I don't want to have to bring down 40 other services to upgrade a piece of software or troubleshoot a bug. Also, there will be times where some of those physical servers would suddenly experience a huge spike in usage. For instance, the launch of a new piece of content, functionality, etc that makes a huge number of normally idle users either want or need to access the services all of a sudden. What you're suggesting has zero scalability, zero redundancy, zero service isolation, and zero resiliency to software glitches and user error. By completely isolating the OS, you're isolating the services on there and everything else. I can also set limits on hardware utilization so a runaway process isn't eating through the RAM, disk, network, and other shared resources.

I can see if you're a really large company that you have flexibility. If a machine crashes then it's bad because you have to restore, but you still make imaged backups same as if you're on a VM. And aren't VMs lots slower than the actual machine?

The snapshots taken during risky operations take seconds to put in place, seconds to revert, and seconds to remove. It takes hours to image any reasonably large physical system. Enterprise backup solutions take seconds to do full backups of a VM once the first backup has been taken (essentially diffs against the vmdks). Shared enterprise storage allows further backups to be taken in case entire volumes or disk aggregates are lost/deleted/etc.

As for speed, I already talked about this. If you're talking about running an emulator on top of an OS (like VMware Workstation/Player/Fusion etc), then it's going to be slow and hog resources. If you're talking about a hypervisor running on bare metal hardware (like VMware ESX), then the common wisdom is you lose 5-10% of the performance of the system. Meanwhile, you gain scalability, redundancy, resilience, reliability, efficiency, and truly massive cost savings.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Enterprise applications technologically consist of the following:

1. registry keys
2. file directories
3. framework
4. web services
5. database

Which one of these is exactly affected by virtualization?

You might be thinking of a very niched scenario working in telecom, most telecom applications expect certain hardware (pbx switch though I've never heard one of these virtualized). Embedded OS are a completely different beast from 99.9% of usage scenarios.

What scenario are you talking about exactly?

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MikeB0Lton]

I happen to work in telecom and we do virtualize many elements of our system.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[pnutjam]

Yes, but with a blade server or a bunch of racked servers and a SAN you can replicate alot of the functionality. I know, I did it. We swapped out hardware by just pointing the LUNS and the new stuff and rolled back to snapshots when we had bad updates. VMware does make it much more accessible and cuts the hardware cost, or moves it to an up front cost, depending on your perspective.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Which one of these is exactly affected by virtualization?

What scenario are you talking about exactly?

Having answered neither of my questions, I'm going to go ahead and assume you probably do work in telecom but as far as virtualization understanding is concerned you're full of shit, discussion over.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[MikeB0Lton]

LOL. Apparently I missed a reply somewhere, but that is irrelevant. I politely disagree with your position, but I do agree that this is not worth further debate.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Synerg1y]

Fair enough, I'm still kinda curious exactly how an app can be affected by virtualization on a correct VM implementation, but I'm sure I'll run across it eventually, and if not I won't worry about it.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[lewiscr]

For what it's worth, I had that problem until I added much more RAM than I thought I needed.

My original setup, I had 10GB of RAM, used about 4GB in various Mac apps. If I ran a VM that needed 1GB of RAM, the machine was sluggish. Pause the VM, the host sped back up. I tried adding a second HDD, and moving all the VMs onto it. It helped some. The BBOD didn't stick around as long, but the host OS was still annoyingly slow.

Later I needed to run a couple more VMs full time, using an additional 4GB of RAM. I added 16GB of RAM (had to remove 2GB, ending up with 24GB of RAM). Now I can run at least 4 VMs full time, all of them using about 10GB of RAM, without any noticeable host slow down.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[AnilJ]

I think you are forgetting that it was IBM who invented commercial VM OS.

Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Your numbers are about optimization for some medium-sized business, and it may well be the right choice there, but that's just barely "enterprise".

Since most companies in this country aren't "Enterprise" that's not necessarily a problem. The "enterprises" I've rubbed against can barely tie their own shoelaces: In fact, one of my larger customers is actually a division of a Fortune 500 (complete with F500 "enterprise" IT methodologies.) Because of those "methodologies" the client has to maintain their own entire network of systems, virtual machines, and applications because the "enterprise" can't service their customer base (or them) in a timely fashion.

The problem with "Enterprise" is the bureaucracy: It precludes being really, instinctively good at anything. I don't see that as a weakness: As I see it, "enterprise IT" is the biggest competitive weakness of the Fortune 500, and in the cases where a smaller competitor rolls in and eats their lunch (as is the case of my client) its usually because of (not in spite of) "enterprise" mindsets.

PayPal Uses OpenStack

[grusapa]

http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/paypal/

Re:PayPal Uses OpenStack

[jellyfoo]

"We are moving to the cloud powered by OpenStack to enable agility, availability and the innovation necessary to get the best products to our customers, faster than our competitors."

Is there some kind of disease in which anyone who reaches a high enough level in the corporate world is required to talk in brain-dead marketing/buzzword speak?

Oh, and what product(s)? PayPal is a payment processor for online merchants. That's the only product anyone's aware of that they make.

Re:PayPal Uses OpenStack

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and what product(s)? PayPal is a payment processor for online merchants. That's the only product anyone's aware of that they make.

Three that you're unaware of:
Debit card
Mobile card processing
In-store payment by phone or PayPal payment card at 14 merchants (and counting)

Re:PayPal Uses OpenStack

[jellyfoo]

I see. Thank you for the update Mr. PayPal-employee.

Good Riddens

[BitZtream]

Theres something wrong with VMware that makes it think it can charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing. They need their asses handed to them for a few years to put them back in their place.

Re: Good Riddens

[danomac]

Even for nonprofits VMWare is excessively expensive. Most vendors are half price or so (some are even 75%), but not VMWare. If I remember right they were 95% of the original price.

They're insane.

Re:Good Riddens

[h4rr4r]

Not when HyperV, Xenserver, Xen and KVM all do that for free.

Re: Good Riddens

[skovnymfe]

That's how you get when you are too big on your own for too long, feeding shareholders money. The shareholders take over and the company suffers as a result of having to sacrifice creativity for profit. Happens all the time.

Re:Good Riddens

[tlhIngan]

Theres something wrong with VMware that makes it think it can charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing. They need their asses handed to them for a few years to put them back in their place.

It's name. VMWare was the first to virtualize the x86, and thus people bought into them by name alone. Sort of like how people used to buy IBM, or Microsoft. Now they buy VMWare.

And I know many a sysadmin who for their home system, refuse to run anything but the home versions of VMWare (notably on Mac, VMWare Fusion). They wouldn't even consider Parallels (nevermind VirtualBox).

VMWare has name recognition primarily. You'll never go wrong buying VMWare. Hyper-V is only done because it's Microsoft.

Re:Good Riddens

[chispito]

charge more for virtualization software than the hardware it is replacing

That isn't why organizations virtualize.

Re:Good Riddens

[silas_moeckel]

And KVM just works and has for a very long time.

Re: Good Riddens

[Anonymous Coward]

The last CEO made structural changes to enhance profitability yet sacrificed the long term health of the company. For 5 years of "work" cashed in $60 million in stock grants in 3 days (Nov 2012) and was getting a $1.5M USD salary with cash bonuses.

The failed "new" licensing scheme that they tried to push thru in 2011 backfired because it was seen for what it really was, a cash grab.

The company has become extremely bureaucratic and has lost it's innovative edge. In essence it had become Microsoft. I guess that is what you get when you hire alot of management staff & executives from Microsoft.

They are responsible for their own shortcomings and present/future predicaments.

Re:Good Riddens

[Aaden42]

In fairness, at least on Mac, VMWare slaughters VirtualBox and Parallels on performance. Worth the money, IMHO. On Linux/Windows it could well be a different story.

Re:Good Riddens

[bloodhawk]

You are living in the past. VMware while still ahead is only barely so, HyperV and all the others have made huge progress to the point where unless you are a niche that depends on a very specific VMware scenario then it is very difficult to justify the premium they charge.

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

I have ~950 VMs on 14 servers.

Even at full price, I'm paying WAAAAY less in licensing than if I had to have all that hardware running, moreso when you throw on renting more space, paying for more power/AC/network/etc.

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

Happy to post a screen shot if you'd like.

About 100 VMs on a Dell R720 full of memory & fast hard drives is reasonable.

Yes, I don't have failover capacity among many other things, but mgmt isn't willing to pay for it.

Re:Good Riddens

[batkiwi]

Can you name one thing VMWare does that HyperV with Server 2012 cannot do?

Re:Good Riddens

[RobbieCrash]

You may want to go and read about what each platform can do, because this is no longer accurate in many ways.

See here for more info: http://www.aidanfinn.com/?p=13483

Re:Good Riddens

[Nkwe]

Can you name one thing VMWare does that HyperV with Server 2012 cannot do?

Access shared storage? (Do a live migration without moving or copying the underlying virtual disk images.)

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

Theres nothing wrong with them realizing that huge numbers of IT shops are willing to pay that money.

You're right that it is refreshing to see some seriously healthy competition from Xen and HyperV, tho-- their prices are seriously painful.

Re:Good Riddens

[hawguy]

*cough*bullshit*cough*

*cough*bullshit*cough*

What are you calling bullshit on? The value?

vSphere 5 Enterprise with Ops Manager is $4300/CPU. He has 14 servers, if each is dual-processor, then he'd pay $60K pruchase price plus $14K/year maintenance. Assuming that servers + storage cost him $15K + $500/year per server for hardware support, then his total initial cost is $270K + $21K/year for maintenance, or $284/initial + $22/year maintenance for each virtual server. How are you going to beat $280/server with physical servers? The datacenter network switch ports alone for a physical server may cost you more than $280.

Or are you claiming that 14 physical servers can't support 950 virtual servers? 67:1 is a fairly high consolidation ratio, but not unreasonable if they are typical lightly used office servers - 384GB of RAM and 16 cores of CPU in each physical server could easily support that load.

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

HyperV has been pretty buggy every time Ive used it (though I have not tried 3.0). Hot-adding USB, NICs, etc has been painful, when it even works without a reboot; there have been several times I've seen virtual NICs unresponsive until removed and re-added with 2 reboot cycles. Ive also seen scenarios where SCVMM was completely unresponsive because of some asinine dependency.

Xen I have little experience with, because it has apparently no ability to be nested in VMWare workstation. Unfortunate, since HyperV and ESXi are all quite happy to nest, with ESXi happy to nest 3-4 layers deep. I would still probably choose Xen over HyperV, because of HyperV's historically awful support of non-Windows stuff, and non-existant freeBSD support.

I admit Im a VMWare fanboy, because they seem to have the broadest OS support, the best performance, and the most sane tools. MS's virtual network editor was seriously bad last time i used it, nearly as bad as VMWare Workstation's. And to this day I cant think of a feature that the other two have that ESXi has, while I can definately think of features ESXi has that the other two dont (though probably not at the free level; the cool bits always seem to end up at Enterprise+).

Re:Good Riddens

[PhrstBrn]

KVM is not so much a Type-1 Hypervisor, as it is a "jail" for the Linux kernel.

It does have a great utility, especially for hosting isolations and for just-in-time host creation.

But is is just NOT a real, NuMA aware, scheduling sensitive Hypervisor with a cluster awareness for capacity management, etc.

KVM is a type-1 hypervisor. I can't believe somebody with 3 digit UID is posting this misinformed crap.

Re: Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

..which generally gets others to realize that theres plenty of money to be had if only they get their act together. Amazing how many features and how much bugfixing HyperV got once MS realized that a decent hypervisor was a compelling feature.

Seems to me things are working as intended; this is how we ended up with multiple sweet browsers when MS stagnated.

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

I have no experience with Parallels, but you cannot compare Virtualbox with any of the other hypervisors. It is great for one-off projects, until it randomly devours your VM due to an upgrade (which happened to me, and was a documented bug); or until it hangs; or until you realize that its acceleration for one or another feature is limited to windows only.

VMWare workstation really is miles ahead of VirtualBox, and really is worth the price. I wish I could try HyperV on my home rig, but of course installing that feature locks my computer due to a mobo incompatibility. Regardless, as my intention is to have a home lab running ESXi, and as Im only aware of VMWare products being able to nest, that is the only option I have.

Re:Good Riddens

[Lashat]

Open Source, Upstreamed, Accelerated OpenGL Linux Display Driver (vmwgfx) = Linux win for VMware.

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

Generally most people arent going to need more than Essentials Plus, (for 3 hosts i think?) unless they really need DRS or DPM or the other fancy stuff. For more than 3 hosts, theyre going to want standard edition; you can get a kit of 6 CPUs for $11k. The cost of the backend SAN alone is generally going to exceed that, and I imagine that 3 2-socket, 8-12 core servers is going to run in the area of ~$25-40k.

Re:Good Riddens

[Wolfraider]

Take a look at cluster shared volumes, Hyper-V has supported shared storage since 2008 R2.

Re:Good Riddens

[philip.paradis]

KVM provides full virtualization with hardware acceleration, and the line between Type 1 and Type 2 is significantly blurred by virtue of the fact that the loadable kernel module for it does indeed operate as a bare metal hypervisor. You aren't limited to Linux guests, either. I've got a combination of Linux, BSD, Windows, and Solaris guests running in a cluster right now. These guests run unmodified, and performance is admirable. In fact, it's better than I've achieved on similar hardware with VMware, and I actually have better control of the entire network stack from a host perspective via ebtables and arptables. Fine grained resource management is available via cgroups facilities.

Do you actually operate anything in a KVM environment?

Re:Good Riddens

[berashith]

im currently running a heavy production load on 6.0.something, and not quite up to the latest hot fix. No blue screens in a while. the only issue is the depth of changes in the hot fixes dont allow a smooth upgrade path, and the lack of polish you mention does get in the way. I wouldnt call it anywhere close to perfect, and dont now if I would choose it if this wasnt already a huge installation, but the price is definitely right.

Re:Good Riddens

[mysidia]

Yes, I don't have failover capacity among many other things, but mgmt isn't willing to pay for it.

Wait until something goes wrong on its own, and then ask for management to consider high availability then; perhaps management would reconsider after host-wide downtime one Monday morning that takes 5 to 6 hours to repair...

Re:Good Riddens

[mysidia]

Even at full price, I'm paying WAAAAY less in licensing than if I had to have all that hardware running, moreso when you throw on renting more space, paying for more power/AC/network/etc.

But without virtualization, would you really be running all those servers -- or would you have fewer servers with more apps consolidated on each one? I bet the latter.

So while virtualization saves money, it's not necessarily as much as it might appear at first glance. Virtualization encourages the operation of more server workloads, because it's so cheap.

(The price per server is lower, so the quantity demanded within your organization could be expected to be higher, all other things being equal)

Re:Good Riddens

[mysidia]

It should be noted that with competition existing... the justification for VMware's licensing prices does have to be based on their benefit above the competition. You think you can't run 950 VMs on 14 Hyper-V servers? The cost compare is not virtualization vs no virtualization; it's virtualization with VMware vs their least-expensive comparable competitor :-)

Re:Good Riddens

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooooo you claim you support large HyperV and ESX clusters yet you don't even have a prebuilt image or deployment process. Either you are full of shit or you have no concept of what a large deployment is as no one with large scale deployments works like you outlined, at least not competent ones. The limitations you describe also only exist in the old versions of HyperV not the current one. finally what sort of moron runs a web browser on their vritual host? everything you describe rings alarm bells of an incompetent admin.

Re:Good Riddens

[whoever57]

Windows works nicely under KVM with the signed Windows virtio drivers from RedHat and the drives presented as virtio drives. This gives a significant improvement in I/O speed.

Re:Good Riddens

[tigersha]

Agree. We once had a case where we had a person working offiste without an internet connection that required use of what is normally run on a webserver. We installed said server in VirtualBox on Windows. Was a total disaster. Every 4th time or so the computer instantaneously rebooted when you started the VM.

We switched to VMWare Workstation for Windows, no more problems.

I am using Parallels on Mac a lot. In the old days, on Leopard and WIndows XP it was wicked fast, but over the years I have notices that it has become a dog. Now, admittedly, I am running Windows 7 and 8 on it which are much more resource intensive but still. I will definitely look at VMWare workstation for Mac now. Win7 and 8 on my admittedly 5 year old laptop is not usable anymore.

WIndows 8 on a Hackintosh with 32 Gigs of RAM does run well in Parallels.

Re:Good Riddens

[Bert64]

You can't do half the things with a unix server that you can do with a mainframe...

You can't do half the things with windows that you can do with a risc unix server...

You can't do half the things with an arm based tablet that you can do with a full size x86 laptop...

When the cheaper product does *enough* and is marketed well, the expensive product gets pushed into a niche, and as the locked in customer base dwindles very few new customers sign up.

Re:Good Riddens

[Bert64]

If a server costs $15k, and vmware costs $8.6k per server then thats over 50% higher costs per machine just for vmware.

Had he used a free virtualization stack, he could have bought a second lower spec server (or 50% more of the same servers) alongside each higher spec machine to use as the failover capacity his management is refusing to pay for.

Re:Good Riddens

[Bert64]

I assume you have a very large number of clusters if you need 3 people to manage it...
I manage 4 clusters of kvm based systems (proxmox), also on hp hardware, 2 have storage arrays too, the others are cheaper setups.
Managing the virtualization takes up almost none of my time, far more time is spent on the images inside, and since most of my images are linux using kvm saves me a lot of time because all the necessary drivers are built in by default.

Re:Good Riddens

[hawkinspeter]

Please explain how I'm able to run multiple windows machines on KVM hosts if it's just a Linux "jail"? I think you're confusing KVM for something else.

Re:Good Riddens

[h4rr4r]

You left out, enable iscsi which was CLI only until 5, add drivers for any device not in the ESXi disk, etc.

Re:Good Riddens

[h4rr4r]

Try KVM.
The tools are far more sane, and even easily scriptable.

Re:Good Riddens

[pnutjam]

No, but it sounds like I should try it out. Thanks.

Re:Good Riddens

[pnutjam]

everything you describe rings alarm bells of an incompetent admin.
Welcome to the world of Windows Admins, these are the guys dragging down salaries for the truly competent.

Re:Good Riddens

[pnutjam]

I'm curious if these are windows servers or linux? I think this one server for each app is a windows admin mindset that seems to have carried over to linux to some extent. Windows apps are terrible for stomping all over each other and assuming they are the only thing going on.

Re:Good Riddens

[LordLimecat]

Correction to above, I was able to get XenServer running in Workstation, it was bad settings on Workstation.

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

You mean like last week when one of the 'redundant' AC units went out and I had to shut down most servers for 1.5 days until all repairs were made?

Yeah, didn't change their mind.

CapEx vs OpEx

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

We build monitoring software. We need lots of OSes to test against and on. ie w2k3, w2k8,w2k8sp1,w2k8r2,xp,xpsp2,win7,win7sp1, win8,w2k12,RHEL4.5,5,5.5,5.6,5.7,5.8,6,6.1,6.2,6.3, same for CentOS, similar for SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu.
Also, have to throw in lots of hardware to test our probes on - switches, sans, UPSes, routers, etc.

Our testing matrixes are ugly.

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

And the cost to learn said virtualization stack?

For the whole developer org who all have power user rights?

Probably a lot more, if counting lost productivity time to developers.

Also, said stack doesn't support about half of our guest OS targets.

Re:Good Riddens

[NatasRevol]

Good points.

Most of our VMs are idle, to run probes/monitors against.
A few large VMs that manage the monitors against all those other VMs.

It's overloaded, but doable.

Re:Good Riddens

[StuartHankins]

You're glazing over a lot, and using cloning to try and get around some real limitations. When the host has to run antivirus (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd744830.aspx) you're losing resources than a non-Hyper-V solution. VMWare and RHEV are much better solutions for everyone except the hobbyist, with VMWare being the insanely expensive option.

Re:Good Riddens

[cthulhu11]

When you consider that most people who use VM's do so because it's trendy rather than out of any real need, their pricing makes sense.

OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source winning again....

Re:OSS

[ackthpt]

Open source winning again....

Consider PayPal, they may just be tired of sharing their vast revenue. Someone at the top wants to buy an island or new yacht and all those VMware fees would come in handy.

Re:OSS

[Fluffeh]

... and all those VMware fees would come in handy.

And there is nothing wrong with that in my books. If anything, it's a great thing. Some big-wig wants to buy an island, migrates [some of] the company to open source and in doing so shows many smaller businesses that it is possible, it works and they feel more confident the next time some geek makes a suggestion like that in a meeting.

I am personally very tired of pushback from management based purely on the fact that they don't understand technology and have been trained to think that the best product must have the biggest price tag.

Re:OSS

[NatasRevol]

"shows many smaller businesses that it is possible" assuming you have a dedicated department of people to make it happen.

Re:OSS

[ackthpt]

"shows many smaller businesses that it is possible" assuming you have a dedicated department of people to make it happen.

I'm sure they do - offshore somewhere.

Re:This is where open source naturally leads

[TheRealMindChild]

Soon all software companies will be bankrupt and you won't be able to find a job developing software at any price

You work at a software shop where you sell custom software "solutions"!

Re:This is where open source naturally leads

[h4rr4r]

Don't respond to obvious trolls.

Re:VMware for free

[h4rr4r]

No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.

Re: Even for nonprofits

[girlinatrainingbra]

Being a non-profit or "not for profit" corporation does not mean that the employees and board members work for a pittance. Take a look at the salaries for Goodwill and the Red Cross and United Way in the San Diego area. Each chair makes more than $300,000.00 per year, sometimes substantially more when you include their "car allowance" and "living allowance" and "competitive allowance". A lot of their other employees are also extremely well paid. So there's no need to worry about "non-profit" behemoths like these not getting any sort of serious discount.

It's no biggie. You have to understand the big pic

[Stu101]

Hi

Speaking as someone who spends 100% of their working week in VMware it's no biggie. A (very) small group of us look after a stack just as big as that.

With MS entreprise agreements that mean you now have to a seperate for each socket in the cluster (ie when DRS moves the guest to another cluster node or you get a host failure and HA kicks in) it costs an awful lot and also makes Hyper V looks more enticing to the bean counters as the Enterprise comes with all the Hyper V management tools..

VMware realise they cannot compete on cost and they have said as much. No matter what you say about Hyper V I have seen some nasty failures that just wouldn't happen in VMware (and lets not forget host failures can mean loosing 30 guests at one time (Lets not go into allowable failure scenarios..)

I have seen a Hyper V guest mentally shit itself and cause the host to fail in such a manner that the failed machines didn't restart. So rather than have a restart on another cluster member a guest was able to take out a host. Just wouldn't happen with VMware and it's highly advanced Virtual Machine Manager. VMware also has awesome other features including shared memory paging etc etc.

Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.

Just my 2 cents.

They can't even beat a book seller

[jbmartin6]

I thought the comment from this was pretty telling:

VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books

VMWare is completely lost if that is how they view their marketplace.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[h4rr4r]

This is what happens when an MBA type person runs a tech company. He thinks more about brand and reputation than being the best in the market. He thinks marketing and commercials can replace good products that offer great value.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[guttentag]

VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books

Amazon is as much about selling books as Pepsi is about selling sugared water.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that isn't right. Carl headed up sales at VMware for almost a decade. I think he just doesn't (or at least didn't) understand that Amazon isn't a bookseller. It's a tech giant with business and technical capabilities that are outside of VMware's core competencies and are going to be hard to match especially when they're laying off architect level infrastructure folks right and left.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[hairyfish]

Yeah that's what he thinks, because all those types of people are the same. Just like Asians and Black people...

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[styrotech]

VMWare is completely lost if that is how they view their marketplace.

Maybe that silly statement (which was made in context of their new cloud hosting plans) was intended to deflect attention away from what they are really frightened of.

eg AWS isn't really much of a threat for VMWares existing enterprise customers, but OpenStack and MS Azure could end up being one due to hybrid public/private cloud stuff gaining some traction.

I reckon there is a chance they are more nervous about Azure (MS) and OpenStack (Dell, HP, IBM, Rackspace etc) than Amazon, but didn't want to legitimize them by mentioning them directly while rallying the salestroopers against the other cloud providers. Once a big vendor starts mentioning the new upstart competiton, it's often taken as a sign to start paying attention to that competitor.

This Paypal move has added some weight to that idea. Or more likely, you're right and VMWare really is that clueless.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[GodfatherofSoul]

I don't think that quote is literal. It's CEO trash talking at a conference. He obviously knows Amazon is a competitor and not just a book seller.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[GeekWithAKnife]

This is what happens when an MBA type person runs a tech company. He thinks more about brand and reputation than being the best in the market. He thinks marketing and commercials can replace good products that offer great value.

So true.

Perhaps it is with some satisfaction that you will learn I have taken the initiative on this and written to MBA political figures to address the wrong doings and ill-conceived thoughts of their citizenry.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[Legion303]

Yeah, guys, stop being so racist against MBAs! It's a hate crime!

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[h4rr4r]

When did MBA become a race?

These people choose to damage their brains in this way, then you want me to avoid saying bad things about them?

Re:They can't even beat a book seller

[hairyfish]

It would make you sound less stupid if you didn't think that all people in a certain group all though the exact same way as some movie you saw once.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[h4rr4r]

I have seen vmware virtual center swear a machine was running that was not. I got to migrate everything onto another machine in the cluster and reboot that host. This was what support had me do as we got so far down the road and I really needed that VM back up.

Nothing is perfect. The issue is the costs are not a few hundred per host, that would be acceptable. VMware will need to reduce its cost or it will lose market share.

Re:VMware for free

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/compare-kits.html

The free version gives Vmware workstation a run for its money(if you are OK with running your day-to-day OS on top of it, rather than it on top of your OS, or you have a second machine); but it is the toy seats by the standards of what they aren't exactly giving away.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Stu101]

Yep, I know its a few thou per socket depending on edition and such. I was on about a few hundred per VMs, but yep, I know what you mean :)

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

If platform and information security are requirements, there's no alternative to VMware at scale.

I'd like to see PCI/HIPAA Openstack. ;-)

Re:This is where open source naturally leads

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon all software companies will be re-inventing themselves and I won't be able to find a job developing software at any price.

Fixed that for you...

Re:Hypervisor

[robmv]

OpenStack manages an Hypervisor, VMWare are many things an Hypervisor and a lot of administration applications (than only manage VMWare Hypervisor), OpenStack can manage multiple hypervisors. I want to know what they will use? KVM or Xen?

Re:VMware for free

[sys_mast]

....and of which none of the competitors do as good of a job as VMware. I guess you get what you pay for.

Now to play the next counter argument, one of the org's I support is small, with an appropriately sized IT budget (small)
They are very well served by Hyper-V, and the low cost is a major factor.

So use the right tool for the job. Free with slightly less features VS. pay for more or better features.

Re:VMware for free

[TheCarp]

Check out that license again.... last I looked it was non-commercial use. Not only that, but its limited, no VSphere or any of that.

So this wouldn't really fly for...any of the use cases we are discussing. They may be best in breed for many features, but there is vanishingly little that they are the only game in town for.

Not only that, but as a "free" offering, they could stop offering it and stop updating it at any time, leaving anyone using it on the same buggy insecure version forever.

While its true an open source project may die, at least it dies, leaving you with options....and lets face it...nothing as high profile and highly used as the free hypervisors is just going to die off anytime soon.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[hf256]

If platform and information security are requirements, there's no alternative to VMware at scale.

I'd like to see PCI/HIPAA Openstack. ;-)

Random slashdot commenter knows more about PCI than Paypal -- seriously where did you get that?

Re:VMware for free

[hawguy]

....Unless Vmware discounts their licenses to nearly free, their high volume customers aren't likely to stick with them, ......

Oh, you want it free?

OK, here you go: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

All that ranting, and all you needed to do was ask.

That's the hypervisor only, not any of the features that make VMware attractive to the Enterprise. That's kind of like someone complaining that Cisco hardware is expensive, and you offer a free supervisor engine that won't really do anything until you surround it with a $40,000 switch chassis.

Re:VMware for free

[LordLimecat]

by "competitors offer for free", you mean "XenServer offers for free", right? Im pretty sure you still have to pay for HyperV (or a minimum of 1 Windows server license) plus CALs, one way or the other.

Re:VMware for free

[LordLimecat]

Check out that license again.... last I looked it was non-commercial use. Not only that, but its limited, no VSphere or any of that.

If you can find that clause, id be interested; however the EULA they link makes no mention whatsoever of a specific edition, and they set no restrictions that I can see other than the ones imposed by the installed license.

And you do get to use "vSphere" the client, you DONT get to use vCenter. So no clustering, no automatic updates, no VSA or VCVA, no hardware acceleration on SAN, etc.

OS less installs and thread level virtualization

[wanfuse123]

The next competition is going to be in OS less installs and thread based virtualization for servers, workstations and mobile devices. I am sure all the major plays will jump on the band wagon. As far as VMWare, I have been running my VMWare install for 4 years and have only needed to reboot it once and that was probably my fault when I had a routing loop. VMware is very stable. VirtualBox is less so but then again its a type 2 hypervisor ( I use the term hypervisor loosely so don't call me out on it) compared to ESX's type 1 hypervisor. Xen is a pain to get running. And my proxmox 2.0 install on Debian with KVM simply just works although it doesn't easily support lots of features ( at least it didn't 4 years ago when I used it). Being able to live migrate an infrastructure is very valuable. Having Purple screens of death or guest lockups or host lockups doesn't fly in the enterprise. Virtualization is rapidly becoming like a utility company, everyone expects it and no one wants to pay for it. Same will happen to all parts of the computer industry including programmers when the A.I gets good enough. There is no job that is safe in the world, everything and everyone can be replaced with something cheaper, faster or better. http://rawcell.com/

Re:VMware for free

[sjames]

Perhaps not as good as TODAY, but VMs and their management is a rapidly expanding area for Free Software.

Meanwhile, would you choose VMWare's free but no management or FOSS's free and some management? If the latter, VMWare is still in trouble. Essentially, they went from having a near exclusive on the whole thing to an ever narrowing space between free management tools and their incredibly pricy ones.

If they want to hold on to any of the low end, they're going to have to add more management capability. If they want to hold on to the high end, they'll have to charge less so that the price scales to the lesser (and shrinking) benefit offered beyond the free solutions.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

They are running a single application - or at least a series of related applications against the same data set.

That's no problem. There's no mixed-trust issue, and everything in PayPal is assumed to be under PCI DSS, down to service reps desktops.

This is an unusual case - not close to typical.

Show me your mixed-trust cloud, with multiple applications and use cases with arbitrary connectivity requirements - like most data centers.

Now, where can you insert, manage and report on controls for security and compliance? How do you assert different policy regions, so that workloads of differing trust levels may share the same pool of infrastructure resource?

On Openstack, you can't. On Hyper-V, you have the same Systems Center and agents as the physical counterpart - and no usable network isolation.

Re:VMware for free

[charles2678]

....and of which none of the competitors do as good of a job as VMware. I guess you get what you pay for.

I wish you did -- then VMware ESX's SCSI emulation would actually be up to par with what's in qemu/kvm. Sure, they implement the mandatory mode pages, but you want anything unusual? Good luck.

Re:VMware for free?

[Geste]

We very much appreciated our free use of VMWare Server and ESXi even though they were feature/hardware-constrained. And even when they were acquired by EMC and then put out insane pricing with vSphere 5, we bought some because we needed what they offered with that at the time.

But we are a small department and we just can't afford to pay what they are asking for licenses and support. We can't expand.

So, our answer in 2012-2013 is the KVM-based ProxMox VE (proxmox.com) and we are thrilled with what we are getting for free. The gap really *has* closed a lot and I think this article makes that plain. We have some vSphere we'll run for a while, but I'd be surprised if we had any VMWare at the end of 2014.

(and EMC, now that our OpenIndiana ZFS boxes have been humming for 6 months, our Celerra will be decommissioned in April)

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.

Just my 2 cents.

As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"

"Well, first you buy Windows..."

Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...

Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.

Re: Even for nonprofits

[MrL0G1C]

Each chair makes more than $300,000.00 per year

Absolutely disgusting, taking peoples charitable donations and living like lords.

I decided to check your facts, the president of red cross US gets $1million a year!! Some people have no shame.

Re:VMware for free

[barc0001]

You might want to point out to us where you saw "for non-commercial use" because I don't see that anywhere. I was always under the impression ESXi was a crippled first-ones-free method of getting companies to use VMWare and then upsell them when they realize there isn't central management, live motion, or support for more than 32GB of RAM/VM

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Regions are not enforced at NIC. It is similar to tenant isolation at the port-group in VMware.

Re: Even for nonprofits

[jbengt]

Most non-profit companies are not behemoths. I know quite a few people working in or running small to medium-sized ones, like pet rescues, food pantries, etc. Many of these people volunteer or barely make ends meet. Granted, most of those wouldn't really need to virtualized their servers, but there are many small-to-medium sized non-profits that could use the tech, but only if it is affordable.

Re:VMware for free

[Bengie]

You can get HyperV for free and put Linux on it for free, with no limitations other than no pretty management UI.

Re: Even for nonprofits

[girlinatrainingbra]

You're right about that. That's why I specifically said that there's no reason to worry about the "nonprofit behemoths", and even gave an example of the three most profligate wasters of our donations. I agree with you that these small-to-medium not-for-profits, particularly animal shelters, are worthy of receiving discounts or even freebies and free-assistance from linux and FOSS types. I volunteer at a local pet shelter, and they've got oodles of free labor types assisting on their web page, so they don't need me. I am all for the charities that do real work rather than the huge organizations that would rather have you donate cash instead of labor. (They can't skip their percentage off of your labor, while they can with cash).

Remember Virtual Iron?

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Iron was around for a very short time and then got bought out by Oracle. I used it to setup a computer lab. It was good software, reasonably priced, and very easy to use. I think Oracle has killed it completely at this point.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Billly Gates]

"Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions."

Are you talking about the same big business that migrated from top stable mainframe, VMS, and Unix platforms to shit wintel to save money? The same big business that standardized on Microsoft products because they were cheaper? The same ones that hire Indian H1B1 Visa's because they can get the work done 10% cheaper, but with only 50% of the productivty?!

The same one where crticial IT decisions are made by accountants and not the I.T. staff who get bonuses based on how much money they save rather than what they invest it?

Color me cynical, but at the end of the day money talks bullshit walks. If it is cheaper they will do it. After all that is why I am paid $15/hr to make sure they stay up and running with no redundancy. After all I am a cost who adds no business value and it is cheaper to do that than pay for clustering or VMWare.

This is not the 1990s anymore.

Re:VMware for free

[berashith]

The issue that comes into play is that VMware offers a very small feature set ( with ease of use ) for a huge sum. It is getting harder every day to justify the cost for those features.

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

No live migration, no centralized management, none of the features the competitors offer for free.

Live migration is not free, but it is cheap -- less than $1000 bucks per server for a standard license. Central management of Hyper-V requires systemcenter virtual machine manager which is not free.

At sufficient scale, the VMware licensing costs are almost non-consequential. For purchasing VMware to be the better choice, it is not necessary that the license have a lower cost. The ROI needs to be higher. As long as VMware can offer a higher ROI, through functionality, and advanced features, or through greater consolidation ratios (lower cost per virtualized application in a cloud; more workloads per server, less electricity or hardware cost per workload on average), then the organizations who can justify the use of those features will save more money by buying VMware's products and have lower costs than if they used a competitor's product with a lower per-unit license charge.

Competitors' products don't offer free comparable enterprise-quality equivalents to Transparent page sharing (TPS)/Transparent memory compression (memory overcommit), the Cisco Nexus1000V distributed virtual switch, CPU Memory HotPlugging, Virtual Serial Port concentrator, Host Profiles, Resource Pools/Distributed Resource Management, Distributed Power Management, Storage I/O Control, Vmware APIs for Array Integration, vShield Endpoint, vShield App, vShield Edge, vCloud Network and Security (VXLAN), etc.

The competitors' total available functionality is more limited.

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

They don't restrict you from using vHpervisor in a commercial capacity. However, you are not allowed rent out virtual machines, or host virtual machines commercially for third parties on a free ESXi (Nor are you allowed to do so with commercially purchased vSphere licenses; you can only legally sell or rent the usage of VMs on VMware software through their service provider program, where you are required to install a usage monitor, and you pay by powered on reserved virtual RAM per Gigabyte-Hour on a monthly basis.).

Amazon IS a book and goods retailer

[rgbrenner]

Amazon gets about 1 billion in revenue from their web services division. That is 1.67% of their total revenue. It's such an insignificant part of their business that they group it together in the "OTHER" category on their income statement.

So is Amazon a bookseller. Damn right they are. And in order to sell books over the internet, they have some servers (duh), which they are happy to rent out to gain an extra 1.67% increase in revenue. To sell 60 billion of goods over the internet, they have _A LOT_ of servers, and a lot of tech knowledge in-house. But don't deceive yourself. At the end of the day, they are a RETAILER.. which is where 98.33% of their business is.

Re:VMware blew it with their clients

[mysidia]

The only supported way to get the data is a hunk of bloatware that only run on Windows

No, you can use the Web client, Powershell CLI, the Perl SDK, the SOAP API, the RCLI, or the ESXI shell/ssh or the ESXi CLI/shell.

I think VMware might have more management options possibly than any of the competitors. And there is documentation readily available for the interfaces.

The cloning mandates randomization of your MAC address, even if you want to *keep* it for the clone

You can change the MAC address under Edit settings, if you so desire. By definition the MAC address is required to be unique, it doesn't make sense to allow it to stay the same after cloning, that would be quite dangerous.

take so long to reset the console when starting up a virtual host that the BIOS and boot selection options have already blazed by

An occassional minor annoyance with certain configurations of ESXi that is easily circumvented by checking an option in VM settings to force BIOS screen next boot, or using VNC or one of the alternative console clients available.

there remain dozens of options that can only be set or managed from inside the text configuratipn files, options that the GUI *CANNOT* detect and *CANNOT* select and resets essentially randomly.

You are not meant to edit the contents of a VMX file by hand, although you might do so, you do have to unregister the VM first, make the edits, and then re-register the preferred method is through Edit VM Settings > Options > Advanced > General > Configuration Parameters

The configuration parameters button that is only accessible when the VM is powered off allows the general editing of config parameters.

This is generally not required. On rare occasion it will be called for, and always provided for by VMware support or a KB article, otherwise, these are advanced properties one should never need to change, and settings that need to be changed have change task options presented in the various GUIs.

Re:VMware for free

[whoever57]

But once you're large enough and can afford admins who don't fear the command line, kvm and xen may be better options.

KVM and Xen can be managed through virt-manager. No need to use any command-line tools.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[jamesh]

I have seen a Hyper V guest mentally shit itself and cause the host to fail in such a manner that the failed machines didn't restart. So rather than have a restart on another cluster member a guest was able to take out a host. Just wouldn't happen with VMware and it's highly advanced Virtual Machine Manager. VMware also has awesome other features including shared memory paging etc etc.

A few weekends back we had a small 2 server cluster have both nodes fail simultaneously (both failed to post until we removed their network cards). Dell was able to supply one replacement part within 8 hours which got one machine going, but vSphere didn't just automatically restart the servers that are homed on the failed node on the good node (there is plenty of resources to do so). To fix it I would have to delete the failed node from the cluster and manually add the machines. That's not HA by any stretch of the imagination. In the end it was easier to just wait the additional 8 hours for Dell to locate and ship another replacement part (we aren't exactly in the metro area so Dell's time to repair was (i think) within the agreed SLA) to get the other node up again. We've used similar Hyper-V clusters and they "just work". As a general rule though, I'd agree that Hyper-V is more prone to troublesome antics than... well anything else really.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[jamesh]

Big business craves stability over saving a few hundred bucks per machine. However VMware are coming up with interesting new stuff and more interestingly the more advanced features are flowing down into more basic editions.

Just my 2 cents.

As somebody who has consulted on both you're 1000% correct, more than you think, even. The real structural advantage you get out of VMware over Hyper-V is that Hyper-V is another layer of lock-in--"free" is just to reel you in. The reality is that it isn't "free"--the cost is simply built into the license they've already sold you for Windows Server, however you've bought it. I went about 50 rounds with a guy who swore up and down Hyper-V really was "free!!!" I said "Great, how do you get it?"

"Well, first you buy Windows..."

Clueless--It is incredible the marketing power of "free" and how much money it separates people from everyday. And this doesn't even include what a hyperactive piece of crap Hyper-V is to deal with if you're doing anything other than a completely vanilla implementation...

Anybody pushing Hyper-V has obviously never experienced vSphere Enterprise Plus. Me likey very much, thanks.

FUD much? Windows Hyper-V Server is free, as in the dollar cost to you is zero. If you want to run Windows on top of it then obviously you have to pay for that, but we're not arguing about that. You could just as easily run Linux on top of it and never pay a cent to Microsoft (although there is no good reason to do so - you'd use Xen instead).

The guy you were talking to was obviously clueless in thinking you have to buy Windows first, but he was right about Hyper-V itself being free.

Give me Hyper-V over VMWare any day, but then throw them both out and give me Xen :)

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[mvdwege]

Reading problems much? You have not addressed parent's main objection: In order to run any guest under HyperV, you still have to have a host machine running HyperV. Guess how you get that? That's right, by buying Windows.

The last few marketing campaigns have shown how dreadfully bad MS is at marketing and PR; apparently they've been cutting back on their astroturf quality as well, if you are an example.

Re:This is where open source naturally leads

[Bert64]

Open source simply leads to boxed commodity software becoming free... Most software developers, even today, are developing bespoke applications for their employers and this would only increase with open source as companies gain the ability to actually modify the software they're using rather than just having to put up with it as-is.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[TheRealSlimShady]

Read again. Hyper-V Server is 100% free - you do not have to buy Windows to get it, you download the ISO from the Microsoft site, and install it. It's fully functional (HA,live migration, live storage migration etc etc). If you wanted to run a whole bunch of Linux VM's on it then you could do that without paying microsoft a cent.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx

Re:VMware for free

[jelizondo]

Please make up your mind!

First you say:

Oh, you want it free? OK, here you go: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html All that ranting, and all you needed to do was ask.

Then

I guess you get what you pay for.

Later

Now to play the next counter argument, one of the org's I support is small, with an appropriately sized IT budget (small) They are very well served by Hyper-V, and the low cost is a major factor.

Which way is it? Free is good or you just get what you paid for? Hiper-V is as good as WMWare?

How about sticking to your guns and not wandering all over the place trying, at the same time, arguing for and against your own opinions?

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[philip.paradis]

The nice thing about things like OpenStack is the fact that you can exert as much control over the underlying hypervisor/host functionality as you want. With such facilities, I can give you better isolation and security than VMware can provide right now, and I say this as a senior engineer who deals with VMware on a daily basis. It appears you're once again speaking without properly researching things first.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[jamesh]

Reading problems much? You have not addressed parent's main objection: In order to run any guest under HyperV, you still have to have a host machine running HyperV. Guess how you get that? That's right, by buying Windows.

The last few marketing campaigns have shown how dreadfully bad MS is at marketing and PR; apparently they've been cutting back on their astroturf quality as well, if you are an example.

WTF? You really don't have to buy windows to get Hyper-V. "Windows Hyper-V Server" is a separate product, and is free. It includes Windows Server Core (eg no real GUI), and is designed to be managed by a (non-free) version of windows running somewhere else, but that isn't a requirement.

It's a marketing strategy by Microsoft - the intention is that you would then buy Microsoft OS's to run on top of your free Hyper-V server, so the fact that it really is free is really not of any consequence, but it is still free and I can read just fine.

And yes I'd make a very poor quality MS astroturfer when I'm saying to use Xen in preference to Hyper-V or VMWare... but I guess you missed that part.

Re:VMware for free

[TheCarp]

I think you are right on ESXi, actually. I Found it a while back when I was reviewing VMWare workstation. I never considered that ESXi would be under a less restrictive license than the workstation version. I guess that makes sense though, it gives small users who might otherwise use free hypervisors a step in their door.... but people using workstation are, like I was, trying to meet a specific need, less need to coax us in.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Windows Hyper-V Server is free, as in the dollar cost to you is zero. If you want to run Windows on top of it then obviously you have to pay for that

Oh, you mean Hyper-V Server, the bare-metal hypervisor, not the installable add-on? Then yes, it is free as in license cost--but its other main "Feature" is that its also shite. Its a classic example of "Getting what you pay for." In this case, what you're not paying for is a VMM that prevents a guest from crashing the host. So good luck with that.

But even if the price tag is "free" for their bare metal hypervisor--so what? What MS really fears from VMware isn't their hypervisor, its the seed of the idea they plant in their customers heads--that is: "Yes, Mr. SMB Network/Systems Admin, you really can have a stable, powerful, and easy to use unix/linux based commercial software system in your data center that is transparent to your users that your existing admins can understand." So there's still lock-in, but in this case, the lock-in is a mental lock-in to a mindset.

And, sure, you could run Linux on Hyper-V Hypervisor... You could also take a spork and shove it in your eye to prevent glaucoma--it works, but its a sub-optimal solution. I might even argue that the spoon in the eye is less painful than coping with Hyper-V Hypervisor all day.

Re:VMware for free

[Bengie]

You don't need to pay for anything "first". Anyone can get HyperV for free directly from Microsoft's site, no restrictions, and fully featured except for the GUI management. Luckily, everything the UI can do, powershell can do, and I do mean everything.

Re:VMware for free

[drinkypoo]

Perhaps not as good as TODAY, but VMs and their management is a rapidly expanding area for Free Software.

It's not that rapid. The Free VMs have been chasing vmware's stability and feature set all along and have never gotten particularly close. Last I checked none of the decent management tools would run anywhere other than redhat, either, because redhat always targets their tools at redhat instead of at general linux and porting them is a bitch.

Re:VMware for free

[pnutjam]

Even the command line tools are degraded. No rsync or sftp, you have to use scp for file transfers. Unfortunately, as I recently found out, VMware has throttled the scp transfers to (I guess) encourage people to buy their other products instead of using the free one.
In hindsight that must be why they killed the VMware Server offering that would run on top of WIndows or Linux. I could throw that on a headless linux machine and get excellent performance while retaining an extended underlying toolset.

Re:VMware for free

[h4rr4r]

The competitors do all those fine.

Paying more does not get a better product.

Re:VMware for free

[pnutjam]

You would need a third extra machine because there is no way to get to the console of a running VM from the VMware host console.

Re: Even for nonprofits

[drinkypoo]

And for all you know they left a much higher paying job and took a pay cut to work at the Red Cross... but who cares right... they've got no shame, right.

That's right. If it's about the money, they can fuck right off -- the red cross needs someone in charge for whom it is not about money. If it's not about money, why do they need $1M/year? (If it weren't about money, they'd price first aid kits within reason, so that people would actually buy them.)

Re:VMware for free

[h4rr4r]

Vmware does not offer more workloads per server or lower hardware cost. While competitors call those things by different names many of them are available.

Heck, VMware only recently gained GPU passthrough and does it yet have passthrough for arbitrary devices?

Re:VMware for free

[bluefoxlucid]

Actually I was looking at KVM/oVirt because they do better for live migration and central management than VMware. Cost isn't a factor to me in this decision, but only because I hadn't seriously thought about it.

Proxmox

[Sedated2000]

Slightly off topic but I wanted to take a chance to plug Proxmox VE. It's done beautifully for me, I run 16 guests on a server for some web projects (a bunch of them run sharepoint). It's very nice and open source. It supports KVM and OpenVZ and has a healthy community for it.

Check it out :)

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[pnutjam]

At $15/hour you'll be a hundredaire in to time. I'm sure the guys you work are are getting exactly what they are paying for, either because you are not putting out full effort, or you are not capable of better effort.

Redundant???

[sys_mast]

What's the deal with the mod down? "Redundant"??? there were like 12 comments when i posted, NONE of which pointed out the free hypervisor.

re: Hyper-V

[King_TJ]

Yeah, but the thing about Microsoft's solution is, you're never *really* sure how free "free" will wind up being?

Time after time after time, I've worked for companies who bought into a Microsoft technology (often because it offered a lot of bang for the buck, up-front), and we wound up getting locked into a costly upgrade path down the road, or were essentially herded by Microsoft to take the I.T. infrastructure whatever direction THEY wanted it to go, if we expected to keep using the technology you started with.

That's why where I work now, we decided on VMWare for our server virtualization needs. Up front, yes ... it cost more than doing the same thing with Hyper-V. In fact, the consulting firm we occasionally work with recommended against it and fought us to reconsider. But as my boss and I both reasoned - VMWare is pretty much the initial player in the VM game. They've been offering enterprise grade solutions for this before Microsoft ever thought about coding such a thing. And when you look at all the juggling MS has done in recent years with the way their licensing works (largely to address deficiencies in how virtual machines would be legally licensed), you can tell they were scrambling to play catch-up. I'm sure Hyper-V is a perfectly good, solid product. (We used it on severs at my previous employer and it was completely reliable for them.) We're more worried about the antics MS might play, later on. With the VM tied into the OS itself, it gives Microsoft plenty of leverage to, for example, say "Oh... Windows Server 2014 is NOW going to require you pay a $50,000 per server fee for a "VM extensibility pack" add-on license, or else you're not in compliance!" If they did, what would you do as a business who was invested heavily in their server products?

Since VMWare doesn't make operating systems, they're always going to be forced to offer the best possible VM option they can make. They can't just make you accept whatever they give you, because it was bundled with the latest OS upgrade your company needed to do.

Always firewall everything but the IDS.

[Medievalist]

All machines should have firewalls. All of them, virtualized or not.

Defense in depth is easier than mopping up the blood after something gets past a brittle outer shell and into the soft guts of unprotected internal hosts.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Distributed switching?

Can a sufficiently privileged user of the Guest OS change their networking characteristics? Add an IF or change a MAC?

If they are firewalled, can they change fw state and rules?

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[jez9999]

I know this is a hell of a noob question for Slashdot, but maybe someone will inform me anyway. Why do people like PayPal even need to use VMs? Can't they just write software that is designed to work over a cluster of real machines that act as failovers? What advantages does using a VMs get you when you don't need to support software written for multiple OSes (I'm assuming PayPal's main reason for using VMs is not that)?

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[mvdwege]

Yeah, you make a really bad astroturfer; a stupid one. Really? "You don't need Windows for HyperV, just for the management station"? You think I was born yesterday?

And spare us the "but I use Xen" gambit. You're on Slashdot, where the Microsoft FUD used to be served up with, "I like Linux, I even run Slackware, but..." since 1998 or so. Given your UID, that might even have been you.

Mart

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[mvdwege]

Lesson one, folks: always follow the link from a right-wing nutjob or a Microsoft fanboi.

There is nothing there that proves what you say, just a bunch of marketing fluff. The other guy in the thread has told us why: even if the core product is a free download, you still need a Windows management station.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[TheRealSlimShady]

Your claim was: " In order to run any guest under HyperV, you still have to have a host machine running HyperV. Guess how you get that? That's right, by buying Windows."

That has been demonstrated by me & the other poster to be 100% false. To get a host machine running Hyper-V, you don't have to buy Windows - you can download the 100% free Hyper-V server. Saying that because you need to have an admin workstation is moving the goalposts. It is correct to say that you will need to have a Windows management station (Windows 8 will do) but your claim was that to run a Hyper-V host you need to buy Windows, and your claim is wrong.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[FABrizzolla]

And how you manage your 100% free Hyper-V Server farm? Hyper-V Management instrumentation needs Windows MMC... SCVMM also expensive... dont tell me "Powershell" because we're talking about ease of use, something that is valuable for most IT guys that have a life. vSphere vCenter Server is available as a Linux appliance and you no longer need an Windows machine to run the client... you can manage everything on vSphere WebClient from any OS... any browser... Now what?

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

Vmware does not offer more workloads per server or lower hardware cost.

VMware certainly does offer efficiency features that allow more workloads per server. The highest capacity hardware to run VMware costs the same per unit of hardware as with other hypervisors; however, if running KVM, XenServer, or Hyper-V, you require more hardware components to safely run the same workload.

Among other things, the other hypervisors either cannot overcommit memory at all, or the memory overcommitment options offered are limited and very immature (as in the case of XenServer and Hyper-V). These are not generally contested points: even people that happilly run XenServer or HYPERV, acknowledge that they are making a sacrifice of the ideal consolidation ratio and performance that could otherwise be achieved.

In particular

• vSphere allows a maximum of 512 guests per host. You can get pretty close to that limit with few issues. Hyper-V allows a maximum of approximately 380 guests per host; don't even think about trying to go close to that, if you value stability.
• vSphere allows more scalability in terms of nunmber of virtual networking configurations per host, simplicity of teaming failover, and network isolation than Xen/HyperV
• vSphere provides 'fault tolerance' -- can recover from a hardware failure with no downtime for the most critical workloads; no other hypervisor provides anything like fault tolerance for comparable cost
• vSphere provides 'storage vMotion'; both thin disks and thick disks; you can change disk provisioning type and move a VM between datastores, even of different type and protocol, even from RDM to VMDK, with no downtime. Other hypervisors provide extremely limited storage migration options.
• ESXi supports this concept of Templates (Provision VMs from a gold master) AND the concept of Linked clones (through VMware View or vCloud director), that provides storage efficiency -- by storing clone VMs as copy on write delta from a base disk; which Xen/KVM/Hyper-V do not support; the 'snapshot' support in Hyper-V/Xen/KVM is extremely limited and inefficient vs VMware, particularly, due to restrictions such as not taking a snapshot of a powered on VM (ESXi allows you to snapshot and/or clone a live VM; other hypervisors do not allow you to do either). HyperV allows you to copy only a powered off VM. implementations of Xen allow you to copy a powered off VM
• Vsphere provides "SSD Cache"; memory overcomitment and storage caching using SSD drives on servers -- that is, the hypervisor is specifically aware of how to efficiently use SSD as a cache, instead of swapping out to physical disk. No other hypervisor provides SSD awareness and efficient SSD cache feature for memory overcommitment.
• Vsphere provides VAAI; special APIs for virtualization awareness by storage arrays, for increased performance. No other hypervisor provides that.
• VSphere provides Storage DRS; dynamic placement of workloads on datastores based on latency and free space. No other hypervisor offers that.
• ESXi has greater virtual CPU scalability than other hypervisors for CPU-demanding guests. vSphere's share-based CPU scheduling implementation is more mature, more efficient, and more stable; maximum vCPU per VM 32 vs 4; provides both limits and reservations for CPU, Memory, (and storageI/O through SIOC).
• Hyper-V, Xen, or KVM, all require the install of a full OS as root partition, which has a large memory footprint and a disk footprint, compared to ESXi, especially after you have added management capabilities, AND for Xen and Hyper-V many organizations will require an antivirus (because you have a full blown OS); multiply the footprint in units resource usage times the number of servers, times the unit cost per resource, and decreased performance
• ESXi carries an OS footprint of less than 200 MB. Hyper-V requires a minimum of 10GB.
• ESXi supports more guest OSes than other hyperv

Re:VMware for free

[h4rr4r]

If Xen requires antivirus so does ESXi.
Smaller install does not mean less buggy. Linux kernel gets beat on a lot more then ESXi gets tested.

FCoE is supported fine in linux, so your claim there is totally false. That means Xen and KVM support it.

The rest of your crap is pretty similar.

I am going to assume you sell VMware.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[airdweller]

"I am paid $15/hr to make sure they stay up and running with no redundancy"
Ummm... What? $15/hr? You missed a zero before the slash, right?

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[Billly Gates]

Interviewing now for bigger and brighter things.

Point being is the accountants are clueless and cost is all that matters at the end of the day.

Re:VMware for free

[mysidia]

If Xen requires antivirus so does ESXi. Smaller install does not mean less buggy. Linux kernel gets beat on a lot more then ESXi gets tested.

Xen carries with it a full Linux install, with more ports open than you would believe. Xen It carries with it every Linux vulnerability, and susceptibility to every Linux/UNIX worm, and custom services, that I have in the past written an exploit for.

Furthermore, all the guest virtual machines' virtual networks are bridged in the DOM0, which essentially means, that they are not fully isolated from the DOM0, and the DOM0 is not fully isolated from them. There are some rather interesting characteristics this has, it's nice to abuse, unfortunately... from a security POV it's horrible, and ESXi is a winner there in terms of security.

The Linux kernel may get a lot of 'abuse', but it also gets frequent vulnerabilities, and it's so widely available, the barriers to entry to develop attacks against new versions of Xen are very low indeed.

ESXi exposes very little of an attack surface, things can be completely and very effectively isolated on a totally separated management plane.

There is little that can actually be done in terms of running arbitrary code on an ESXi -- even if a host service is broken into, they run non-privileged, so the attacker would have a hell of a time doing something useful.

That, and ESXi boot filesystem is a ramdisk of limited size -- making persistent changes to installed software is no trivial feat, and the thing supports TCPA Trusted computing architecture extensions and only runs signed code.

ESXi is not totally unbreakable, but it is much more hardened than Xen is, by orders of magnitude. Xen runs Linux which executes arbitrary applications. ESXi does not execute arbitrary applications in the management VMM of the VMKernel.

FCoE is supported fine in linux, so your claim there is totally false. That means Xen and KVM support it.

This would be a new development. In other words, Linux finally supports it now, however, its support for FCoE is not very mature.

I am going to assume you sell VMware.

This is not true; I just use VMware.

I used Xenserver first, and really liked Xen at first, but then switched, after trying VMware, and eventually coming to the conclusion that Xen just doesn't cut it.

Matters may have begun to change since 2008, however, Xen simply could never beat ESXi in terms of stability -- not only that, but Xen actually proved itself instable.

And following the developments... there simply haven't been any improvements in Xen that are sufficiently compelling, that it belongs in the Enterprise.

Home labs, yes. Development, Small businesses, sure, it may be OK.

Production servers requiring high availability: hell no.

Hyper-V is worse though.... at least the other two never totally corrupted a VM, when the storage array wasn't broken.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[TheRealSlimShady]

Late reply, but I'm guessing that if you're considering a Hyper-V solution, you're probably in the Windows ecosystem and will likely have a Windows administrative workstation somewhere...

You can manage Hyper-V using the MMC tools from a remote workstation, you don't necessarily need VMM, although at a certain scale it becomes desirable - at which point you incur cost. Although you could use another wrapper over the top - like OpenStack for instance.

Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big

[mvdwege]

The host running HyperV is worthless without a management station. I'm not moving the goalposts, you and Microsoft are playing a bait-and-switch.