PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack

Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-25 08:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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 by alen · 2013-03-25 09:09 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-03-25 09:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by MightyMartian · 2013-03-25 09:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2013-03-25 09:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Synerg1y · 2013-03-25 09:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 by LordLimecat · 2013-03-25 10:12 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by LordLimecat · 2013-03-25 10:18 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by LordLimecat · 2013-03-25 10:30 · Score: 2

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 by MikeB0Lton · 2013-03-25 10:31 · Score: 2

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 by sjames · 2013-03-25 12:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by DarthBart · 2013-03-25 12:49 · Score: 2

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 by mysidia · 2013-03-25 14:46 · Score: 2

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 by k8to · 2013-03-25 14:56 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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-josh
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by funkboy · 2013-03-25 20:58 · Score: 2

Does pfsense support automatic shutting down from UPS/low battery alerts?
yep
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Loki_1929 · 2013-03-25 23:00 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

--
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Karl+Cocknozzle · 2013-03-26 00:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

--
Who did what now?
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by stiggle · 2013-03-26 01:17 · Score: 2

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 by LordLimecat · 2013-03-26 01:58 · Score: 2

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 by k8to · 2013-03-26 03:57 · Score: 2

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".

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-josh
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Loki_1929 · 2013-03-26 21:50 · Score: 2

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.

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-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck by Loki_1929 · 2013-03-26 22:09 · Score: 2

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.

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-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

PayPal Uses OpenStack by grusapa · 2013-03-25 09:05 · Score: 5, Informative

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

Re:PayPal Uses OpenStack by jellyfoo · 2013-03-25 16:35 · Score: 2

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

Good Riddens by BitZtream · 2013-03-25 09:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager

Re:Good Riddens by h4rr4r · 2013-03-25 09:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

Not when HyperV, Xenserver, Xen and KVM all do that for free.
Re: Good Riddens by skovnymfe · 2013-03-25 09:22 · Score: 2

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 by tlhIngan · 2013-03-25 09:31 · Score: 2

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 by silas_moeckel · 2013-03-25 09:41 · Score: 2

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

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No sir I dont like it.
Re: Good Riddens by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-25 09:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 by hawguy · 2013-03-25 10:38 · Score: 3, Insightful

*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 by LordLimecat · 2013-03-25 10:38 · Score: 3, Informative

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 by PhrstBrn · 2013-03-25 10:41 · Score: 4, Informative

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 by philip.paradis · 2013-03-25 12:19 · Score: 4, Informative

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?

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Write failed: Broken pipe
Re:Good Riddens by mysidia · 2013-03-25 15:12 · Score: 2

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 by Bert64 · 2013-03-25 18:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Re:OSS by ackthpt · 2013-03-25 09:20 · Score: 2

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.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Re:VMware for free by h4rr4r · 2013-03-25 09:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

Re: Even for nonprofits by girlinatrainingbra · 2013-03-25 09:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

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 by Stu101 · 2013-03-25 09:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.

They can't even beat a book seller by jbmartin6 · 2013-03-25 09:30 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.

Re:They can't even beat a book seller by h4rr4r · 2013-03-25 09:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 by Anonymous Coward · 2013-03-25 10:07 · Score: 2, Interesting

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:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big by h4rr4r · 2013-03-25 09:30 · Score: 2

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:Hypervisor by robmv · 2013-03-25 09:40 · Score: 2

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:OSS by Fluffeh · 2013-03-25 09:41 · Score: 2

... 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.

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Re:VMware for free by sys_mast · 2013-03-25 09:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

....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.

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Re:VMware for free by TheCarp · 2013-03-25 09:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big by Jeremiah+Cornelius · 2013-03-25 10:35 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big by Karl+Cocknozzle · 2013-03-25 10:58 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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Re: Even for nonprofits by MrL0G1C · 2013-03-25 11:25 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Re:VMware for free by berashith · 2013-03-25 13:20 · Score: 2

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 by mysidia · 2013-03-25 14:16 · Score: 5, Informative

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 by mysidia · 2013-03-25 14:30 · Score: 3, Informative

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.).

Re:VMware blew it with their clients by mysidia · 2013-03-25 15:36 · Score: 2

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:It's no biggie. You have to understand the big by jamesh · 2013-03-25 17:45 · Score: 2

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 by TheRealSlimShady · 2013-03-25 19:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

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

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