VMware CEO: OpenStack Is Not For the Enterprise

coondoggie writes "VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says he doesn't expect open source cloud project OpenStack to catch on significantly in the enterprise market, instead he says it's more of a platform for service providers to build public clouds. It's a notion that others in the market have expressed in the past, but also one that OpenStack backers have tried hard to shake."

Comments

Citrix Clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: we just want to have a competitive stack to Xen (which the ISV be loving!)

Re:Citrix Clones

[EvilSS]

Xen (which the ISV be loving!)

That's his point. Xen (or the commercial XenServer for that matter) has had very very little enterprise penetration. Even when it is used in the enterprise, it's usually not the primary hypervisor but isolated to a specific application within the company. VMWare currently owns that space and the only short term threat to them is Microsoft and Hyper-V. Service providers, however, love it because their primary concerns usually revolve around costs (thus why you see commodity hardware in a lot of cloud provider data centers vs Cisco/HP/IBM/Dell in the enterprise space).

Re:Citrix Clones

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenStack setups are unfortunately terrible, and unreliable. Even the Amazon Web Services from which they originate is terrible.

This all comes back to cost. At one point in time, you used to be able to tell how much performance you would get before VM systems took over and started adding in huge amounts of latency and overhead on cheap parts.

Do you really want to run your business on VM gear when these things are 10 times less reliable than actually owning the hardware? Even if a software package were to last more than 5 years (cough*XP*), the cost of not upgrading the software will result in more support costs than simply buying the right hardware and software to begin with.

There isn't a single application that is "better" in the cloud, and with the PRISM spying, consider all US-based data centers compromised. Nobody is going to want to put their data in the US.

The cloud is dead.

Re:Citrix Clones

[EvilSS]

No, the cloud, in the end, will eat most corporate IT. 20-30 years down the road most companies won't have internal IT anymore. Like everything else these days, corporate cost cutting will eventually win out. Sucks but I can't see it playing out any other way.
BR Most of the current instability can be attributed to industry growing pains. They will work the kinks out and the weaker companies (by ability,not necessarily size) will fall away.

Re:Citrix Clones

[turbidostato]

So regarding Openstack we already moved away the "first they ignore you" phase and going somewhere into "then they laugh at you, then they fight you", uh?

Interesting.

Re:Citrix Clones

[jaseuk]

I agree for the small environment. A 50 man company will not need 1-2 IT people.

For the Enterprise, I doubt it. If you have more than 1,000 users you still have enough on-site hardware and networking to worry about, that you'll still need IT. Even if it's just for making purchasing decisions, pushing buttons for off site support, information governance, project management and resolving issues when multi-cloud services are in play, it's the latter that becomes the problem.

If you have multiple tenants for the same cloud services in one company behind one IP address, things start getting really interesting really fast. As when you and a partner company use different cloud services and you start having difficulties. Trust me.. Microsoft / Google etc. can't just stick Wireshark on their data centre to work out exactly what's happening. All current troubleshoot tends to rely on a non-cloud partner having these skills to give them the detail that they can't afford to investigate.

I'm not a nimby, I've helped and encouraged the use of a number of cloud services in my enterprise, particularly for easily solved problems or where it's so specialised or small that it's really not worth anyones time learning how to do it in house. I'm sure there will be a move to outsource a load of services to cloud providers.. It'll be when people try to switch for the first time that the difficulties arise. So I expect "Cloud Reconsidered" in 3-5 years. Probably also if there is another major 2E2 debacle or security breach or outage.

I cloud be wrong.

Jason.

Re:Citrix Clones

[DeBaas]

If you read this part of the article:

Despite the statement, Gelsinger also said that OpenStack is an important strategic
initiative for VMware that it is committed to supporting. VMware will work to ensure its products and services work in cloud environments based on the open source platform. And in that sense, Gelsinger says OpenStack is opening up a whole new opportunity for VMware to penetrate the service provider market, which is he says the company has not focused heavily on in the past. “We’re seeing (OpenStack) as an opportunity to extend our position,” Gelsinger said.

You'll see that, despite the remarks on 'not for the enterprise', he is certainly not laughing at OpenStack. Maybe, just maybe, they may even not fight OpenStack!

Re:Citrix Clones

[EvilSS]

I hope you're right, but often times it's not the technology, best practice, or even what's best for the company that wins; it's how do we grow so our institutional investors who own most of our stock stay happy with us. In the past year I've had several customers, none of them small, ping me about this. If they are asking us about it, it's on their minds. Like I said though, I think this is all a few decades out. The industry is really just starting to get it's bearings and there are still a number of technological challenges to overcome first.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Karl Cocknozzle]

I hope you're right, but often times it's not the technology, best practice, or even what's best for the company that wins; it's how do we grow so our institutional investors who own most of our stock stay happy with us. In the past year I've had several customers, none of them small, ping me about this. If they are asking us about it, it's on their minds. Like I said though, I think this is all a few decades out. The industry is really just starting to get it's bearings and there are still a number of technological challenges to overcome first.

While I agree there are some interesting (and some quite sexy) problems to be solved technically in the cloud arena, I believe it is shortsighted to assume this is all that has to change. In my opinion, most of the remaining obstacles are structural and/or systematic, and some of them are going to be quite expensive and possibly politically impossible to change.

The biggest non-technical hurdles for the cloud to conquer in the United States, as I see it, are:

1) Regulatory: As in somebody better rein-in the NSA or we can pretty much kiss this golden-goose good-bye. Also, we need to update our laws and property rights so that companies don't simply forfeit all 4th amendment protections because their data is on somebody else's hardware in somebody else's data center. Yes, I realize that should already be the case, but as a practical matter it isn't. We need to reform that or you can forget it.

2) Public Infrastructure: Ours is shite. Korea, a country that 50 years ago had people living in fucking grass huts (and in some rural areas, still does,) has better internet performance than we do. That's both pathetic and a show-stopper for a truly transformative cloud experience. If you move it all "to the cloud!" and then have to spend $10k/month on multiple gigabit Internet pipes and the associated services (think anti-DDoS) to make it work you might not have really saved any money... And you can't skimp on those Anti-DDoS services once everything is in the cloud, because a disruption there basically idles your entire enterprise. Before, a successful DDoS had little hope of disrupting anything but your external network, leaving your worker bees happily buzzing around. But once their buzzing can be brought to a halt by a DDoS? That's a catastrophic failure, not just an inconvenience.

3) Hedge fund assholes: These vultures will be looking to scoop up as many cloud operations and data centers as they can over the next few years in the hopes of cornering the non-Amazon market. It's how these people work, and when they do control a significant portion of the market you can look for the value proposition of the cloud to be mostly erased, with the new price increases flowing directly into their own pockets. This actually might also fall under "Regulatory" because really we need to start thinking today, right now, about how to keep these clouds from becoming "too big to fail." Because the other side of it is, once that happens we have another whole caste of businesses that will indefinitely suckle at the government teat, and that will never show a profit on paper for the rest of all eternity to keep that largesse flowing.

Re:Citrix Clones

[spacepimp]

Considering that VMWare is/was on the board of OpenStack I'd say they are internally realizing how much money they could make by building a proprietary alternative (probably just middleware management tools built on top of open source). This is a move to promote their own tools and services in what is going to be a competitive field. This is similar to someone saying that no serious business uses open source software. Of course those business always sell closed source software that are saying it.

Re:Citrix Clones

[mlts]

I would state that things will balance out.

The cloud is useful for some tasks, however there are a lot of security hurdles and perceptions. There is also the fact that WAN links are expensive, and moving everything to the cloud means that the edge links have to be very beefy, as opposed to keeping it in-house where the core LAN fabric is a lot cheaper to deal with.

The cloud is nice, but there are a lot of business regulations (and probably more to come if there are any serious breaches that make the news) to watch out for. In some cases, it is cheaper to just keep the data in house.

But things may change. In 20-30 years, there may be a breakthrough allowing for spread spectrum wireless with extremely high bandwidth or something happens like with hard disks and we go from gigabyte drives to terabyte drives in a few years due to some major technology advances.

If this does happen, and edge/WAN bandwidth does become dirt cheap, that would make life interesting, mainly because there could be a large number of cloud providers, and one could just use software that writes data among multiples to ensure it is stored safely.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Virtucon]

No VMware is on the board because of the three Es Embrace, Extend, Eradicate.

Re:Citrix Clones

[celle]

"Also, we need to update our laws and property rights so that companies don't simply forfeit all 4th amendment protections because their data is on somebody else's hardware in somebody else's data center. Yes, I realize that should already be the case, but as a practical matter it isn't. We need to reform that or you can forget it."

      When we the public get that level of privacy then we will talk about companies, not before. And yes, for the public this should already be the case and also for companies as well.

Korea is a dinky little country that was nearly destroyed 50 years ago. It's easy to build up from nothing with help from a big partner. The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming. This leaves out the basic issue with cloud services that they are only useful in town near the servers and high density infrastructure by design. Everywhere else the cloud is just too unreliable. When it's down, you're down, for as long as they find it necessary.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Anonymous Coward]

1: In general, there needs to be something done about the anti-US sentiment which has been building since 2003 and the Iraq invasion which was viewed as needless (which many country propaganda departments had a field day with.)

2: That is a good reason for businesses to keep their major functions in-house, and to consider leased lines (expensive as they may be) between sites, so Internet "weather" doesn't affect internal day to day operations.

DDoS attacks only will get larger and more sophisticated with time.

This may be a good reason for businesses to follow the US government's lead and have a network similar to SIPRNet/NIPRNet, which is another WAN, likely circuit switched, with protection both at the switch end (machines not allowed to communicate with each other unless previously arranged), and at the machine ends (using a PKI, or even shared secrets as a fallback in case RSA gets broken.) This way, a DDoS on the Internet wouldn't affect B2B functions.

3: This too only will get worse. A few years back, it was making the quarterly numbers or else facing shareholder lawsuits. Now with HFT, one decision to sacrifice stock price for better products will bring instant litigation. Already, the cloud is on the verge of not being worth the time and effort, and all it takes is some security issues, and the cloud as a concept would be pretty much killed.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenStack setups are unfortunately terrible, and unreliable. Even the Amazon Web Services from which they originate is terrible.

You obviously have no idea of the provenance and history of OpenStack and where it originated from. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to take seriously anything else you said. Particularly since it's all negative "The cloud sucks! It's gonna die!" BS.

The cloud is dead? Bull. The cloud is just getting started. The "cloud" marketplace feels remarkably like the dedicated hosting market felt in the late 90's/early-00's - and there will be a radical amount of change over the next 12 to 24 months as more providers continue to roll out cloud deployments outside of the US.
The cloud is also MUCH more than just hosting virtualized server instances, too. By far.

Do you really want to run your business on VM gear when these things are 10 times less reliable than actually owning the hardware?

You're missing a basic tenet behind why cloud is taking off - most businesses neither want, nor -need- to own their own hardware, and have the requisite staffing around it. Even the 1000-person corporation that someone else referenced - while they absolutely will have internal IT to manage desktop systems and the internal office network and whatever other internal needs they have, their core business is not likely to be managing IT infrastructure. They will want to have the majority of their technical staff doing value added work - working on their products, applications, etc. They'll have a CTO/CIO, some sort of IT manager/director, and a team of 5 to 10 dudes to manage all of the office infrastructure, and their cloud environment. If they can outsource email, the will - and now new email accounts and managing email accounts is a secretarial duty. Managing the cloud infrastructure becomes an effort in Dev/Ops - automation ruling the day - without having to have bodies in a Datacenter actually touching things. Networking engineers aren't needed anymore, etc. So you end up with a double handful of guys rather than a couple dozen.

IMO, in the next 2 years, if you don't know automation and cloud, you're going to either be out of a job, or part of a dying breed on the way out the door.

There isn't a single application that is "better" in the cloud, and with the PRISM spying, consider all US-based data centers compromised. Nobody is going to want to put their data in the US.

You would be absolutely -shocked- at who is using the cloud for business critical applications, and I'm not talking about IT or entertainment plays like Netflix. I've already addressed the stupidity behind the idea that there aren't non-US public cloud footprints, too - there are, and their number is increasing.
As far as applications being 'better' - define 'better'. For MOST businesses, reliability is more important than the performance of a specific instance, especially if their app can scale horizontally (more instances == better reliability AND performance). If I can deploy more instances, and have the overall application deployment be more reliable (and more performant) as a result (losing one instance out of 10 total is a LOT less impacting than losing the sole instance or one instance out of 2 or 3), then the business is happy. Especially if the cost is lower than self-hosting and non-depreciating 'cause it's opex, not capex.

Disclaimer: I work for OpenStack's progenitor, and these opinions are my own - I, in no way, speak for the company.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Ravaldy]

The story is simple, Cloud is a buzz word. I know IT Managers that aren't technical enough to make the right decision and a buzz word can save their jobs, maybe get them a bigger bonus so they'll push the current buzz as much as they can. Cloud existed before Cloud was popular. It was in the form of web and email servers. Why host your own when someone has more expertise than you to do it.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Billly Gates]

I worked for such a client.

On paper it appears you saved all this money for the beancounters so they can get there raises for being soo smart!

Problem was desktop support was forbidden to do anything besides support desktops and it is a 2 week response time!! Your sap is not working ... sorry we can't support that go call Fred in Illinios as this shadow IT group takes care of that.

Lisa is one smart cookie who hates I.T! She figured out if she can use a cloud for the new accounting system she wont have to wait 2 weeks for a response. Guess what. The business process requires Johnny to check something and the bank to respond. Johnny goes on vacation and now Lisa is helpless and IT can not help he as Johnny clears and is the auditor for Lisa who use their own invented system. Lisa leaves 6 months later and Johnny is in another state and a new guy who comes in and is lost and takes a month to learn this weird process they do which no one else in the company knows about.

That financial report is now lost and the SEC fines the company etc.

You have business process engineering doing its own thing, Finance doing its own thing, and other departments who now can't integrate and work together as SAP had modules for these functions but each department thought they could save money and work around I.T. with their own clouds.

You lose money in the long term.

When this 1400 employee count had 6 I.T. guys instead of 2 shit would get done and none of this nonsense existed. Reports were never late. Response time was in 30 minutes, not 2 weeks, a new employee would get a new computer and his software installed before he started, not wait a month before things are configured etc. How money are you really saving?

Yes clouds do make sense, but using them like H1B1 or outsourcing to save costs is the wrong reason. They are there to promote efficient to work with your existing system not replace what you have.

Re:Citrix Clones

[lgw]

The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming.

Time consuming? Sure. That's why we should start immediately. Expensive? No. The cost is trivial on the scale of the federal budget these days.

Re:Citrix Clones

[lgw]

VMware knows it's basic hypervisor technology isn't a big deal these days, with plenty of free alternatives. They're trying to focus higher up the stack. If they ever actually make a great enterprise management product, I don't think they'll have a problem with managing open source lower layers as well, and open source tends to not be great at that sort of thing (e.g., these are the tools Amazon keeps to themselves). But VMware has to actually write that great enterprise management product if they want to survive long term, and they haven't shown they can do any such thing.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the Amazon Web Services from which they originate is terrible.

By which you mean the RackSpace and NASA projects they originated from, right?

AWS API compatibility is something that OpenStack has been wrestling with, but not because they "originated" at Amazon.

Do you really want to run your business on VM gear when these things are 10 times less reliable than actually owning the hardware?

Yeah, because everybody knows that 10 servers purchased over the span of 2 years and configured by an endless procession of half-ass IT guys is much more reliable an infrastructure than automated provisioning of 10 identical servers in the span of 2 hours.

To answer your question, "Do I really want to run...", the answer is only "No" if my application architecture REQUIRES that a single high-powered node is the only copy of the instance. Otherwise - VMs are much easier to deploy, their configuration is software-defined, and so easily audited & automated, and their creation is much faster than ordering a hunk of iron from Dell and waiting for it to arrive. If my application architecture can scale horizontally, then I win much more moving to VMs than I lose by the fact that any one of my cheap, easily & quickly deployed, identically configured systems might be slightly more likely to crash on me.

There isn't a single application that is "better" in the cloud

Except for the ones you never even think about and likely use every day. Like most of Google's services. Like the host of "Neue-Web" sites whose backends make use of AWS, S3, etc, and you never even realized it because you figured everybody was still stuck in the good old days of traditional LAMP and WIMP stacks, eh?

The fact that you don't even know where Open Stack comes from is a major tell, friend.

Re:Citrix Clones

[Karl Cocknozzle]

When we the public get that level of privacy then we will talk about companies, not before.

Your point is reasonable but irrelevant: This is a discussion of the cloud, not of individual liberties. I totally agree: Your 4th amendment protections shouldn't end once you save your data in the cloud. But it's a separate issue--the question was to the viability of the cloud, and that means business records have to be "safe" from seizure when they're stored in the cloud, otherwise the cloud is doomed. Sorry if I didn't genuflect hard-enough in the direction of the individual, but individuals cloud data is worth somewhere between "jack-shit" and "nothing." Business data, on the other hand, could be auctioned off for millions or even hundreds of millions by an unscrupulous NSA operative.

The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming.

...And the reason we have 150 years of outdated infrastructure is that the argument that it "costs too much" to upgrade, replace or repair has won the day for much of the last 50 years.

"It's too expensive!" howls the conservative when asked to replace an aging bridge. And then when that bridge collapses and dumps a dozen tax payers and their vehicles in the river, the conservative howls "Government incompetence stikes again!"

Not exactly suprprising

[TheReaperD]

Big corporate CEO says open source projects are only for geeks, children and people who can't afford it. News at 11.

I'm pretty sure that CEOs have been feed this so much by their marketing executives whose paychecks are on the line that they truly believe it. It just makes it so much more fun when they file bankruptcy or get bought out and the new company cans them without their golden parachutes.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Billly Gates]

Or the cynic in me feels they are contributing to the project so they can copyright and patent the hell out of it.

That would fulfill his argument on it being a toy for poor people and if you want to not have a liability than pay me ala SCO/Oracle.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[CodeBuster]

Part of the job of any CEO is to publicly promote the company and make bold statements not just in support of the company and its products but also against the competition and their products. He's just doing his job.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Tough Love]

Gelsinger should shut up and get down to the hard work of delivering a compelling cloud platfom from his own company.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

...get down to the hard work of delivering a compelling cloud platform...

You just redlined my Marketing Weenie Detector.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Tough Love]

You just redlined my Marketing Weenie Detector.

Jeez, I didn't realize I was that good a fake. But surely I gave myself away when I said "hard work".

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...isn't that what VMware offers? What do you think vCloud Hybrid is? And they do offer a Cloud service as well....and it appears to be far ahead of what OpenStack has working right now.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[LordLucless]

One of the reasons my company uses cloud systems is that we don't have to deal with all the hardware stuff anymore. Running our own cloud would be counter-productive, as it means that we get the worst of both worlds - we still have to deal with the hardware, and we get the added complication of dealing with a more complex system. We don't get the rapid scalability of cloud systems, because we lack the economies of scale that lets cloud providers have spare capacity ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

What benefit does OpenStack give us that a traditional system doesn't?

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[DarkOx]

Going virtual makes everything easier not harder. You have to be a very small shop before the costs out weigh the gains. The first time you really have to worry about uptime, backups ( that you actually test ), unanticipated needs of disparate project teams, or disaster recovery; you will find your private cloud makes it all virtually push button. If that sounds like marketing babble suit yourself, but I have seen multiple shops transform form the mix of single servers and standalone vm hosts to more integrated farm solutions from VMware, Citrix, and open source; and none of them regretted it.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[JaredOfEuropa]

Running your own cloud gives you a cost savings that could be significant, as it lets you consolidate hardware. More importantly, running software on virtual machines makes replacing or upgrading the actual hardware much less painful. And depending on your setup, provisioning new machines for projects is a lot faster if these machines are virtual. Enough benefits for my current client to make the switch (even though they outsourced the datacenter later on)

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer it if he shut up and fixed his fucking certification portal so exams passed on or before July 19th would actually be credited. That would fucking rock. Ass-clowns.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Anonymous Coward]

> Part of the job of any CEO is to publicly promote the company and make bold statements not just in support of the company and its products but also against the competition and their products

Nope. It's not part of his job to spread FUD. It just happens that people think this is a good strategy. If they didn't, he wouldn't do it. His job is to enact the will of the board and handle day-to-day details. It's almost like you believe that this is the only way to do business.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Karl Cocknozzle]

It's not part of his job to spread FUD. It just happens that people think this is a good strategy.

I'd say it is a good strategy as it has worked (to considerable effect) for decades in advertising. And because it has a track record, our insane laws in this country all but force a CEO to pursue any possible working/legitimate strategy to help the company succeed. Should it be that way? No, of course not.

But it is.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Anonymous Coward]

The ESXi hypervisor is based on a highly customized version of Linux. I don't think he is completely against Open Source products.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[vux984]

Yeah, if your CEO is saying something like this...

"Oh crap, this free product is going to eat our lunch and we'll be bankrupt by 2018, unless we can figure out how to make our product substantially more compelling real quick. And to be honest, we haven't got the faintest idea how to do that at this point."

you probably need a new CEO.

Re:Not exactly suprprising

[Ravaldy]

That's not really what he said. As a decision maker a corporation has many options to pick from. Open Source is a great option when looking at budget but there is no support infrastructure outside the community. If you hit road blocks who's accountable to help you? Will anybody really care about your problem? That's the issue with Open Source software.

Re: Not exactly suprprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a retard would say esx is a Linux. Retard.

Big surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

CEO says: "You should pay for my product, instead of using that free shit". Film at 11.

He is right

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a cloud storage provider and have vSphere and OpenStack clusters and there two are for different tasks. The 'fighting' over the two is comparing apples to banana peels.

Re: He is right

[Anonymous Coward]

<George Castanza&gt Ah HA! I gotcha now! Apple doesn't make servers anymore! </George Castanza>

What a dumbass

[Mr_Plattz]

He may be right that it's only public cloud adoption *now*, but we (enterprises) are looking at the following as our 3 years road map:

1. Implement Open Stack internally, under a hybrid cloud model
2. Use this as the opportunity to bring elastic services to internal enterprise systems (OSB, Salable web apps etc) by making key technology discussions that do not pair us to monolithic vendors (Oracle)
3. Then, when we have the economics and business maturity we can easily migrate our compute sideways into 'any' public cloud

The big problem we have right now is that it's hard, if not impossible, for us to take our big, giant, poorly design monolithic application into the public cloud. We need to implement the cloud methodologies and characteristics internally (elastic, scalable, on-demand etc) before we migrate that compute to a pay per cycle model.

In three years time when we've done the above - I can only imagine how much more stable and mature OpenStack will be.

Re:What a dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

He may be right that it's only public cloud adoption *now*, but we (enterprises) are looking at the following as our 3 years road map:

1. Implement Open Stack internally, under a hybrid cloud model
2. Use this as the opportunity to bring elastic services to internal enterprise systems (OSB, Salable web apps etc) by making key technology discussions that do not pair us to monolithic vendors (Oracle)
3. Then, when we have the economics and business maturity we can easily migrate our compute sideways into 'any' public cloud

The big problem we have right now is that it's hard, if not impossible, for us to take our big, giant, poorly design monolithic application into the public cloud. We need to implement the cloud methodologies and characteristics internally (elastic, scalable, on-demand etc) before we migrate that compute to a pay per cycle model.

In three years time when we've done the above - I can only imagine how much more stable and mature OpenStack will be.

Although there are some enterprises looking at 3-5 year (and I have seen much longer ones, 7 year or more) OpenStack Roadmaps, the majority of enterprises are not seriously considering it at all. I've seen smaller organizations and startups, but not enterprise sized companies with any seriousness. As you build elasticity, and adopt cloud-like designs, you will be in a hybrid mode for quite some times, it's not just a switchover. So...you are more likely to be building off of what you have in your organization right now, and from a hypervisor level, that means VMware vSphere. Using their items, you are more likely to start using vCloud Suite items and the vCloud Hybrid service to spread your wings and enter parts of the organization into the Cloud environment, whether that is public or private.

Re:What a dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Although there are some enterprises looking at 3-5 year (and I have seen much longer ones, 7 year or more) OpenStack Roadmaps, the majority of enterprises are not seriously considering it at all. I've seen smaller organizations and startups, but not enterprise sized companies with any seriousness.

HP aren't spending all that money on OpenStack to corner the SOHO and startups market. Trust me.

Re:What a dumbass

[EvilSS]

You don't really want to use that as your metric do you? HP doesn't have the best track record picking winners.

Re:What a dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

If the initials "HP" hurts your sensibilities try "Dell", or hell how about "IBM"?

Re: What a dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep going ..those hurt too. ..and both IBM and HP/DEC had the functionality of OpenStack 30 years ago, so any interest they are paying to it now is purely a marketing initiative to seem relevant to the generation of kids hired in the dot-com boom and then forced to largely train themselves after their more expensive elders were taken out by the bust.

Enterprise apps vs next-gen apps

[whois]

He may be right, right now.

That's because people have historically coded their apps with the assumption that the database/hard drive/web server/IP address would always be there to write to or read from. They're also written with vertical scalability, i.e., if things are slow then throw faster hardware/more IOPS at it. All of these criteria vmware is good at handling.

People are now writing simple apps that use ridiculously complicated frameworks to ensure things work even when they're pear shaped. Most of those apps are written so scalability is horizontal. More speed comes from throwing more hardware at it. This also increases reliability.

These are usually done by new startups because they have specific needs (avoiding paying a SAN vendor) and skillsets (coders who don't understand, or don't know about the availability of a hardware solution so they code something in software.) The thing is, yesterdays startup is tomorrows enterprise. They won't migrate away from whatever cloud stack platform they're running without serious thoughts to the problems it may cause.

I'd guess one of the reasons a vmware CEO would say openstack isn't a competitor is they're owned by EMC, a SAN vendor.

Having said that, we evaluated openstack for our business and didn't like the rough edges in places. We're using a mix of vmware and proxmox right now.

Re: Enterprise apps vs next-gen apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice. There is no way around the destructive impact that a free (even severely inferior) alternative can have on an awesome state-of-the-art Stanford-influenced company full of brilliant highly-paid American scientists who are also raising the next generation of geniuses. Even though it was not Capitalism that created the free knock-off, it is Capitalism that forces buyers to go with the free knock-off if its adequate. As for the rise of time sharing (I mean "the cloud"), I'll be more blunt and come right out and say that the loss of so many industry experts (due to forced retirement in their 40s-60s), left us with a world run by the cheap labor (even if they were once paid $100K due to labor shortage in the dot-com bubble). Cheap (and now cocky) labor (with a dozen years of chasing their tales) needs the heavy-lifting services provided by "the cloud" ..at any price and under any circumstance, so no point in arguing. VMware is still killing it with the non-programmer crowd and will do so until their app suppliers finally force SaaS on their employers. Oh, and Proxmox is a hacker's paradise because it uses the Linux bridge driver instead of its own vSwitch.

Just wait until it gets you...

[Anonymous Coward]

With the premium pricing VMWare is asking, I guess there is a very big intention to make OpenStack or any worthy alternative work for "the Enterprise". It's not that VMWare's offering isn't good, there is practically nothing out there (yet) that can beat their features and reliability, but man, that stuff really is EXPENSIVE.

Re: Just wait until it gets you...

[Anonymous Coward]

A full license with all the options costs about the same as a fast food restaurant manager might be paid in a year at any of the national burger chains in the US. Companies that can't afford that are going to be soaked with incremental cloud or excess IT labor charges anyway.

It isn't enterprise and it is?

[bruce_the_loon]

I sense a wordplay on denial here. If a service provider providing public cloud systems isn't an enterprise level deployment of OpenStack, what is?

I know, support, blah, blah, scaling, blah, blah. I still think he is admitting it is enterprise scale, but directly denying it so that sales managers can point IT managers to "not enterprise" and have to buy his product.

Re:It isn't enterprise and it is?

[EvilSS]

I do consulting (including a lot of work with Xen) and there are more differences than commonalities between hosting providers and SaaS companies and internal corporate IT (aka enterprise). Vastly different priorities, skillsets, requirements, etc. They truly are different beasts.

What we are seeing is that the hosting companies love Xen because it's cost effective and flexible, while enterprises really don't like the learning curve and management limitations, and almost all of them have VMWare skillsets internally. The only threat to VMWare that I see on the horizon is Hyper-V. If you read between the lines even Citrix is seeing this and positioning their products (XenDesktop/XenApp) to work tightly with Hyper-V.

Re:It isn't enterprise and it is?

[ILongForDarkness]

I agree with differing skillsets. A dev shop can hire the people that know the tech they want. A enterprise can in theory too but they are much more limited because rather than having say 50% technical staff they'll have more like 2-5% so each person they pick has to have a little knowledge of networking, windows servers, linux servers, sans, client cloning, business apps etc. Keeping the existing business systems working is more important as a hiring criteria and as a work practice than learning a new tech to do something innovative. They are too scattered and for mid sized companies ( 2000 in my mind) they might have 5-10 IT/devs to take on any serious experimental work. Not enough to give breadth of knowledge since they also need overlapping skillsets to be able to do any projects of meaningful size.

He's both right and wrong.

[rusty0101]

Look at e-mail as an example. Globally and between corporations people have long used free/open standards, protocols and applications, sendmail, smtp, postfix, etc. However a growing number of users are moving from stand alone e-mail clients to web based e-mail platforms such as hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, and so on, each of which have the option of being accessed through stand alone clients, or through their web interfaces.

When you enter the corporate environment you largely switch to comercial web server and clients. Perhaps most often Exchange and Outlook, respectively.

That said, many compaies are using open source platforms as their interface to the rest of the world. Whether that server is between firewalls in a DMZ, on some external service provider is irrelevant.

Similarly tremendous portions of internal corporate networks are running Microsoft web servers to host content internally, and managing content with Sharepoint. While there are some examples of each on the Internet, most corporate public interfaces and a the vast majority of other available servers are open source / free Apache, and other servers, with open source php, postgres, python, and so on backing it up.

Based on that model, VMWare and Zen instances will be widely used within corporate environments, however I strongly suspect that OpenStack will be largely used on the Internet in general.

The hazard with saying it will only be used by 'hobbiest' and 'geeks' is that when you get down to it, two of the largest entities on the Internet today, namely Google and Facebook, were started by hobbiest and geeks. And both started with free/open source, software, and are largely using that to this day. In other words people experimenting with new ways of making the Internet work for them are going to do so using the resources they can get the most value for their dollar from, and that's far more likely to be OpenStack than it is VMware or commercial instances of Zen.

Re:He's both right and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello. Exchange is NOT A WEB SERVER. kthnxbai

Re:He's both right and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The hazard with saying it will only be used by 'hobbiest' and 'geeks' is that when you get down to it, two of the largest entities on the Internet today, namely Google and Facebook, were started by hobbiest and geeks.

And pissing off the geeks locks you out of early adopters who have been through the cycle once already. Haters gonna hate.

Re:He's both right and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The intergration of IIS and Exchange with OWA, ECP, ActiveSync and the way you control IIS via Exchange Console says you are really fucking wrong now. On Exchange 2007 and on IIS is just merely a piece of the Exchange platform, not the other way round.

Re:He's both right and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

To be truly enterprise a product has to suit all existing corporate environments and work well under multiple different configurations. Certainly VMWare does this quite well. What it doesn't do well is running on the hardware stack your expected to run Openstack on. Also Openstack doesn't run AS WELL on traditional corporate hardware stacks. So again he's kind of right and kind of wrong. However, a good architect shouldn't necessarily follow 'traditional' hardware stacks if the software requires a different setup. So it really cancels most of what he's on about.

The problem with Openstack is it's designed basically to not be that friendly with traditional hardware topologies and I think that is one of it's major constraints in adaptation. If a corporate has already sunk 20 million on a stack it's hard to tell them the next one should be totally different. Also support is a major concern for companies and I don't think you get the support (feet on the street in your city) that companies like VMWare can offer you. It's the sole reason Redhat is as popular as it is. The idea that if something terrible goes wrong knights in hawaiian shirts will come to your rescue and you won't get fired.

Re: He's both right and wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

..you really need to play with Zimbra, that VMware bought from Yahoo! for a huge amount of money ..because your lack of knowledge about this has rendered your point moot.

It's a bit competitor bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM and Rackspace both compete with Cisco in the Enterprise cloud market. Specifically IBM has committed to on-premises OpenStack powered by their PureSystems hardware platform. This is as enterprisy as it can get.

Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but not in the PureSystems/OpenStack part of it

Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate CEO whose company sells enterprise cloud products says competing product not for the enterprise.

Wake me when something changes.

google openstack

[coffii]

If I google "openstack" the first item is an ad that links to www.vmware.com/Enterprise. That tells me that VMware does think that they are equivalent, why else pay for the advert?

Re:google openstack

[viperidaenz]

because lots of people like you google "openstack" so they buy a keyword because its popular.

Re:google openstack

[viperidaenz]

actually, I just tried this, I get no ads about vmware. Just a Redhat one and storagemadeeasy.com. Perhaps you're being targeted by vmware for other things you do that google know of.

Re:google openstack

[im_thatoneguy]

Or they want to capture people who think that they are equivalent and pitch to them why they aren't and why VMWare is actually what they need. Just because something isn't equivalent doesn't mean it's not relevant. If you search for "Hotel" it would make sense for homeaway to also advertise its home sharing service. They aren't really the same thing but they are related to someone's need which is shelter. If you are googling openStack you probably are trying to figure out how to virtualize your infrastructure. Surprise surprise, virtualization is something VMWare does.

FUD

[dutchwhizzman]

The usual FUD reaction when they see an open source technology compete with their core business. Free Hypervisors made them lose money on just providing those. Now they need to get the money from the enterprise management system tools they made. Unfortunately, open source tools try and manage them all, while their business is based on managing mostly their own hypervisor offerings and not the open source ones, or the ones from their competitors.

RedHat is in on OpenStack and they're putting big bucks behind it. Give it a few years, and VMWare will be the one that has to catch up on Enterprise readyness. Just managing a single group of KVM or XEN hypervisors is already working just fine if you use RHEV (the paid and supported version of oVirt) and I have no doubt that managing clouds will be on par shortly now that big money and many developers are being deployed.

Diggin their grave...

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware is digging it's own grave. Pricing changes, licensing and EULA changes, and stupid statements like this are why I don't do business with them anymore.

Re:Diggin their grave...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

VMware is also digging it's own grave internally -- they have many ex-Microsoft management who have infected the product line with a Microsoft centric view and did not even understand the core products and how they work. esxi is a real time unix like os with a unix like kernel. Most managers do not even know that. They are repeating the mistakes of Microsoft in VMware are appear to be oblivious to it.

There is a great push to move jobs offshore to minimize costs. That really worked well for Microsoft -- Vista, Windows 8, RT Tablets, .....

Barriers had been errected to stifle / slow down reporting of bugs. Thus time to resolution of bugs has dramatically increased.

The attack on openstack is a deep-seated fear that they will have serious competition in the next 3-5 years and that the "monopoly" is coming to an end and that they will actually have to compete for market share.

What to make of OpenStack?

[rainer_d]

THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:

• -a new storage platform (like ceph or gluster, which we know nothing about, obviously)
• -a new backup platform (equivalent of veeam?)
• -most likely a separated switching (going 10G)
• -and probably duplicate a lot more things that are on VMware currently

Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[isama]

Openstack already has it's storage built in in the swift component AFAIK. That's one off your list :)

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[j0el]

For your situation it depends on a few things. First is how your overall business works. If the server farm is just a small part of the cost of your business, and your product is strong, saving a few bucks on the servers won't matter. But if your business is mostly driven by the server farm and it is a large percentage of your companies expense, you will find out if you are right soon enough. What will or will not happen is that one of your competitors will use an OSS implementation to lower their costs. True, they may have problems in stabilizing it, but they may not. In any case, if they can operate more efficiently that you can, you will have to change. If they cannot operate more efficiently than you can, then you are absolutely correct.

You are saying the same thing many UNIX companies said about Linux many years ago.

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Swift (last time I checked, which was 2 releases ago) is one form of storage, more of an Amazon S3 clone, but they do have the block stuff (now called Cinder as I understand?) for the "EBS" type of volumes. There's still a question about the backing store for the live VMs' ephemeral storage, and clustered storage environments like gluster enable an openstack environment where you can live-migrate VMs around... important for maintaining a reliable environment IMO.

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[rainer_d]

For your situation it depends on a few things. First is how your overall business works. If the server farm is just a small part of the cost of your business, and your product is strong, saving a few bucks on the servers won't matter. But if your business is mostly driven by the server farm and it is a large percentage of your companies expense, you will find out if you are right soon enough..

I'm not sure, actually. There aren't that many physical servers (a couple of hundred - vmware has helped reduced than a lot, already). We are a bit of a "boutique"-ISP in that some of our customers are not price-sensitive at all. Which is good, because we can't compete on price anyway - we compete on flexibility, knowledge, reaction-time. We usually build multi-server, often multi-site, multi-network solutions in heterogeneous environments with high availabilty demands....
Salaries are probably at least as big an expense.

What will or will not happen is that one of your competitors will use an OSS implementation to lower their costs. True, they may have problems in stabilizing it, but they may not. In any case, if they can operate more efficiently that you can, you will have to change. If they cannot operate more efficiently than you can, then you are absolutely correct.

True. Efficiency has always been a concern.

You are saying the same thing many UNIX companies said about Linux many years ago.

Until recently, we mostly used FreeBSD ;-)
Now, a lot of Ubuntu is creeping in...

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[DF5JT]

Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".

Am I too pessimistic?

I believe you are.

With Red Hat having jumped on board, Open Stack is going into a new direction that will not lead to fragmentation, but to consolidation. Red Hat's is one really good player in terms of Open Source. They throw resources at projects and they always do this upstream, delivering patches, enhancements, integration bits right where they belong and where they help the community best.

Red Hat is a guarantee that Open Stack will evolve into the next generation enterprise platform and VMware's CEO is either scared to death or simply a moron.

Re:What to make of OpenStack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. OpenStack uses 3 types of storage: ephemeral, block, and object. Swift is the default object store and is similar to Amazon S3. Cinder is the block store, similar to Amazon EBS, and supports multiple back-end storage systems (the most basic of which is Linux exporting LVM over iSCSI, but also special plugins for high-end SANs). And, ephemeral storage, corresponding to Amazon instance storage, is the local disk of the server hosting the VM (with some effort this can be moved to shared storage).

Like Microsoft and Linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

even a single esx host is great

[cheekyboy]

Hell, I run a esx host at home, even if its just for 3 perm linux servers, and 2-3 dev linux servers for fun, lets you try/test new distros quickly.

Even if its just for the snapshot feature, its worth it, considering fedora is so flaky at updates, its cool to have that 'undo' option with one click.

Re:even a single esx host is great

[Anonymous Coward]

going cloud is GOLD. Private cloud though. Network connectivity has enough problems without trying to ram all of operations through WAN.

Re:even a single esx host is great

[modulo]

If you like ESXi Hypervisor, try Proxmox VE, it's got features you only get with the VMware full versions (HA, backup, live migration), what's not to like?

Re: even a single esx host is great

[Anonymous Coward]

..but Proxmox is missing a vSwitch so it is a security nightmare due to reliance on Linux bridge driver

Re:even a single esx host is great

[Anonymous Coward]

You can yum rollback, it's in the manual.

Re: even a single esx host is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Vswitch exists, if you didn't knew.

Good news

[GeekWithAKnife]

The fact VMware is playing OpenStack down and bothering to comment about is shows it's definitely going well on the OpenStack side.

Good news, OpenStack is open, it can be built to fit whatever purpose because anyone can come and play.

Closed source corp says open source stuff is not for serious people...yeah I guess that makes sense for them to say so.

as soon as you say that

[ILongForDarkness]

you guarantee you'll lose. MySQL isn't for the enterprise. Linux isn't for the enterprise. Hadoop, SaaS offerings like Salesforce, GDocs, etc. Once you say something isn't for the enterprise you almost guarantee that it will be a > $1B business (or fundamental tech used in a $1B business) in the next couple years.

Re:as soon as you say that

[intermodal]

I think the problem comes from the extremely questionable definitions of "enterprise" floating out there at this point. Some of them are common sense, some are pure nonsense, and some of them are downright hypocritical.

Re:as soon as you say that

[Billly Gates]

Sales droids use enterprise thinking it means stable, mature, proven.

When I hear enterprise I hear overpriced, rented, mediocre quality.

There was a time when only IBM was enterprise ready and real mainframes were required for real business work like word processing or simple file serving and inventory management. Zdnet who owns PCMagazine made fun of the first wintel/Novelltel servers calling them PCs on steriods when Compaq invented the filepro or whatever the first server was called. Banks and financial institutions even ignored them as they were not enterprise ready.

Now who has the laugh? Were mini computers like DECs also considered non enterprise ready and poor mans substitutes back in the 60s and 70s and not enterprise ready too? It would not surprise me.

Re:as soon as you say that

[intermodal]

I agree with your comparisons of meanings, and I think your point about IBM is solid.

Added to your definitions I'd add "homogenized" on both sides, which has both good and bad, depending on your needs.

Meanwhile, the NYSE and I believe at least some components of Google run on Gentoo-based customized systems. Seems not everyone drinks that Kool-Aid.

Re:as soon as you say that

[dkf]

Once you say something isn't for the enterprise you almost guarantee that it will be a > $1B business (or fundamental tech used in a $1B business) in the next couple years.

Really? Woohoo! Testing and validation and all of those good practical software engineering principles aren't for the enterprise.

(Please may you be correct!)

"Our competition is lame"

[nurb432]

Ok. Business as usual.

Why OSS is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Never underestimate the pride and sense of ownership of OSS. When Technical people embrade OSS in the enterprise frequently the solution is way better than any proprietary product. The reason is that its the technical people that are care and feeding for their baby compared to management buying shelfware. Its way more effect for any organization to have 100% engagement by the staff than it is to buy something and not have engagement.

  The good news is Redhat is about the best corporate steward you could have on any OSS project. They don't fragement, they embrace and add features to the base Open source project, take the best of what is present in the Open source project, package it and release it as the enterprise version.

We are a good size user of vmware and Redhat products. Openstack is set to replace vmware in the next year 1/2. The reasons are about driving value that proprietary products can't provide. We are even looking very heavy at the OpenShift product (origin project based) as a cloud deployment piece. It a great product from the initial testing, especially if your application is heavy web traffic typed.

In other news...

[bradgoodman]

...Ken Olsen says that PCs are just for hobbyists, businesses will stick with Minis and Mainframes.

Re: In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he said that there was no reason anyone would need a computer at home. He was a Mormon and maybe meant people shouldn't take their work home with them tho. To the contrary, all of DEC's PCs were painfully Professional (with a capital P).

OpenStack is fairly crude at the moment.

[vague regret]

He's right. OpenStack is far from production, not to speak enterprise. I do not expect it get stable and mature with a year or two. Check out OpenStack mailing lists and bug reports. You can't expect reliability from the six months release cycle software when each new release breaks a significant parts of the previous one. Of course you can use it at your own risk. But it require too many efforts to maintain it. It may be cheaper to use some commercial product, depending on your tasks.

It's because OpenStack is not web scale.

[Medievalist]

If /dev/null is faster than OpenStack I will use it.

Re:OpenStack is good for many things...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lame. You only referenced the story once and it was at the very beginning and in such a general way that it could have been anything.

You ignored his point.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you both agree that this action can be seen as a good strategy.

HOWEVER, that wasn't the GPP's point. Their point was that the CEO's job WAS NOT to push FUD about competitors BUT TO RUN THE FUCKING COMPANY PROFITABLY.

Insisting that trashing the competition was what they have to do is tacitly admitting they have no reason to be chosen and have to dissuade you from choosing someone else rather than tempt you (or provide a reason for moving) to them.

If you had something worth going to your company for, why would you trash your competition instead? If their product is faulty and that's the best reason you have, then all they have to do is fix the fault you've found for them. Ergo, this tactic CANNOT be because the CEO's company is doing better.

Agreeing that smear tactics work in an information-poor environment is doing nothing to say that this is what the CEO's job is.

And the tactic of negativity of competitor products can easily be seen as proof the product for sale is worthless in itself.

And in other news from 1992...

[Zeromous]

Sega claims SNES underpowered for core gamers.

VMware is already mostly "cloud" now

[Anonymous Coward]

THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.

We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.

VMware is designed for management of VMs by IT folks. They can simply clone most of the functionality that OpenStack has by:
* creating a web portal
* creating the concept of "tenants" with-in their ACL scheme
* allow resource constraints on said tenants
* have pre-imaged operating systems for the tenant users

OpenStack is technically nothing more than VMware with a fast self-provisioning mechanism. The things preventing a VMware infrastructure from being a "cloud" infrastructure is that IT is a gatekeeper with regards to VM creation and OS imaging. Another feature is the ability to create "private subnets/VLANs" a la Amazon VPC (which OpenStack also has with Quantum/Neutron and namespaces).

Critical features are HA and vMotion

[russbutton]

I used to work at VMware as a tech support engineer. VMware's product has a lot of bells and whistles. Just like Microsoft Office, they keep adding stuff to it that few will ever use. The two most important features in the ESX product are High Availability and vMotion. It's my understanding that Open Stack supports something akin to vMotion, and possibly even vStorage Motion, where you live migrate both the VM to a different host and the VM files to a different data store. That's killer.

But I don't think Open Stack supports anything equivalent to High Availability, where a VM will automatically reboot on a different host if it's current host goes down. If they could do that, I'd highly recommend everyone sell their VMware stock.

These two features are the heart and soul of the value in VMware's ESX product. If and when Open Stack can do both of those things, you'll have 90% of what you really need in a VM environment.

Re:Critical features are HA and vMotion

[mrpolyrhythm]

Except VMware continues to push the envelope by advancing technology. For example: Enhanced vMotion allows you to migrate BOTH the virtual machine AND its files in one operation, meaning you can now do vMotion migrations without shared storage. Also, currently in Tech Preview, which most likely means in full version coming out very soon, is Multi-processor Fault Tolerance. Once this happens, it doesn't matter if competitors have HA, when VMware can provide ZERO downtime protection for VMs in the event of physical hardware failure. Yes, there are internal issues to how VMware is being managed, but I doubt they're going anywhere anytime soon, simply because of the ridiculous speed they come out with very cutting edge features. The big thing here, is that VMware has a vision of where they want the datacenter to go. No other company has that vision: they are all playing catch up, and VMware is playing a completely different game. My two cents. (Or five ;)

Re:Critical features are HA and vMotion

[russbutton]

I'm not suggesting that VMware doesn't have a great product, or that the features you mention aren't a great idea. What I said was that 90% of the value in VMware's ESX product are in simple HA and vMotion. Storage vMotion is cool, but it isn't a make or break thing. You can live without it just fine. Multi-processor fault tolerance is cool, but it's EXPENSIVE, both in terms of hardware, licensing and resources used. ***VERY EXPENSIVE***. When people find out just how much it will cost, many will simply pass.

When Open Stack can do both HA and vMotion, that'll be sufficient for many, many people. I know it would be at the startup where I'm at now.

Yes, VMware has some great features, but just how much are you willing to pay for them?

Re:Critical features are HA and vMotion

[Anonymous Coward]

ovirt and xenserver can do that. They are open source and backed by well known companies.

Re:Critical features are HA and vMotion

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that is in the underlying technology for KVM as well and already exists. However, openstack is amatuer hour when it comes to bringing all the capabilities to work.

FT is, frankly, infeasible except in very limited scenarios. FT penalties and limitations mean that, overhwlemingly, you are better implementing HA at a higher level than VM persistence.

VMware is in trouble at *least* from hyper-v. They *could* be in trouble from KVM, but openstack isn't quite on the trajectory to directly compete in vmware's wheelhouse, but the capabilities are there to be exploited by decent management software. However, thus far, the Linux ecosystem hasn't followed through with a decent competitor. RHEV-M was in the right ball park, but not quite there. It appears that RHEV-M is not probably going to evolve as they shift focus to over-hyped openstack.

openstack might change course, but as it stands, it is massively overhyped for what it is.

Re:Critical features are HA and vMotion

[Anonymous Coward]

> When Open Stack can do both HA and vMotion, that'll be sufficient for many, many people

XenServer appears to have a vmotion ability -- XenMotion & even Xen StorageMotion.

It also appears that HA also exists for XenServer

Check out the following:
http://www.xenserver.org/overview-xenserver-open-source-virtualization/open-source-virtualization-features.html

Huh. That's funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why my employer, whom you've probably heard of, is deploying on OpenStack with great success? Must be a fluke.

Frankly..

[Anonymous Coward]

He is right, for today and the medium term future. Openstack is, sadly, amatuer hour. Their trajectory takes it no where near the intersection with vmware manageability. It truly is a shame, as KVM is capable of 99.9% of vmware stuff now, but all eyes are fixated on overhyped openstack. Detracting from things that might have led to competent vmware competition like oVirt.

Long term Openstack might change, but as it stands the powers that be aren't merely not there, but are generally philosophically opposed to some design decisions that vmware embraced that some customers need.

right before a huge cloud expo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Big corporate CEO says open source projects are only for geeks, children and people who can't afford it. News at 11.

right before ... http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/ so just regular marketing-speak...

I might not be the hobbiest

[cupantae]

but I'm certainly hobbier than most of my friends.

Sociopath

[NewYork]

You cannot survive/succeed in a corporate world unless you're a sociopath.

Re:Sociopath

[Anonymous Coward]

> You cannot survive/succeed in a corporate world unless you're a sociopath.

I agree totally with that statement.

In VMware our VP is a sociopath, the present director exhibits sociopathic tendencies and two managers on my floor are definite sociopaths.

Read:

Without Conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us
Snakes in Suits

You will never look at the workplace the same way ever again.