What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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A great example of what I mean from above is, of course, having a full test platform so that patches, updates, changes and more can be tested before going to production. That's obvious.
But lessso is something like migration environments and transition platforms. Lots of SMBs end up making large, costly leaps to virtualization based on the fact that they chose VMware. The licensing makes it difficult to "ease" into virtualization and they start to do things like throwing out old hardware because it is too costly to license or running systems as physical installs because they can't justify the license being spent there or using Essentials for some workloads and ESXi Free for others, giving up the backup API and unified management interface.
All of those things, if they were using an alternative, would not be a problem. With XS as an example, they could do one to one virtualization where it makes sense, keep old hardware around for failover or second class workloads and keep everything under a single pane of glass.
Each of these things is relatively minor on its own, but they start to add up. Once shops choose things like VMware the up front "cost" is often seen purely from "$500 to make things easier, that's a no brainer" perspective and they forget that the costs and the limitations of that license are going to stay with them day after day, year after year guiding other decisions - often in a way that people forget that they threw out that perfectly good, older harder because of VMware and that they now have no test lab because of VMware and that they have this mess of individual interfaces to log into because of VMware.
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@JaredBusch said:
To me, the best solution is Hyper-V if you have a domain and Windows desktops to manage it. Use built in replication to an off-site facility if you want redundancy and then whatever local backup you want. Free Veeam works for that since this time last year when they added the ability to execute jobs from powershell and task scheduler.
Next up, or first if you do not have the Windows infrastructure anyway, would be XS and XOA
Finally would be VMWare+Essentials with purchased Veeam to handle replication and backup.
For the most part, I agree. Hyper-V, while not my preferred option personally, is by and large the best option for a lot of businesses. Although the gains that I'm seeing from XS and XO really make that incredibly attractive for normal businesses in a way it wasn't just a year ago.
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@johnhooks said:
Everything I do is at least 90% Linux so I'm on XenServer, but even with Windows infrastructure I'd probably look at Scale instead of VMware.
That's really a big thing in how I look at it. When I'm looking at companies that can't afford to "do things right", VMware doesn't fit in the picture. If you are just getting Essentials you are getting so little that even $500 is a complete rip off. And when you need HA and VSAN then the price skyrockets into the realm of totally out of the question. So when someone is in need of cost cutting, Hyper-V and XS are where the solution sets need to be.
When a company has the needs that Jared was mentioning - support, not doing things manually, no worrying about assembling things unnecessarily, not wasting time - then Scale just destroys VMware on that end by providing all of the hardware, the software and the support at around the same price as the VMware licenses alone (not quite, but close enough.)
It's not that Hyper-V or XenServer or Scale are always the option. Nothing is always the option. It's not even that VMware is never the right option. But VMware, from a good business decision standpoint, seems to have fallen into a larger mid-market brownfield niche, at best. They might have the best technology out there, but it is so costly to acquire and difficult to use and impossible to test and so trivially better that it just doesn't matter. There is a reason that Amazon isn't choosing it. If VMware was truly the best value, I guarantee Amazon would license it at massive scale, with a huge discount and that would be that. But they don't for a reason.
What I see is VMware being crushed by a combination of XenServer and Hyper-V on the "small" business end, Scale and similar products in the "big enough to need HA" and up category and then getting crushed by the OpenStacks on the "bigger than that" side of things - and who would run anything but either Xen or KVM with OpenStack? Leaving VMware with really little to no market space where they make sense. They must have niche spots, of course, but they seem like they must be tiny and far away from the SMB space and certainly far away from the greenfield space (which mostly only exists in the SMB anyway.)
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@scottalanmiller Ok I'll bite.
From our experience VMware is far more performant, especially when resources are highly contented. This is something that can happen in an SMB environment where their budget limits them to only purchasing 2 hosts.
Whilst, I have seen benchmarks that indicated the reverse but they were primarily based on cpu / mem throughput. In real world usage, VMware's IO emulation appears to be faster. This was particularly the case for us when virtualising the few Windows machines we had.
Granted this is a) a small sample size 2) comparing VMware with Xen under Redhat (as opposed to Xen Server) 3) we moved to VMware 2 years ago and haven't looked back
As we are predominantly a Linux shop we would have loved for Xen to be our solution but we ran into too many roadblocks. Our choice back then was either pay for Xen-Server or pay for VMware Essentials.
VMware has amazing docs online and good community forums (ie free support). Xen didn't back then. We only had two speed bumps with our migrations and both were solved on the first page of google.
One big feature you miss out with the VMware Essentials license ($500) is vMotion. However, whilst you do get that with Xen Server, it appears to require shared storage. Something the SMBs shouldn't have.
Ideally it would be amazing if VMware included vSan and vMotion within the Essentials license but I can't see that happening given that its a good revenue stream for them. Free tools like SolarWind narrow this gap.
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@markds said:
@scottalanmiller Ok I'll bite.
From our experience VMware is far more performant, especially when resources are highly contented. This is something that can happen in an SMB environment where their budget limits them to only purchasing 2 hosts.
Whilst, I have seen benchmarks that indicated the reverse but they were primarily based on cpu / mem throughput. In real world usage, VMware's IO emulation appears to be faster. This was particularly the case for us when virtualising the few Windows machines we had.
Sensible. That VMware's IO emulation is better is not surprising, I have no doubts around it having the superior technology. Their architecture alone is the best out there.
I've seen SMBs report Xen beating it at 20% this past year, not from cpu/mem tests but in actual VM density after migrating the workload directly from VMware ESXi to XenServer. But every workload is different. If they were not IO bound, for example, your situation would not likely apply to them.
What additional density have you seen with VMware and which platform(s) was it outperforming?
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@markds said:
One big feature you miss out with the VMware Essentials license ($500) is vMotion. However, whilst you do get that with Xen Server, it appears to require shared storage. Something the SMBs shouldn't have.
You are right that SMBs should not have shared external storage. But XenServer can do replicated local storage (RLS) using no external components which would provide vMotion as well as high availability (at the platform level.) It also has the Storage vMotion equivalent as well.
All of this is new, or most anyway, since you made your switch away from it.
Two years ago I was espousing VMware as well. It is only the recent changes to the Xen and moreso the XenServer ecosystems that have prompted the changes there. I've always been a Xen fan, we used it before VMware starting in around 2003, but XenServer I avoided until recently due to the Citrix entanglements and we had a VMware license.
Funny, when we first tested VMware, Xen was so much faster than it literally came down to one being able to run workloads and one not, on the same hardware. Because we did virtualized PBXs, Xen was the only option as VMware simply wasn't fast enough for audio processing.
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@markds said:
Granted this is a) a small sample size 2) comparing VMware with Xen under Redhat (as opposed to Xen Server) 3) we moved to VMware 2 years ago and haven't looked back
Xen under Red Hat, while not officially supported by RH last I knew, should be, in theory, identical to XenServer under most configurations since XenServer is using CentOS as their Dom0 anyway. Would be the same kernel, at the very least, unless it was an older version of Red Hat. Do you know what Xen version it was? Xen 4.4 is current.
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And, of course... welcome to the community!!
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@scottalanmiller One common case we saw back then was virtualising Exchange servers. For some reason there was a very noticeable degradation in disk performance. Something that is likely to have improved since then.
Virtualising linux VMs was excellent under Xen until we pushed cpu contention beyond a ratio of around 4x physical cores. We also found that Xen didn't perform well when overcommitting memory. From memory (no pun intended) VMware does page deduplication and compression when available memory gets low.
This meant we could push contention ratios far more which made up for the cost of a license. I think in the SMB area this would be true as $500 is going to be cheaper than buying an additional host (let alone the running cost).
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@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
And, of course... welcome to the community!!
Thanks!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Do you know what Xen version it was? Xen 4.4 is current.
The last version we ran in production was v4 but I think we tested 4.3.3
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@markds said:
@scottalanmiller One common case we saw back then was virtualising Exchange servers. For some reason there was a very noticeable degradation in disk performance. Something that is likely to have improved since then.
I'm guessing older Exchange. Exchange changed how it accessed the disks in the last few years and it doesn't have the disk issues that it used to have.
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@markds said:
We also found that Xen didn't perform well when overcommitting memory. From memory (no pun intended) VMware does page deduplication and compression when available memory gets low.
This meant we could push contention ratios far more which made up for the cost of a license. I think in the SMB area this would be true as $500 is going to be cheaper than buying an additional host (let alone the running cost).
VMware definitely handles memory compression and dedupe way better than anyone else. Although it wouldn't be $500 versus another node, it would be $500 versus the cost of more memory in most cases. Not that that buys you loads of memory, but it does buy some.
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Xen has memory dedupe in the hypervisor. The place where it has issues is in the PV drivers. They have limited support there.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Funny, when we first tested VMware, Xen was so much faster than it literally came down to one being able to run workloads and one not, on the same hardware. Because we did virtualized PBXs, Xen was the only option as VMware simply wasn't fast enough for audio processing.
We do a lot of voice stuff and whilst our termination gear is not virtualised, most of our customers who do choose to virtualise their endpoints are using VMware. They don't have problems once we tell VMware to reserve resources for that VM. The customers that do have problems are those who virtualise onto EC2, but thats a totally different issue.
I think biggest issue with VMware is the looming threat of licensing costs. $500 is not much even for SMBs and esp compared to labour costs. However, there is going to come a time as the business grows that its going to need more than 3 hosts, want high availability and converged storage. That jump is not linear with VMware and in some cases I can see it being cheaper to migrate away from VMware at that stage, esp with the pricing from hyperconverged vendors starting to become more reasonable.
Speaking of, did you calculate the effective cost of your Scale licensing ie price from Scale - effective cost of Dell hardware etc?
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@markds said:
Speaking of, did you calculate the effective cost of your Scale licensing ie price from Scale - effective cost of Dell hardware etc?
I have not, that would be an interesting study to do. It's a little difficult as it wouldn't be licensing, but support. But if you lump the two together for a general comparison it would be meaningful.
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@markds said:
We do a lot of voice stuff and whilst our termination gear is not virtualised, most of our customers who do choose to virtualise their endpoints are using VMware. They don't have problems once we tell VMware to reserve resources for that VM. The customers that do have problems are those who virtualise onto EC2, but thats a totally different issue.
Issues on EC2? We do a lot of telephony on Rackspace, which is Xen with OpenStack, and haven't had issues for years, not even before they were open stack. I'm very surprised that EC2 isn't as good or better.
VMware definitely can handle audio processing now. This was ~2003 when they were lagging behind. I know that by 2006 they still weren't handling it well. But that's when we stopped looking at them for several years. We moved to them, I want to guess, around 2009 and by that time telephony was fine. They had advanced a lot in the interim.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I have not, that would be an interesting study to do. It's a little difficult as it wouldn't be licensing, but support. But if you lump the two together for a general comparison it would be meaningful.
Indeed. When I first looked at Nutanix I was shocked at the pricing, that was until I subtracted hardware & labor (install and migration). We didn't end up proceeding with Nutanix due to concerns over their closed review policies and lack of guarantees on performance.
Scale pricing would be extra interesting seeing that you would also exclude hypervisor pricing as well as (I think it uses KVM internally?)
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@markds said:
Indeed. When I first looked at Nutanix I was shocked at the pricing, that was until I subtracted hardware & labor (install and migration). We didn't end up proceeding with Nutanix due to concerns over their closed review policies and lack of guarantees on performance.
Yeah, Nutanix burned a lot of bridges permanently with that stuff. Once you know that they are faking their reviews and data there is no way you want to do business with them. Just way too much to go wrong. I've even had a little pressure put on from them to back off on disclosing that to people and I've never done business with them (nor would I.)
