What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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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.
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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.
Ya I don't really have a Windows infrastructure, all Linux servers, a few Linux terminals on the shop floor for viewing drawings, plans, etc. We have a couple Windows desktops for Solidworks but not enough to need something to manage them.
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.
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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.
I see Scale fitting in like this. As soon as you get anywhere close to $15k for hardware you should be looking at Scale gear. The exact crossing point will be different for each situation, but that is where the line gets really close.
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@JaredBusch said:
But I am not going to spin up XS and XO and this and that and the next thing and then manage it all manually. That is all a waste of time, that I do not have the luxury of wasting.
IT supports the business. IT time is expensive. Wasting it doing things manually to get "free" is one of the dumbest things out there.
What makes XS more or less manual than other solutions? We went from Xen to VMware to XenServer (over the course of about a dozen years) and VMware, while good, didn't offer any more automation than XenServer. If anything, I feel that it offers less because everything comes from third parties and requires licensing. VMware feels like more manual setup is needed that XenServer.
The reason you mention, that it's for a business and business needs come first and wasting time isn't good, is a reason that I like XS more than VMware.
In the same vein, wasting time and money just because something isn't free is even worse.
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@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
I believe this is the biggest problem. There are shops with "IT Professionals" who are just going with what a vendor told them and probably had someone help them set it up. And this might be why SMB doesn't like support unless it's paid or from an MSP, because whoever is in the department can't do it without help anyway.
The other part of this that actually gives things like XS a bad rap is the fan boy following.
People just blindly spew crap with no substance about free products like XS.
Let me add perspective. I love XS from what I have seen of it. I will never use it in production anytime soon because I cannot ignore all of the time involved in manually setting shit up.
Now with products like XoA out there, I have a serious solution to make XS something I will consider.
But I am not going to spin up XS and XO and this and that and the next thing and then manage it all manually. That is all a waste of time, that I do not have the luxury of wasting.
IT supports the business. IT time is expensive. Wasting it doing things manually to get "free" is one of the dumbest things out there.
I don't have experience with VMware, but what makes it more automatic than XS? Even before XO, at a basic level scripts could automate most everything. And with orchestration tools, it's even easier because you can have something like Ansible copy a VM template, update it, and do anything else you need with one command.
It is all about the third party tools. None of it is free. Free is a myth as I just said. To do something "free" takes time. Time is not free. So, nothing is free.
The simplest example I can give is Backups.
You setup XS, or Hyper-V, or VMWare +Essentials. Setup your VMs. Done. This part is honestly the same from VMWare, Hyper-V and XS IMO. Minor process differences aside.
The next thing to setup is backups. I need something automagic, solid and reliable. Veeam nails this for Hyper-V and VMWare+Essentials. XOA is getting this for XS, and once I get time to actually use it, I will probably rank it right there too.
Either way this is XOA not XO. I still have to pay for it, no different than paying for Veeam or Unitrends.
Why is it XOA and not XO? Doesn't XO have all of that backup functionality, too? And if you are willing to or desirous of paying for backups, there are paid backup solutions for XS just like there are for VMware or HyperV. No, it isn't Veeam and I admit Veeam is good, but is Unitrends or StorageCraft or any of the others that bad? Veeam alone seems to be an extreme reason to choose a platform. A factor, sure, but it seems to be a deciding one here.
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@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@JaredBusch said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
I believe this is the biggest problem. There are shops with "IT Professionals" who are just going with what a vendor told them and probably had someone help them set it up. And this might be why SMB doesn't like support unless it's paid or from an MSP, because whoever is in the department can't do it without help anyway.
The other part of this that actually gives things like XS a bad rap is the fan boy following.
People just blindly spew crap with no substance about free products like XS.
Let me add perspective. I love XS from what I have seen of it. I will never use it in production anytime soon because I cannot ignore all of the time involved in manually setting shit up.
Now with products like XoA out there, I have a serious solution to make XS something I will consider.
But I am not going to spin up XS and XO and this and that and the next thing and then manage it all manually. That is all a waste of time, that I do not have the luxury of wasting.
IT supports the business. IT time is expensive. Wasting it doing things manually to get "free" is one of the dumbest things out there.
I don't have experience with VMware, but what makes it more automatic than XS? Even before XO, at a basic level scripts could automate most everything. And with orchestration tools, it's even easier because you can have something like Ansible copy a VM template, update it, and do anything else you need with one command.
It is all about the third party tools. None of it is free. Free is a myth as I just said. To do something "free" takes time. Time is not free. So, nothing is free.
The simplest example I can give is Backups.
You setup XS, or Hyper-V, or VMWare +Essentials. Setup your VMs. Done. This part is honestly the same from VMWare, Hyper-V and XS IMO. Minor process differences aside.
The next thing to setup is backups. I need something automagic, solid and reliable. Veeam nails this for Hyper-V and VMWare+Essentials. XOA is getting this for XS, and once I get time to actually use it, I will probably rank it right there too.
Either way this is XOA not XO. I still have to pay for it, no different than paying for Veeam or Unitrends.
Before XOA I used snapback. It's a shell script that you run with a cron job, or multiple cron jobs, that exports a snapshot as a backup (which is what XO and XOA do). You create two custom fields for the VM in XenCenter that tell it daily, weekly, monthly, etc. and how many copies to keep. It never didn't back up for me.
I don't think anything is truly free, but some ways give you knowledge that you can apply in other areas and do cost a lot less at the same time.
And are you on site everyday and aware of the backup stauts all the times? Does it email you? How much time does it take to manage when you need to add things? etc. it all adds up.
I used to use ghettovcb for VMWare free. so I know about doing things the cheap (upfront) way.
I was on site for that one so I could see if it did back up, adding another script to have it email once it was done would have been trivial though. Once it was running it would scan each VM for the custom fields, so adding another VM only really took the amount of time it takes to type daily, weekly, or monthly and then a number of copies.
I do get what you're saying, and there are times when paying for the solution is obviously better.
Another way to put it is like this.
We don't need a Scale HC3. We can do it all ourselves with pieces and scripts. I mean it is all just Dell hardware running Linux and using KVM and a proprietary VSAN.
Doesn't mean I would want to build one myself. But if I did, I can guarantee you that it would not run as well or be as easy to use. Even if I came out cheaper after accounting for the hardware and labor to build it manually.
I totally agree there. But that's comparing to Scale, that's quite different. When someone uses VMware they have to figure out which VMware features they want, deal with getting the right license, apply the license, figure out what VMware doesn't do for them such as take backups, go find the backup vendor, license it, find a backup target, acquire it, set it up, etc. It's all manual and it's still all assembling the pieces yourself.
XS is comparable to that. You might have a few more minutes of setting up the backups, but you have a few less minutes of wrangling with licenses.
XS and VMware are directly comparable in that way. Scale is a whole different ball of wax where everything is included (including backups, support, storage, etc.) from a single vendor with integrated support. Neither XS nor Vmware offer that in any form.
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@johnhooks said:
Another good point that was made somewhere else was being able to learn at home also. A business should pay for XOA and get support with continuing updates. But, if I want to run it at home, I don't want to pay $70 a month for the same abilities I have at work. So I can run the free one and get all of the features to test with and play around, but put in a minimal amount of work to set it up (and even less the second time if you script it). I can't do that with things like VMware.
Same goes for a lab at the office. With VMware it is difficult, normally, for anything short of a major enterprise to have the spare licensing to run a lab environment. But with XS, KVM or Hyper-V you can do that for free.
How many SMBs won't pay or can't pay for environments like that but choose VMware? They look at it as "affordable" but then cut corners on training, test and lab facilities based on it costing too much. Often I see SMBs choosing VMware when they can't really afford to run it "properly", meaning that if they had chosen a different option they would have done something far more robust in how they used it.
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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.
