When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Is that really true? So many people use it without understanding it. The "using it because it seems easy" mindset makes for a support nightmare, similar to what Windows faces with their ecosystem. So many things are done incorrectly because it seems like you need to knowledge to do it. Then everything blows up.
Obtuse design to keep amateurs away from a product work if your willing to pay the non-trivial opex costs (which are huge). The only reason this works well in a SMB is if you want it to be painful for anyone to drop in and replace you or outsource you.
When I drop into a SMB with 2 servers that are running NetBSD and Gentoo (The ricer of linux) and are not using QWERTY on the console I know someone tried to make himself impossible to replace...
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Is that really true? So many people use it without understanding it. The "using it because it seems easy" mindset makes for a support nightmare, similar to what Windows faces with their ecosystem. So many things are done incorrectly because it seems like you need to knowledge to do it. Then everything blows up.
Obtuse design to keep amateurs away from a product work if your willing to pay the non-trivial opex costs (which are huge). The only reason this works well in a SMB is if you want it to be painful for anyone to drop in and replace you or outsource you.
When I drop into a SMB with 2 servers that are running NetBSD and Gentoo (The ricer of linux) and are not using QWERTY on the console I know someone tried to make himself impossible to replace...
Yes but we aren't talking obtuse. Dead simple systems built well.
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In reality, AD and Windows are overly obtuse for most SMBs. But they are accessible and sold heavily so people claim knowledge and play with them.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
It's more that there is a small space in the SMB where it is beneficial, but a HUGE space in the non-SMB where it is. If I'm running a Fortune 1000, I'd almost always choose VMware because the cost is small compared to the workloads, the support is assumed as a cost no matter what and they make the best stuff.
We have a slide deck somewhere that shows the cost of an Oracle RAC deployment and has a bar graph of all the costs. The VMware licensing piece is so skinny it looks like a rounding error. There are a lot of area's in IT where for a 1-2% cost you can get some damn nice management functionality. My favorite example is people forgetting to pay for iDRAC/iLO. I've argued with the product managers they should have a special SKU/Model number that it is IMPOSSIBLE to remove from the quote (it's just rolled into the motherboard) so that procurement clowns can't strip it from the quote to "Save money!"
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.
True, but they don't do anything useful without an insane amount of training, time, and money ^_^
And the last time (admittedly some time ago) that we hired VMware training, the class trained the VMware staffer because Vmware didn't know its own product. I've had a certain lack of faith in it ever since Xen and Zones folks were the ones teaching VMware how to use its own software to the "expert" that VMware had on staff.
I'm sure Vmware has loads of great people, but even Vmware stuggled to find what I'd call competent users internally whereas finding people who knew Xen was pretty easy (and still is.)
I suspect this was in the early days and you got a bad teacher. I've had pretty decent trainers for the classes I've done. I'm also helping with some of the curriculum right now. For a product (vSAN) that releases two to 3 times a year it's "fun" keeping this stuff up to date.
As far as training new employee's on the product that's a reality of any company with 20K employees. You will hire people who don't know something and train them. I've seen the NSX team hire people with no networking background but deep Virtualization/VDI just to offset the amount of hardcore networking people who lacked exposure outside of networking (it's a weird product that has to startle a LOT of vertices). Especially for SE's you tend to hire people and give them a training plan (you'll take these classes, do this self study, know these skills at this level by yyy). When you work for a 20 man firm you can hire purple squeals. When your trying to staff an 8000 man field sales force, you have to accept that you need internal training programs.
This was a senior trainer assigned to one of the largest clients. He didn't even know the basics that you could see with casual usage in the class. It was as if he'd never seen the product. It was a bit extreme.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
In reality, AD and Windows are overly obtuse for most SMBs. But they are accessible and sold heavily so people claim knowledge and play with them.
Hmmmm For a while there I thought I was the Golden God of GPO (A skill I'm happy to have not used for 2 years now!).
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
Right, in that situation, you assume paying for support for the OS already. So those costs are already additive to VMware's costs in most cases.
It does require a higher level of support to get the hypervisor stuff (at least used to with RedHat) vs just basic instance based support. I think there's a Windows Datacenter like datacenter cross point they might just throw it in.
Again, most people who are paying for Redhat's premium licensing and running it at scale likely care very little about the cost of management/monitoring tools vs. solution stability/density/uptime etc.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
Except that kind of hardware is already dead common and has been for decades from every major vendor AND they were not aware that Vmware (and Xen) already had this!!
To be fair to FT, it doesn't do RDMA transport (yet) for the memory, and it has a scaling wall at 4 Cores. Some of these weird hardware solution can scale a little bit better.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
Except that kind of hardware is already dead common and has been for decades from every major vendor AND they were not aware that Vmware (and Xen) already had this!!
To be fair to FT, it doesn't do RDMA transport (yet) for the memory, and it has a scaling wall at 4 Cores. Some of these weird hardware solution can scale a little bit better.
Sure, but not the one in question
IBM has stuff for that, of course.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
Right, in that situation, you assume paying for support for the OS already. So those costs are already additive to VMware's costs in most cases.
It does require a higher level of support to get the hypervisor stuff (at least used to with RedHat) vs just basic instance based support. I think there's a Windows Datacenter like datacenter cross point they might just throw it in.
Again, most people who are paying for Redhat's premium licensing and running it at scale likely care very little about the cost of management/monitoring tools vs. solution stability/density/uptime etc.
Oh yes, not free. And maybe not VMware cheap. Just not as bad as that seemed
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@scottalanmiller - thanks for showing i'm not a total idiot.
Glad to see somebody else doesn't see what I was saying as crazy or 'wrong'. Found it very frustrating to be told 'hire me as a consultant to show you why you are wrong' and... 'go learn how to do it properly' etc.
2 x HA Proxy (free), sitting in front of two webservers (can be free), sitting in front of a clustered database (can be free), sitting with 50% on one node, local storage, and 50% on another node, local storage... can be entirely absolutely free using Hyper-V and NO NEED FOR VMWARE at all. That is also entirely Highly Available, for free. Don't know why I was insulted for saying so, when vMotion, the only aspect mentioned adds nothing at all to the capability of the FREE application level HA I said... To be told to 'go learn' very unprofessional.
As far as I understand, using VMWare provides only hardware level HA. Could be wrong, if so, yeah - point me out on that. As far as I see, if I have a VM on VMWare for webserver (which i'd only have one of as most so far have said two webservers is wrong), when the node crashes the other VMWare nodes would bring the VM back online from the cluster/shared storage... that isn't instant. With windows failover cluster (At least in 2008 r2, not sure since), the VM has to boot fresh on the second node... its not instant in memory failover. Why bother paying for VMWare to get that if you don't go the extra step and just build app level HA in too... clearly you do not need HA).
[Perhaps VM does instantly bring the VM up after a host has failed on another node from the shared storage with everything in memory and no need to boot]? - In which case, please tell me. But I know it didn't with a windows failover cluster.The reason why I use hardware HA and application HA is so that I can get away with doing maintenance on the hosts, and on the VMs, whenever I want - within reason. If I want to maintenance on webserver 1, switch HA proxy to webserver 2... no need for out of hours. Can just BAU get on with it.
If I need to do maintenance on node1, simple, move webserver 1 live to node2 etc and then also do the maintenance BAU... easy.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Are you happy know? @scottalanmiller answered for me.
- That is the cost for 3 hosts not 1.
- You don't do HA at the platform and at the Application without some really damned good reasons.
- And IMO, you have not even given a valid reason for any type of HA.
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@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Are you happy know? @scottalanmiller answered for me.
- That is the cost for 3 hosts not 1.
- You don't do HA at the platform and at the Application without some really damned good reasons.
- And IMO, you have not even given a valid reason for any type of HA.
I cannot see any way on their site to purchase any less than this, and get vMotion, which was the initial start of the whole darn thread. Only that stage an up, when checking out to buy, says it comes with vMotion. Even if I need 2 hosts, with VMWare I must get that product at that price.
With Hyper-V, you can move a VM live between nodes... for free.
Why on earth would I buy VMWare, at that price, for that feature, the only feature suggested at the time... when I can get it for free!
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Being able to do maintenance business as usual, during the day, on VMs and on hosts, is a valid reason. Entirely valid. Especially as it can be done as and when needed, with no affect on customers at all.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Are you happy know? @scottalanmiller answered for me.
- That is the cost for 3 hosts not 1.
- You don't do HA at the platform and at the Application without some really damned good reasons.
- And IMO, you have not even given a valid reason for any type of HA.
I cannot see any way on their site to purchase any less than this, and get vMotion, which was the initial start of the whole darn thread. Only that stage an up, when checking out to buy, says it comes with vMotion. Even if I need 2 hosts, with VMWare I must get that product at that price.
With Hyper-V, you can move a VM live between nodes... for free.
Why on earth would I buy VMWare, at that price, for that feature, the only feature suggested at the time... when I can get it for free!
I believe @scottalanmiller has already corrected your misunderstandings from @DustinB3403 going south.
So you are correct. You do not need VMWare for that functionality, use Hyper-V.
But none of that answers the more appropriate question. Do you need HA? If so, at what layer?
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Being able to do maintenance business as usual, during the day, on VMs and on hosts, is a valid reason. Entirely valid. Especially as it can be done as and when needed, with no affect on customers at all.
That reason has a cost associated to it. That cost is very, very, often not justified by when real numbers are crunched.
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@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Are you happy know? @scottalanmiller answered for me.
- That is the cost for 3 hosts not 1.
- You don't do HA at the platform and at the Application without some really damned good reasons.
- And IMO, you have not even given a valid reason for any type of HA.
I cannot see any way on their site to purchase any less than this, and get vMotion, which was the initial start of the whole darn thread. Only that stage an up, when checking out to buy, says it comes with vMotion. Even if I need 2 hosts, with VMWare I must get that product at that price.
With Hyper-V, you can move a VM live between nodes... for free.
Why on earth would I buy VMWare, at that price, for that feature, the only feature suggested at the time... when I can get it for free!
I believe @scottalanmiller has already corrected your misunderstandings from @DustinB3403 going south.
So you are correct. You do not need VMWare for that functionality, use Hyper-V.
But none of that answers the more appropriate question. Do you need HA? If so, at what layer?
Both. I already said why.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Are you happy know? @scottalanmiller answered for me.
- That is the cost for 3 hosts not 1.
- You don't do HA at the platform and at the Application without some really damned good reasons.
- And IMO, you have not even given a valid reason for any type of HA.
I cannot see any way on their site to purchase any less than this, and get vMotion, which was the initial start of the whole darn thread. Only that stage an up, when checking out to buy, says it comes with vMotion. Even if I need 2 hosts, with VMWare I must get that product at that price.
With Hyper-V, you can move a VM live between nodes... for free.
Why on earth would I buy VMWare, at that price, for that feature, the only feature suggested at the time... when I can get it for free!
I believe @scottalanmiller has already corrected your misunderstandings from @DustinB3403 going south.
So you are correct. You do not need VMWare for that functionality, use Hyper-V.
But none of that answers the more appropriate question. Do you need HA? If so, at what layer?
Both. I already said why.
Mr CEO, I want to double our licensing costs and double our hardware costs so I don't have to schedule maintenance windows.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
As far as I understand, using VMWare provides only hardware level HA.
Think of it as platform HA. NEC does hardware. Very similar, but not identical. Platform is abstracted and more powerful. but still not application layer.
There is solid value to both.
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@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Being able to do maintenance business as usual, during the day, on VMs and on hosts, is a valid reason. Entirely valid. Especially as it can be done as and when needed, with no affect on customers at all.
That reason has a cost associated to it. That cost is very, very, often not justified by when real numbers are crunched.
I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.
Look, lets just disagree on this. We each have our way of doing things.
