When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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@Francesco-Provino said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
Fault Tolerance with vendor support for it. Technically not limited to Vmware, but essentially limited to it. I believe Suse with Xen is the only other vendor who offers OEM vendor support for that.
Agree 100%. It is one of the cheapest supported solutions. Issue is if you can afford it! Usually not here.
Of course exceptions can be around. But are exceptions imho in the small business.Not sure it is the cheapest. Compare to Red Hat, I bet RH is cheaper. I've not compared, I'm just guessing.
Not really. If you want live migration and other stuff you have yo go rhve or how the hell they name ovirt.
Plain KVM has done live migration from the very beginning…
Yes but if we talk about support for this kind of things, this is provided via rh virtualization.
Try live migrate with stock centos: it doesn't work. You need to pull from rh virtualization sources. Centos has a set of packages for this specific need. It also does share nothing migration
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Francesco-Provino said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
Fault Tolerance with vendor support for it. Technically not limited to Vmware, but essentially limited to it. I believe Suse with Xen is the only other vendor who offers OEM vendor support for that.
Agree 100%. It is one of the cheapest supported solutions. Issue is if you can afford it! Usually not here.
Of course exceptions can be around. But are exceptions imho in the small business.Not sure it is the cheapest. Compare to Red Hat, I bet RH is cheaper. I've not compared, I'm just guessing.
Not really. If you want live migration and other stuff you have yo go rhve or how the hell they name ovirt.
Plain KVM has done live migration from the very beginning…
Yes but if we talk about support for this kind of things, this is provided via rh virtualization.
Try live migrate with stock centos: it doesn't work. You need to pull from rh virtualization sources. Centos has a set of packages for this specific need. It also does share nothing migration
Also long distance vmotion is another fun on. On vSphere I can migrate stuff from London to NYC without disrtuption. Also NSX will virtualize the network so that VMs network will actually work running active active over long distances with full ingress/egress and BGP.
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@Reid-Cooper said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
You would not likely buy something just for this, but VMware has vVols. I don't think that anyone else has an equivalent technology.
Vvols is amazingly powerful, and there's nothing even on roadmap for something similar from others. Even small shops can benefit from the 50x snapshot performance improvement.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Reid-Cooper said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
You would not likely buy something just for this, but VMware has vVols. I don't think that anyone else has an equivalent technology.
Vvols is amazingly powerful, and there's nothing even on roadmap for something similar from others. Even small shops can benefit from the 50x snapshot performance improvement.
What they do exactly? Link please
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Reid-Cooper said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
You would not likely buy something just for this, but VMware has vVols. I don't think that anyone else has an equivalent technology.
Vvols is amazingly powerful, and there's nothing even on roadmap for something similar from others. Even small shops can benefit from the 50x snapshot performance improvement.
What they do exactly? Link please
The only link I've found is how it says it's so good for your business and is the next best thing for managing volumes... reminds me of something.
Link: https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/virtual-volumes.html
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Reid-Cooper said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
You would not likely buy something just for this, but VMware has vVols. I don't think that anyone else has an equivalent technology.
Vvols is amazingly powerful, and there's nothing even on roadmap for something similar from others. Even small shops can benefit from the 50x snapshot performance improvement.
What they do exactly? Link please
I also found this: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240242340/Top-five-things-you-need-to-know-about-VMware-Virtual-Volumes
Just seems like what Hyper-V already has had built in for a long time, like QoS and such.
I just did a quick read, I'm sure John has a lot more to add, which would be helpful.
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@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Reid-Cooper said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
You would not likely buy something just for this, but VMware has vVols. I don't think that anyone else has an equivalent technology.
Vvols is amazingly powerful, and there's nothing even on roadmap for something similar from others. Even small shops can benefit from the 50x snapshot performance improvement.
What they do exactly? Link please
I also found this: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240242340/Top-five-things-you-need-to-know-about-VMware-Virtual-Volumes
Just seems like what Hyper-V already has had built in for a long time, like QoS and such.
I just did a quick read, I'm sure John has a lot more to add, which would be helpful.
I think the big plus for vVOLs is the API access so the hypervisor can offload storage responsibilities to the storage layer. Like letting the storage do the snapshots and clones.
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@stacksofplates like let the san use uts own snapshot/backup sw?
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates like let the san use uts own snapshot/backup sw?
Yes, which isn't quite fully offloaded, but a reliable means of communications so that the SAN can do the majority of the work.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Yeah, agree. But, the development team are the team who select what they want to use, for reasons I'm not privy to... they wanted SQL Server when they assessed it a long time ago, and that's what the solution has been built on.
It sounds like layer after layer of business and political failures resulting in IT trying to find expensive technical band-aids to poor management oversight. Not a good situation. Good that there is enough money to pay for some fixes, but bad that money is needed to fix things that never needed to be broken.
I really don't know the reasons why back in day one, the decision was to use this stack. That was decided a long time ago, and i'n never at this stage be able to get them to change their entire stack. Maybe it was a good decision, maybe bad... I don't know as I wasn't there. The fact it is wasn't a poor decision, just a more expensive one to use SQL Server. Nothing broken.
I dare you to say that again and ask Scott about corruption.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Remember, in IT and business (which are the same thing)... "not being as cost effective as possible" and "broken" are identical. Anyone can make a system work, but the purpose of having IT is to make it work well. If it isn't working as well as it should, that's broken from that perspective.
It is working well. Very well. Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
We have VERy different ideas of "working well." I'm not sure what criteria you are using. In IT and business "working well" means delivering high value (ROI) and it is not doing that compared to simple alternatives. As a business person, I immediately see this as "not working well".
If it is working well, by IT standards, we could describe that as the ROI vs. the alternatives. What ROI is this delivering over MariaDB, for example?
Customers get great service using our products. Yes, it costs more than doing it another way, a way which equally would have given great service... but that potential bad decision then, which may not have been as we don't know the particulars, has not left customers with bad service... just the company with a higher, but acceptable, bill. In that sense, customers = happy = paying = working well.
I agree with you, ^ cost = not working well - but if the company is happy with the price then it is working well. Just like if you had purchased VMWare for the features available in free hypervisors... yes, more costly... but no, still great service and working well.
I'm still reading this thread, but you need to drop well in every case in this paragraph. Is it work? Yes. Is it working well? Nope, why not? Because there is a ton of unnecessary spending happening, therefore it fails the working well test.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
We also need HA, not just for this, but because its a business decision from the board on the level of service they want to provide. So...
So it is REALLY important to then realize that the board is running IT. They are not a true board, but actually hands on techs at that point. They are the acting IT department. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but really weird for decisions like that to be taken on by a board.
Now this is where I question Scott.
Is it not ok for the board to mandate 99.999%+ setup?
I would think they certainly could mandate that, but, what seems obvious is that they shouldn't be telling the company how to get there. That is IT's job.
Am I off base?
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@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
We also need HA, not just for this, but because its a business decision from the board on the level of service they want to provide. So...
So it is REALLY important to then realize that the board is running IT. They are not a true board, but actually hands on techs at that point. They are the acting IT department. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but really weird for decisions like that to be taken on by a board.
Now this is where I question Scott.
Is it not ok for the board to mandate 99.999%+ setup?
No. It's not doing their job as the board, it's not doing their legal responsibility to the investors. It's a business failure and potentially a legal one.
Exceptions: When life outranks the fiduciary mandate of the business.
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@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I would think they certainly could mandate that, but, what seems obvious is that they shouldn't be telling the company how to get there. That is IT's job.
They CAN make that mandate and everyone under them has to follow it. But making that mandate means a few things:
- The board is now running the IT department direction. That's insane. Who pays the board members to run an infrastructure department.
- Things like this are never mandates in business. Business and mandates don't go together, they are opposing concepts.
- Boards doing this mean, by definition, that they are going against their own mandate of representing the business. Mandate is another way here of saying "not acting ethically."
- How does the board realistically have the tools at their disposal to know when a decision like this is viable?
- If the people above the CEO are doing the job of the people in the trenches, what are the rest of the employees for?
- Imagine if the stock holders started doing stuff like this, it would sound crazy, right? It's crazy for anyone to do this, whether it is the CIO, CEO, Board, Chairman, Shareholders.... none of that makes sense. The higher in the stack you go, the crazier it gets.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
We also need HA, not just for this, but because its a business decision from the board on the level of service they want to provide. So...
So it is REALLY important to then realize that the board is running IT. They are not a true board, but actually hands on techs at that point. They are the acting IT department. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but really weird for decisions like that to be taken on by a board.
Now this is where I question Scott.
Is it not ok for the board to mandate 99.999%+ setup?
No. It's not doing their job as the board, it's not doing their legal responsibility to the investors. It's a business failure and potentially a legal one.
Exceptions: When life outranks the fiduciary mandate of the business.
Right, duh what was I thinking? They can't ask for this in a vacuum. They have to know the cost v benefits to make sure it makes financial sense.
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And my comments, board should be replaced by company management team, the Cs.
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@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
We also need HA, not just for this, but because its a business decision from the board on the level of service they want to provide. So...
So it is REALLY important to then realize that the board is running IT. They are not a true board, but actually hands on techs at that point. They are the acting IT department. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but really weird for decisions like that to be taken on by a board.
Now this is where I question Scott.
Is it not ok for the board to mandate 99.999%+ setup?
No. It's not doing their job as the board, it's not doing their legal responsibility to the investors. It's a business failure and potentially a legal one.
Exceptions: When life outranks the fiduciary mandate of the business.
Right, duh what was I thinking? They can't ask for this in a vacuum. They have to know the cost v benefits to make sure it makes financial sense.
Exactly. If they did analysis and knew that it made sense, they'd still be being ridiculous and doing IT's job for it, but they would not deliver a mandate but rather a cost/risk analysis that would say when HA made sense and at what cost. It would never be HA of X level at unlimited cost.
There are ways for the board to take over IT, but if they do it, they should do it well. Taking over IT is weird, but you can make an argument for a case for it. But taking over IT and doing something that normal IT people would be considered failures for having done (not doing the one most important job IT is there to do - the analysis) is pretty bad all around. Failing at being the board, failing at IT all at once.
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@Dashrender said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
And my comments, board should be replaced by company management team, the Cs.
The Cs shouldn't do it either. You just expect the board to know even moreso than the Cs not to make a mistake like this. But really, even the people in the trenches should know that mandates make no sense, because if they don't realize that a mandate like that can't work, how do they do their own jobs?
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Got it
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates like let the san use uts own snapshot/backup sw?
Yes, which isn't quite fully offloaded, but a reliable means of communications so that the SAN can do the majority of the work.
Actually vVols is different than SAN Snap-ins in how snapshot offload is done. VMFS snapshots do not exist at all in the case you use them. You also get a management, and command integration so you can set compliance requirements (encryption, retention, replication, performance minimums) and apply policies automatically (using OpenStack, VCD, vRA etc) and it will validate that those configurations are continuously met and alert if not. Nifty stuff.
