Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
The reality is that ESXi "won" the on-premises datacenter war, Hyper-V's entire focus is on Azure/AzureStack now (fighting VMware on a full SDDC stack and Hybrid Cloud). Talking to one large OEM recently Microsoft has pulled all funding for headcounts on competitive Hyper-V trying to displace ESXi on premises. They recognize that the fight has moved on.
From what we see here in the SMB, this seems to be the opposite. There was a time when this seemed true, now it seems the opposite. ESXi lost the war and is now only in the places that haven't updated in a while. It's still lingering, but you don't hear people talking about deploying it again. Sure, because it was so many places and so many shops just never update, it's still around a lot. But we used to discuss it constantly as a key consideration, now it doesn't appear to be any almost anyone's deployment radar.
To say that they won the war, when they appear to have given up, seems odd. In the enterprise I assume that ESXi is still dominating, that's a different game. But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.
It's a misnomer that people don't try to track free installs. There's phone home telemetry for vendor products, download tracking and a host of other voodoo to at least make an attempt at reconciling these data sets. IDC and the like tend to only report revenues, but there are ways to track embedded ESXi free edition at the OEM and distribution level as well as the phone home level etc. Looking at unique downloads of security patches isn't a terrible proxy for active installs that are being maintained. There are also groups like IDC who conduct phone and other survey's in line with statistical models. Vendors who work in the ecosystem and have to make product judgments of where to invest in also do their own private tracking (Backup vendors do some fairly large stuff).
Are you sure you are doing tracking and statistical modeling of this, or are you just reviewing anecdotes and assuming the plural of an anecdote is data? I feel like we were just arguing 3 years ago that Xen going to take over the world.
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
To say that they won the war, when they appear to have given up, seems odd. In the enterprise I assume that ESXi is still dominating, that's a different game. But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.
To clarify, the "war" was claiming a major stake in revenue and market share when Hypervisors and Hypervisor management software was still in Hypergrowth and a double-digit CAGR. That war is over (It's single-digit growth at best).
I'd argue It's the other hypervisor vendors that have largely given up in this space...
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Microsoft shifted licensing for datacenter and VMM to per core to drive up costs for server edition and applications and shift customers to hosted providers (making SPLA look a lot cheaper at small volume). They've cut their bounties for partners to deploy Hyper-V, removed partner competitive resources and adjusted field compensation to focus entirely on Azure/AzureStack. Hyper-V as a stand-alone free entity isn't a priority beyond it being a sum of the parts that they want to sell. I'd argue this was a smart move (Stop trying to get a piece out of a market that is in single digit growth which is where revenue is for stand-alone hypervisor management products is today). I would summarize what I've seen of their strategy as "Go to Azure, or go somewhere else". Oracle's pursuing a similar strategy with their cloud (Field Rep's only get paid on cloud consumption).
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RedHat failed to gain any meaningful market share for KVM and their management platform. I'd argue their new focus is more around containers, and PaaS things. Curious if the marriage of this could make IBM cloud a much more diverse beyond IaaS competitor in the field. Note, IBM Cloud has a massive amount of VMware in it (SDDC as a service in the form of VCF popular for the bigger shops). IBM's service heavy leanings and existing customer base put them at the least married to the hypervisor that they de-facto own/control. KVM could become more strategic (Get everyone off LPAR's and VMware) or it could become less strategic (Redhat has a lot of other IP that will work fine on multiple hypervisors and makes plenty better margin). My bets on the later, but we will see.
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Citrix last I heard has been losing market share with XenServer and Xen itself is losing market share in public clouds in general.
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There's a massive long tail of other niche vendors, none of which I"m aware of having 1% market share in Hypervisor management revenues. The Cloud Service Providers (AWS/Microsoft/Google/IBM) are sucking all the air out of the room as public cloud expands. There could be an argument about Hybrid Cloud revenue being a market split between both, but that's still a growing market.
There are other ancillary markets still with a lot of growth that there's still strong battles going on in. There are a few minor players trying to bundle HCI with higher level functions (Containers etc) but I'm seeing more of these falling off analysts and revenue tracking radar than being added on.
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HCI in Hypergrowth, which is mostly being deployed on vSphere. Analysts underestimating the TAM on this one should be a meme. I do think we are past the uniform BBQ phase.
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Cloud Management Products (CMP) - VMware still leading this and outgrowing market but there's a decent bit of diversity and I'm convinced this one will continue to fracture for a while until we see more consolidation. It's worth noting that the CMP's were chosen for app's today will likely Zombie for another 20 years if CA and BMC's continued relevant irrelevance says anything.
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Advanced micro-segmentation and security services - There's a lot of growth but this is currently a small space due to the massive capital requirements of this arms race. I expect security, in general, to end up with fewer players in the long run. Too many vendors cause much confusion on operationalizing them and gaps form.
I have to agree with Jeff Ready. The Unicorn BBQ phase is on. We are not going to see large scale growth of new competitors entering now. I think while HCI has plenty of growth, there is going to be an increasing push to show revenue to maintain investments and this is going to leave a lot fewer players at the dance.
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@StorageNinja Net, net you feel/believe ESXi is a better play for SMB's?
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Not to rub salt in the wound, but this is stuff that ESXi's had for a decade. It's why I hate "feature checklist" or over-focus on 1-2 aspects of a system. It ignores the operational realities of what most people's day 0, or day 2 operations look like.
Rub all you want. it is 100% true.
Scott is in a very narrow world, heavily influenced by his bias.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
It's a misnomer that people don't try to track free installs. There's phone home telemetry for vendor products, download tracking and a host of other voodoo to at least make an attempt at reconciling these data sets. IDC and the like tend to only report revenues, but there are ways to track embedded ESXi free edition at the OEM and distribution level as well as the phone home level etc. Looking at unique downloads of security patches isn't a terrible proxy for active installs that are being maintained. There are also groups like IDC who conduct phone and other survey's in line with statistical models. Vendors who work in the ecosystem and have to make product judgments of where to invest in also do their own private tracking (Backup vendors do some fairly large stuff).
Are you sure you are doing tracking and statistical modeling of this, or are you just reviewing anecdotes and assuming the plural of an anecdote is data? I feel like we were just arguing 3 years ago that Xen going to take over the world.How dare you bring in facts!
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@JaredBusch said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Not to rub salt in the wound, but this is stuff that ESXi's had for a decade. It's why I hate "feature checklist" or over-focus on 1-2 aspects of a system. It ignores the operational realities of what most people's day 0, or day 2 operations look like.
Rub all you want. it is 100% true.
Scott is in a very narrow world, heavily influenced by his bias.
In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.
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@JaredBusch said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
It's a misnomer that people don't try to track free installs. There's phone home telemetry for vendor products, download tracking and a host of other voodoo to at least make an attempt at reconciling these data sets. IDC and the like tend to only report revenues, but there are ways to track embedded ESXi free edition at the OEM and distribution level as well as the phone home level etc. Looking at unique downloads of security patches isn't a terrible proxy for active installs that are being maintained. There are also groups like IDC who conduct phone and other survey's in line with statistical models. Vendors who work in the ecosystem and have to make product judgments of where to invest in also do their own private tracking (Backup vendors do some fairly large stuff).
Are you sure you are doing tracking and statistical modeling of this, or are you just reviewing anecdotes and assuming the plural of an anecdote is data? I feel like we were just arguing 3 years ago that Xen going to take over the world.How dare you bring in facts!
Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.
That's a fact. We all know that our installs aren't tracked. I know that my customer installs aren't tracked. And we know that the non-open source vendors are incredibly incentivized to want the lack of data to be perceived as being a lack of installs.
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@FATeknollogee said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@StorageNinja Net, net you feel/believe ESXi is a better play for SMB's?
Well of course VMware feels that way.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
- Citrix last I heard has been losing market share with XenServer and Xen itself is losing market share in public clouds in general.
Citrix exited the game, so that's not really meaningful. They were never serious about virtualization. And they've been losing to KVM.
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@FATeknollogee said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@StorageNinja Net, net you feel/believe ESXi is a better play for SMB's?
Disclaimer: I work for VMware, but my prior gig was an MSP/Consulting and then before that, I was a customer (in a verrry small SMB maybe 4 million total revenue a year).
A few thoughts...
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It's dead simple to install as it comes pre-installed for no real added net cost by most OEM's (Pre-installed to SD card, SATA DOM, M.2 drives). Even if you do an install it's largely mashing enter with things like creating partitions and sizing them is all automated.
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It comes with a great HTML5 interface baked into it out of the box (The H5 Host Client is free!).
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Just because a company is a SMB today doesn't mean it will remain one tomorrow. I"ve seen people grow on VMware from 5 VM's to thousands. While there are dangers to aggressively over buying for growth the Essentials and essentials plus bundles cost less than my houses Starbucks/energy drink habits on a daily cost basis over a lifetime. Powerful central management, alerting, features that can scale with you for less than my last office spent on coffee is being made into a much bigger deal than it is.
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Skills wise I can throw a rock and hit someone who knows how to use vSphere and unlike Microsoft flat rate 24/7 mfg support is cheap (~1200 a year for essentials plus). At 3AM when I'm trying to figure out why something isn't working I'd rather call someone than poke around in forums. It's true you can get this from RedHat but it actually costs a good bit more for a subscription last time I checked.
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If your SMB ever needs to deploy software that has very restricted HCL's and supported configurations (SAP HANA, Intersystems Cache, EPIC, A good number of PBX's) you are often limited to vSphere/AIX etc. You might not be there now, but even some of the smaller EMR's can be. You might say "Well I'm going to control every software purchase we make" but that's not the reality of how company purchasing evolves. Also, you might end up M&A'ing a company who has a large presence on VMware/AIX/etc. It's worth noting that some companies (SAP) don't just say "Linux is Linux". they will often force very specific distributions (Redhat and sometimes SuSE). As companies grow they often own less and less of the code they run and are at the mercy of various black box packages and what they run. Most people would rather have one platform for everything over one AIX box to deal with Caché.
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When I consulted I worked with a lot of M&A where SMB's merged or were purchased. Given how often vSphere was deployed it made the roll in, and roll out of VM's a lot easier. Anything else (physical, legacy Alpha, Hyper-V etc) all got platformed. I saw a lot of xxxx --> vSphere but never anyone seriously going the other way as part of a M&A.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.
IDC survey's, Free installs tend to have default mirrors they check out security patches from (It's true some people run their own repo's and do a fan out, but that fan out doesn't get wide in SMB's), 3rd party inventory tools that collect and anonymize their stats. There are ways (again, I view the war as actually making revenue as well as market share).
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
- There's a massive long tail of other niche vendors....
This is misleading because you are looking at the market from the "vendor" perspective - your view is vendors and revenue. But from the IT side, market is by products and deployments. Everything you list is a vendor and a revenue stream, not a product and a deployment. That stuff is meaningful when you are a vendor or an investor on the vendor side and you are looking about where to invest your funds. But we aren't on that side, this is the IT perspective and/or customer perspective here that we represent and none of that matters in the least. What we care about are the products (ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen), what they cost, how they are used, what we get for our effort or money.
Bottom line, having loads of experience with all four, today I get more bang for the buck both in money AND in time with KVM. Sure, people who haven't learned all four tend to see whatever they are used to as the easy one. But unless you are doing all of them, and in a recent context, you can't really tell.
That's why it seems like it is reasonable to think that deployments can be tracked, because the perspective is "revenue" from deployments. But the biggest deployment factors are the ones that aren't tracked.
In the real world, even many companies have no idea how much of their own stuff is deployed. That stuff is rarely centralized. Even when I was at IBM, IBM didn't know what OSes or hardware was in use in production. It was all isolated in small departments that didn't communicate centrally.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.
IDC survey's, Free installs tend to have default mirrors they check out security patches from (It's true some people run their own repo's and do a fan out, but that fan out doesn't get wide in SMB's), 3rd party inventory tools that collect and anonymize their stats. There are ways (again, I view the war as actually making revenue as well as market share).
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey? It's easy to say things like surveys tell us something, but surveys are designed to get results desired. You can make a reasonable sounding survey to get any result you want. Just look at SW surveys, they are all engineers to have false answers and whatever they want to not be represented just is left off.
Most surveys pre-isolated the desired audience. In SW, as an example, their community is built by acquiring interest through people who used the software, software that was free, collected data illegally (but obviously), and only ran on Windows. So any survey of that audience is almost entirely isolated to environments that are price conscious, but run Windows anyway, but don't take security seriously, and don't try to acquire open source. So the results of any survey are obviously insanely skewed.
How does IDC find people to survey? I doubt that they stop by small shops in rural communities and get universal access to IT departments to ask them questions. It's absurd to think that someone like IDC would have any visibility into the market. I mean... seriously, think about it. They only get access via vendors, no vendor to promote the survey, no reasonable access to people to survey. It's "magic" how then the surveys always favour vendor based relationships.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.
If your talking embedded OEM stuff, the era of SCADA and forget it, is coming to an end. I know Honeywell is uber obsessive about getting those boxes updated. The general shift for embedded appliances is them joining the Internet of Shit, so lifecycle is becoming a bigger deal.
If you're talking about the market share of free hypervisors that are deployed and never get a security patch or any maintenance and are managed by muppets.... Fine. KVM can have that market. Who knows maybe they have 100% of it today. I'd argue broken clusters based on Hyper-V 2008 (Which should have been called a beta product) did more to damage their market shares going forward. Being the king of the misfit toy deployments is dangerous. It works if your goal is ship "good enough" and hope to dilute undermine a market, but for anyone who has high needs they will associate that product with muppet levels of uptime (even if the product isn't that bad). It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.
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IDC might have a better reputation than Gartner, but these are the biggest scams in the industry. Those are paid results and have no place in a discussion with IT. Those are tools used to sucker the most uneducated and clueless managers. No self respecting IT person would use them. Vendors do, because the big money is in scamming management and there is no getting around that. You pretty much have to play their game because they and bad managers have made it that way. But it has no place on the IT side.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey?
Yup, got a phone call from them when I was a customer. Asked me 20 questions, sent me a $100 gift card I think it was.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey?
Yup, got a phone call from them when I was a customer. Asked me 20 questions, sent me a $100 gift card I think it was.
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
They were asking me primarily about Citrix which I didn't use so I'm going to say Not Citrix (Survey was about application streaming). I was using RDSH and we discussed that.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.
If your talking embedded OEM stuff, the era of SCADA and forget it, is coming to an end. I know Honeywell is uber obsessive about getting those boxes updated. The general shift for embedded appliances is them joining the Internet of Shit, so lifecycle is becoming a bigger deal.
If you're talking about the market share of free hypervisors that are deployed and never get a security patch or any maintenance and are managed by muppets.... Fine. KVM can have that market. Who knows maybe they have 100% of it today. I'd argue broken clusters based on Hyper-V 2008 (Which should have been called a beta product) did more to damage their market shares going forward. Being the king of the misfit toy deployments is dangerous. It works if your goal is ship "good enough" and hope to dilute undermine a market, but for anyone who has high needs they will associate that product with muppet levels of uptime (even if the product isn't that bad). It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.
All systems get poorly managed by the majority of customers. I'd argue that VMware promotes that more than any other vendor, as the only one that charges for, and cuts people off from updates. As we saw in another thread, shops opt for Vmware, and then figure out that licensing was too complex for them to have worked out, and get stuck without the budget to keep it up to date but don't get approved to replace it.
Avoiding "good enough" is specifically one of the reasons that I feel KVM is easier. Because it fixes some of the hardest challenges with Vmware - budgetary approval and license understanding. The things that are beyond so many shops (the average shop.)
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
They were asking me primarily about Citrix which I didn't use so I'm going to say Not Citrix (Survey was about application streaming). I was using RDSH and we discussed that.
Right, but how did they get your number? How did they get through to IT? Someone had to sell your information to them for them to have it. There is no global list of businesses to magically call to find out what people use. And the average business couldn't even answer what they use, so how do they filter the results?
Humans guessing what is used results in some pretty bad IT info. Just look at SW surveys again. When we know who is answering, we often saw people getting their own environment info wrong because they weren't understanding what they had.
