KVM or VMWare
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
I'm thinking about this - who's right? Do these skills exist in abundance out there or not?
I'm sure anyone can really accurately measure this?No one can prove the amount. What I know for certain is that I find KVM resources continuously, many are good, all would be happy for more work. No one is reporting a shortage of people, only of places needing people. Not because so little KVM is in use, but because it requires so little support. And because any trained Linux admin can do KVM, so the number of people supporting it is one of the biggest in the industry for any type of system. Not the biggest, but up there.
On the contrary, anytime a customer has VMware issues, we get them because they can't get skilled VMware people and they know that we can handle it. We know it takes more time and is more risky because we do both and we know that they have loads of issues because of it (often because they refuse to pay the required licensing as too expensive.) No one ever says to us "we're using you because we can't find KVM people", we are always fighting for work against other KVM shops, but VMware, people keep coming to us because they fail to find people who actually know it beyond just installing and hoping for the best.
Tiny cross section and I'm not suggesting any shortage of VMware people. But anyone with a serious MSP already will have KVM skills just by the nature of general coverage (and VMware too, keep in mind.) Sure, finding a real MSP takes work as the market is full of scammers, but assuming that that is due diligence that you need to do anyway, getting KVM (or VMware) support should be a non-issue.
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
So Scott could be right, the might be tons of talent out there, there might be tons of companies with that talent on-board, but how is one supposed to find those companies in the first place.
There's no answer to this right now, IMHO. It just sucks. But the issue I think gets easier for KVM and Linux vs. Windows and VMware because of all the reasons that we've talked about previously... harder to fake it, less buzz-wordy, more discerning customers. Looking for VMware support you'll find millions of websites, and almost no skills behind them. Looking for KVM support you'll find very few websites with even less skills behind them, but a way, way better ratio. Filtering through it is so much easier.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
@fateknollogee said in KVM or VMWare:
@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
@hobbit666 said in KVM or VMWare:
Didn't get on with KVM but thats down to my skill set. (i.e. limited linux skills)
No business should run on just KVM. Until the most current iteration of Proxmox I would never recommend KVM for a business.
I have used it personally for years now. But that is different than running a business. A business needs simple easy to follow processes that are enabled by things like Proxmox, vCenter, and Hyper-V Manager.
This is probably the best "common sense" answer I've seen in a long time. (I haven't read the rest of this thread yet).
And people wonder why, despite it's hefty price tag, vmWare continues to dominate!
Free isn't always free!And in the SMB, the price tag just isn’t that hefty, unless you require HA.
List price is $576. At $50,000 a year salary that's only 15 hours of troubleshooting of any other tool before you make that back. Plus you get the benefits of easier automation, better integrations with other tools, etc.
Right, and you'd never make that back in an SMB. That's my point. And there is no support at that number. YOu have to pay more to get support. And the licensing takes time. All things you can never make back because other products in the SMB work so well, require so little support... their TCO is so much lower than spending extra to them have the same or higher ongoing support cost just doesn't make any sense.
It's 15 hours, you would def make that back in an SMB. Automation is much easier through VMware. I've done both. It's much easier with VMware, easily more than 15 hours a year.
The licensing does not take time. It's an automatic credit card purchase.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots on lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
I agree. IT is a huge continuum of solutions with many, many axes. On prem, hosted. Cloud, VM, even physical. Modern apps, client-server, web, fat clients. Automated, manual. It goes on and on. And even withina single company there are after many of these and sometimes, all of them.
And this means what? There are still companies that use mainframes. I worked for one. Doesn't mean they should be.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Just in this thread there is a lot
No there isn't. I"ll just be blatantly honest. I don't think you or your company have the skills you are saying here. Not too long ago you made an argument about creating VMs through Cockpit was fine because manual OS installations was ok and didn't need to be automated through clones. I 100% don't believe your company has KVM skills outside of maybe installing Proxmox and clicking some buttons.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
We can reverse it... if you don't believe that all the KVM people hoping for work don't exist... how are we to know that VMware people exist? The logic goes both ways.
Because I've worked with multiple fortune 50s, fortune 100s, and smaller. I've worked with people who have automated on VMware. I've literally never met anyone else who has KVM experience outside of one guy who had Proxmox at home.
This doesn't include people using the Vagrant libvirt provider or something small like that.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
We can reverse it... if you don't believe that all the KVM people hoping for work don't exist... how are we to know that VMware people exist? The logic goes both ways.
Because I've worked with multiple fortune 50s, fortune 100s, and smaller. I've worked with people who have automated on VMware. I've literally never met anyone else who has KVM experience outside of one guy who had Proxmox at home.
This doesn't include people using the Vagrant libvirt provider or something small like that.
And yet, essentially every Fortune 100 has loads of internal KVM skills. In a F100, they generally segregate those teams. Just because you don't meet them doesn't mean that they aren't there. And rarely would you know unless you specifically asked since they are all over the place. Similarly, I work with Windows Admins all the time, every day, and I bet at least a third of them have VMware experience, maybe even really good skills, but if we aren't discussing that, I'd never know.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Just in this thread there is a lot
No there isn't. I"ll just be blatantly honest. I don't think you or your company have the skills you are saying here. Not too long ago you made an argument about creating VMs through Cockpit was fine because manual OS installations was ok and didn't need to be automated through clones. I 100% don't believe your company has KVM skills outside of maybe installing Proxmox and clicking some buttons.
That's fine, but that's what you have to resort to.... claiming everyone you meet isn't good enough to say that there aren't skills for it. Yes, manual install IS fine, and I can't accept your opinion if you feel that one way is the only way for everything. You are doing exactly what we warn people about.... not evaluating needs, not learning multiple ways. Just latching onto the latest trend and touting the thing you know religiously without doing the one thing that makes us truly IT.... evaluating what we do in the context of the business need.
If you feel that manual installs have no place, you've made my point for me. Your opinion is suspect because you are wearing blinders and not operating like someone advising a company based on their needs, but just pushing an agenda. So you come across, like you sound, like a sales person pushing a product or technique. That's the opposite of our jobs in IT.
Sure, cloning is great much of the time, most of the time. But not all of the time. Until you stop with the "my way or the highway" rhetoric, you can't add value to a decision process.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots on lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
I agree. IT is a huge continuum of solutions with many, many axes. On prem, hosted. Cloud, VM, even physical. Modern apps, client-server, web, fat clients. Automated, manual. It goes on and on. And even withina single company there are after many of these and sometimes, all of them.
And this means what? There are still companies that use mainframes. I worked for one. Doesn't mean they should be.
And yet wasn't the basis of the argument that "all" enterprise do just one thing... the one thing you are trying to "sell" us on?
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
I would say most SMBs who aren't trained in IaC would be better off with other options.
Options like hiring the right staff instead of staffing with expensive, unqualified workers. Why hire people who can't do the job. Generally it costs less to get qualified people to do a little work, than to pay unqualified people tons of time to do the wrong work.
Sadly, so many IT decisions are based on "how do we keep paying people to be full time after we've discovered that they neither know what is needed, nor are willing / able to learn" and no one ever evaluates why their hiring was so bad, or how their processes work that keeps them from getting the necessary skills.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots on lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
I agree. IT is a huge continuum of solutions with many, many axes. On prem, hosted. Cloud, VM, even physical. Modern apps, client-server, web, fat clients. Automated, manual. It goes on and on. And even withina single company there are after many of these and sometimes, all of them.
And this means what? There are still companies that use mainframes. I worked for one. Doesn't mean they should be.
And yet wasn't the basis of the argument that "all" enterprise do just one thing... the one thing you are trying to "sell" us on?
Now of course, lots of companies do lots of things. And some are good, and most are bad.
There are two key points that I think have no counter...
- "Most" companies do things that they shouldn't.
- There's no "one way" that is right for every company or workload, not even close.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
We can reverse it... if you don't believe that all the KVM people hoping for work don't exist... how are we to know that VMware people exist? The logic goes both ways.
Because I've worked with multiple fortune 50s, fortune 100s, and smaller. I've worked with people who have automated on VMware. I've literally never met anyone else who has KVM experience outside of one guy who had Proxmox at home.
This doesn't include people using the Vagrant libvirt provider or something small like that.
And yet, essentially every Fortune 100 has loads of internal KVM skills. In a F100, they generally segregate those teams. Just because you don't meet them doesn't mean that they aren't there. And rarely would you know unless you specifically asked since they are all over the place. Similarly, I work with Windows Admins all the time, every day, and I bet at least a third of them have VMware experience, maybe even really good skills, but if we aren't discussing that, I'd never know.
You make these claims but never have any proof. What it boils down to is you are trying to convince people that your experience somehow has more weight than everyone else's. There are multiple people in this thread who have worked with and are currently working with large enterprises but you dismiss their claims and somehow believe what you think you are seeing is more of a reality than what everyone else is.
One only has to look back at the thread where you claimed that this website was somehow responsible for a noticeable uptick in Linux desktop usage to know your version of reality is not everyone else's version of reality.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
And this means what? There are still companies that use mainframes. I worked for one. Doesn't mean they should be.
Also doesn't mean that they shouldn't be. I'm not a fan of mainframe computing, but some of the biggest IT departments evaluate it and keep choosing it. Not nearly as many as used to. And the average one is probably a mistake. But that doesn't mean that all of them are. With the amount of money involved and the amount of research that goes into that hardware, to assume that every deployment of the technology is wrong would be quite a leap. There's a big gap between "most people are wrong" and "classic approaches are always wrong."
Mainframes do certain types of workload highly efficiently, are able to run low cost per workload, super high availability within a single location (sometimes a necessity), have high I/O capabilities, and scale vertically really well which, as math generally shows, tends to outperform horizontal scaling dramatically (but not go as large.) You'd have to measure each situation, but it would be surprising if mainframes don't still make sense for certain workloads from time to time.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
You make these claims but never have any proof.
Same in reverse. You act as though I have to prove the obvious and logical, while you don't have to have any foundation for wild claims that make no sense and don't have any obvious foundation.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Just in this thread there is a lot
No there isn't. I"ll just be blatantly honest. I don't think you or your company have the skills you are saying here. Not too long ago you made an argument about creating VMs through Cockpit was fine because manual OS installations was ok and didn't need to be automated through clones. I 100% don't believe your company has KVM skills outside of maybe installing Proxmox and clicking some buttons.
That's fine, but that's what you have to resort to.... claiming everyone you meet isn't good enough to say that there aren't skills for it. Yes, manual install IS fine, and I can't accept your opinion if you feel that one way is the only way for everything. You are doing exactly what we warn people about.... not evaluating needs, not learning multiple ways. Just latching onto the latest trend and touting the thing you know religiously without doing the one thing that makes us truly IT.... evaluating what we do in the context of the business need.
If you feel that manual installs have no place, you've made my point for me. Your opinion is suspect because you are wearing blinders and not operating like someone advising a company based on their needs, but just pushing an agenda. So you come across, like you sound, like a sales person pushing a product or technique. That's the opposite of our jobs in IT.
Sure, cloning is great much of the time, most of the time. But not all of the time. Until you stop with the "my way or the highway" rhetoric, you can't add value to a decision process.
I'm not claiming everyone isn't good enough. I know large tech companies have great KVM skills. But they are paid a ton and they aren't floating around helping SMBs deploy Windows AD infrastructure.
If you feel that manual installs have no place, you've made my point for me. Your opinion is suspect because you are wearing blinders and not operating like someone advising a company based on their needs, but just pushing an agenda. So you come across, like you sound, like a sales person pushing a product or technique. That's the opposite of our jobs in IT.
Manual installs have their place, to set up the template. Even if you're only deploying one server it should be from a template because it's repeatable. Updates are easier and quicker with templates. Just because you are charging your customers more so you can do manual work instead of automating it doesn't mean others are trying to sell something.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
What it boils down to is you are trying to convince people that your experience somehow has more weight than everyone else's.
Exactly the opposite. And that's why you get upset. I'm showing that my experience (and logic) dispute your wild claims that you're unique experience is universal. You claim that everyone should do one thing, that one big vendor should provide all products, that things don't exist. If my experience shows exceptions, or that resources do exist, it disputes your claim.
My experience isn't better than anyone else's. But when the claim is that "these don't exist" and my experience says "they exist in enough supply that there is no shortage" it doesn't make mine "more meaningful", it just shows that your impression can't be true and what you are promoting is based off of your sole experience, and not what is really out there.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Manual installs have their place, to set up the template. Even if you're only deploying one server it should be from a template because it's repeatable. Updates are easier and quicker with templates. Just because you are charging your customers more so you can do manual work instead of automating it doesn't mean others are trying to sell something.
Exaclty the opposite. Since the average business installs only one instance (remember, average businesses are super small) the time to do what you are saying is all above and beyond the work done in teh lifespan of a workload. on average.
Tons and tons of places you are correct, should be templates. But stating "all" is simply BS.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I'm not claiming everyone isn't good enough. I know large tech companies have great KVM skills. But they are paid a ton and they aren't floating around helping SMBs deploy Windows AD infrastructure.
Because people are too busy selling VMware to those SMBs because almost no one is out there protecting them. Telling them that those KVM resources won't help them or cost too much and that they need "dumbed down" systems because they are small shops. It's easy to lead SMBs astray and sell things that they don't need, so almost everyone does.
But that people aren't floating around doesn't mean that they don't exist. Just that people aren't using them so often. There are an awful lot of people in big tech firms that want the SMB market, too. But as there is little money in the sales cycle, they don't bother. But if you want them to do the work, they are ready and willing.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
What it boils down to is you are trying to convince people that your experience somehow has more weight than everyone else's.
Exactly the opposite. And that's why you get upset. I'm showing that my experience (and logic) dispute your wild claims that you're unique experience is universal. You claim that everyone should do one thing, that one big vendor should provide all products, that things don't exist. If my experience shows exceptions, or that resources do exist, it disputes your claim.
My experience isn't better than anyone else's. But when the claim is that "these don't exist" and my experience says "they exist in enough supply that there is no shortage" it doesn't make mine "more meaningful", it just shows that your impression can't be true and what you are promoting is based off of your sole experience, and not what is really out there.
I never claimed that anyone should do one thing at all or that only one vendor should provide all products. What I claimed was there isn't an abundance of a talent for a specific tool. I don't think VMware is the best product. I've argued on this site against it multiple times.
Except you still haven't provided any proof that these exceptions exist. You're still making claims like "we see them all the time". That doesn't mean anything. You made the claim the talent is there, the onus is on you to prove that it exists.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Manual installs have their place, to set up the template. Even if you're only deploying one server it should be from a template because it's repeatable. Updates are easier and quicker with templates. Just because you are charging your customers more so you can do manual work instead of automating it doesn't mean others are trying to sell something.
Exaclty the opposite. Since the average business installs only one instance (remember, average businesses are super small) the time to do what you are saying is all above and beyond the work done in teh lifespan of a workload. on average.
Tons and tons of places you are correct, should be templates. But stating "all" is simply BS.
The time to do what I"m saying might add 10 minutes, maybe. To have a system you can rebuild instantly. It only helps you in the long run.
