KVM or VMWare
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@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
Why would I throw away a machine just for the sake of Windows 11 which a lot of people will because they always want the latest and greatest so they say.
All this why we are meant to be saving the planet really, all this scrap computer parts that will be in your local tip.
Microsoft gives zero shits about what you do with your old hardware... whether you upgrade to W11, keep W10, or throw Linux on instead, they make next to nothing. They aren't forcing you to do anything with it, and do not care.
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@obsolesce said in KVM or VMWare:
@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
Why would I throw away a machine just for the sake of Windows 11 which a lot of people will because they always want the latest and greatest so they say.
All this why we are meant to be saving the planet really, all this scrap computer parts that will be in your local tip.
Microsoft gives zero shits about what you do with your old hardware... whether you upgrade to W11, keep W10, or throw Linux on instead, they make next to nothing. They aren't forcing you to do anything with it, and do not care.
But you have to admit this is very likely a ploy to get people to buy new hardware they might not really need. Sure it offers a tiny bit of extra protection, but the reality is that most of those people are so completely insecure in the way they operate that the extra security they gain with the new hardware is basically pointless.
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@obsolesce said in KVM or VMWare:
@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
Why would I throw away a machine just for the sake of Windows 11 which a lot of people will because they always want the latest and greatest so they say.
All this why we are meant to be saving the planet really, all this scrap computer parts that will be in your local tip.
Microsoft gives zero shits about what you do with your old hardware... whether you upgrade to W11, keep W10, or throw Linux on instead, they make next to nothing. They aren't forcing you to do anything with it, and do not care.
They really don't want you putting LInux on it and avoiding having an all Windows system or seeing that Linux is easier and less costly to support. They depend on people not knowing about it.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@obsolesce said in KVM or VMWare:
@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
Why would I throw away a machine just for the sake of Windows 11 which a lot of people will because they always want the latest and greatest so they say.
All this why we are meant to be saving the planet really, all this scrap computer parts that will be in your local tip.
Microsoft gives zero shits about what you do with your old hardware... whether you upgrade to W11, keep W10, or throw Linux on instead, they make next to nothing. They aren't forcing you to do anything with it, and do not care.
They really don't want you putting LInux on it and avoiding having an all Windows system or seeing that Linux is easier and less costly to support. They depend on people not knowing about it.
Agree 100%
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@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
The answer is simple, stick with VMware for anything business related. The other arguments are really mental masturbation.
Yes, VMware licensing is worth it and vSphere us not going away. The KVM ecosystem is for builders, not for sysadmin.Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
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@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
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@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
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@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
I’ve been working with this in my home lab, and the virt module seems pretty limited in what it can do. For making a new VM, I’m basically creating and executing a script that runs virt-install to make the VM, which is similar to what the Fedora Project does for VM creation.
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@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
Yeah. That's what I assumed. It's reliant on many disparate cli tools that aren't necessarily related.
There's a terraform libvirt provider but using a centralized place for images doesn't work because it copies the image through the machine running terraform because of libvirt limitations.
If you don't use virt-clone you're heavily limited to either using the domain xml and manually copying the images or wiring up another cli tool like virt-builder.
It's a mess. VMware has its idiosyncrasies but it is light-years ahead in automation.
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@eddiejennings said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
I’ve been working with this in my home lab, and the virt module seems pretty limited in what it can do. For making a new VM, I’m basically creating and executing a script that runs virt-install to make the VM, which is similar to what the Fedora Project does for VM creation.
You can use virt-clone if you don't want to run full virt-install.
But you need to set the template up first through something.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@eddiejennings said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
I’ve been working with this in my home lab, and the virt module seems pretty limited in what it can do. For making a new VM, I’m basically creating and executing a script that runs virt-install to make the VM, which is similar to what the Fedora Project does for VM creation.
You can use virt-clone if you don't want to run full virt-install.
But you need to set the template up first through something.
Yeah. virt-clone is the next step. For my own learning, I wanted to see how I would deploy one from scratch first.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
Yeah. That's what I assumed. It's reliant on many disparate cli tools that aren't necessarily related.
There's a terraform libvirt provider but using a centralized place for images doesn't work because it copies the image through the machine running terraform because of libvirt limitations.
If you don't use virt-clone you're heavily limited to either using the domain xml and manually copying the images or wiring up another cli tool like virt-builder.
It's a mess. VMware has its idiosyncrasies but it is light-years ahead in automation.
It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.
Big tech companies will build their own tooling. Those tools end up in the public domain. And then everyone can use them without having to allocate the resources to build it themselves.
You could of course do the same if you have the time and inclination.
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@eddiejennings said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
I’ve been working with this in my home lab, and the virt module seems pretty limited in what it can do. For making a new VM, I’m basically creating and executing a script that runs virt-install to make the VM, which is similar to what the Fedora Project does for VM creation.
This is an example I've used before for XenServer/XCP-NG. https://jrisch.medium.com/using-ansible-to-automate-vm-creation-on-xenserver-d092aa484a06
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@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.
Thats the whole point I'm making.
KVM is hard to automate. Not that it's impossible, but the tooling doesn't exist to where you can easily automate like with VMware.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.
Thats the whole point I'm making.
KVM is hard to automate. Not that it's impossible, but the tooling doesn't exist to where you can easily automate like with VMware.
And that's a very good point. That's why here at Vates, we made various efforts in XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra, providing multiple solutions: Packer, Terraform and even Ansible integration. That's also why Xen Orchestra really makes sense as a "middleware", as a single central point to consume with its API. Like vCenter in fact.
This is a true way to create value on top of it. The other aspect is all about integration, like we did with Netbox for example (sync all VMs and hosts, with their IP address, config and such to Netbox).
Automation is key.
Some links/resources:
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@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@eddiejennings said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
@francesco-provino said in KVM or VMWare:
@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…
Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.
I agree here. Many on here don't understand the benefits of IaC and proper SDLC because they haven't been exposed to it yet. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Granted many of these one man shops don't have the resources (IT employees) to do it. If you're fixing printers you don't have the bandwidth to do this kind of stuff. Either way there is still pain in the long run for not doing automation, but for them it's just not feasible.
I'm all in favor of automation.
What I question is why you NEED VMWare to automate things? I've done it with XenServer/XCP-NG, and I don't see why anyone couldn't also automate KVM based things as well.
Can you give examples of this automation? I have a feeling the terms aren't exactly the same here.
What I'm thinking of in this case is using Ansible to provision and build and manage VMs and/or the host server.
I’ve been working with this in my home lab, and the virt module seems pretty limited in what it can do. For making a new VM, I’m basically creating and executing a script that runs virt-install to make the VM, which is similar to what the Fedora Project does for VM creation.
This is an example I've used before for XenServer/XCP-NG. https://jrisch.medium.com/using-ansible-to-automate-vm-creation-on-xenserver-d092aa484a06
So two things with this. The first is, what was even the point of using Ansible here? They're just running shell commands for everything. You lose huge advantages of Ansible here. It's really no different than a Bash script at this point.
The second is, this isn't the type of automation I'm talking about. You can do this type of rudimentary stuff with KVM also, but it's all based on cli tools.
Someone mentioned VDI the other day on the site. Say you want to automate bringing up a system for a user automatically when they need a VDI. With these tools you'd either need to use CGI scripts which is essentially a no go, or you'd have to have some way to expose Ansible with AWX, Jenkins, Tower, etc. But you can't just expose Ansible because that doesn't give the end user an easy way to get something. So now you have to either have build a pipeline in Jenkins with remote triggers, or set up Tower/AWX with provisioning callbacks, or something similar. Then you give the user some interface that can then send a request to your middle layer or software to define the request. It's a ton of unnecessary work.
vSphere would either be a RESTful call from a form, or some IaC tool like Pulumi which is embedded in your app that would let them define what they need and it would call vSphere and build it.
The amount of work to automate KVM vs VMware is just too much unless you have a niche case like a cloud provider.
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@olivier said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.
Thats the whole point I'm making.
KVM is hard to automate. Not that it's impossible, but the tooling doesn't exist to where you can easily automate like with VMware.
And that's a very good point. That's why here at Vates, we made various efforts in XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra, providing multiple solutions: Packer, Terraform and even Ansible integration. That's also why Xen Orchestra really makes sense as a "middleware", as a single central point to consume with its API. Like vCenter in fact.
This is a true way to create value on top of it. The other aspect is all about integration, like we did with Netbox for example (sync all VMs and hosts, with their IP address, config and such to Netbox).
Right VMware or Xen Orchestra. If the tool isn't built with an API first mindset, the work needed to automate it greatly increases.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@olivier said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
It isn't the ability to automate that is the problem. It's the availablility of easy to use tools that is the problem.
Thats the whole point I'm making.
KVM is hard to automate. Not that it's impossible, but the tooling doesn't exist to where you can easily automate like with VMware.
And that's a very good point. That's why here at Vates, we made various efforts in XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra, providing multiple solutions: Packer, Terraform and even Ansible integration. That's also why Xen Orchestra really makes sense as a "middleware", as a single central point to consume with its API. Like vCenter in fact.
This is a true way to create value on top of it. The other aspect is all about integration, like we did with Netbox for example (sync all VMs and hosts, with their IP address, config and such to Netbox).
Right VMware or Xen Orchestra. If the tool isn't built with an API first mindset, the work needed to automate it greatly increases.
I agree. And to be honest, we learnt it "by accident" (ie our API was made for our internal usage). But now we are working more on the direction of "API as first class citizen", thanks to the large feedback we got from our users. I'm happy we took the right "overall design" decisions at first, allowing us to rely on Xen Orchestra as a central point (vs one UI per host, which can be handy but doesn't scale)
