Who's making the move to vSphere 8
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We are on a support contract until 2025 after which time a few changes may happen as far as cloud moves. But until then, I might as well consider the move to vSphere 8.
Anyone else considering the move?
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@WLS-ITGuy said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
Anyone else considering the move?
I no longer have anything on vSphere at any client, so no.
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@WLS-ITGuy said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
We are on a support contract until 2025 after which time a few changes may happen as far as cloud moves.
Sunk cost, I'd not continue to waste additional resources on it, drop it now.
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@WLS-ITGuy said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
Anyone else considering the move?
Nope, it's been such a bad product with so much overhead and instability and risk, I haven't had any situation where we could justify it's problems to continue deployment.
We regularly get called in to support clients on it, and we always advise it is cheaper to migrate to something good than to pay to support it. When we do work with Vmware clients, the rate of them taking off without paying for everything is pretty high. Feels like the factors that drive people to have it also tends to lead them towards other decisions like attempting not to pay their debts.
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We are. Currently, my day job is heavily invested in the VMware ecosystem, and there's no likelihood that will change any time soon... So we are already at the point of testing it, though that probably wont' happen until after the New Year.
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@dafyre said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
We are. Currently, my day job is heavily invested in the VMware ecosystem, and there's no likelihood that will change any time soon... So we are already at the point of testing it, though that probably wont' happen until after the New Year.
I haven’t looked at the vmware hcl, but I heard a lot of hardware is no longer supported. I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
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@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
@dafyre said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
We are. Currently, my day job is heavily invested in the VMware ecosystem, and there's no likelihood that will change any time soon... So we are already at the point of testing it, though that probably wont' happen until after the New Year.
I haven’t looked at the vmware hcl, but I heard a lot of hardware is no longer supported. I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
Yeah. I've already been informed by VMware support that the Intel X520 cards won't work with vSphere 8... Not that we're having any luck getting them to work with vSphere 7 either, lol.
99.9% of our systems have broadcom NICs. Not sure how the two we have now snuck in on us, lol.
Edit: I've never done booting from SD cards. Other appliances we had that did that had way too many issues.
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@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
It's here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685
It's probably good to move off SD cards but the thing is that SD cards are actually fine because flash is flash - no matter what enclosure you put it in.
The real problem is that the flash memory need to have enough write endurance for the application. And people doesn't know and don't buy the right type of SD cards.
According to vmware you need 128 TBW (over 5 years). Industrial SD cards for example can have that. SD cards that goes into phones and cameras don't.
Same problem with usb sticks as boot devices and "clever" people using SATADOMs for high endurance cache. Oh well.
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@Pete-S said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
According to vmware you need 128 TBW (over 5 years). Industrial SD cards for example can have that. SD cards that goes into phones and cameras don't.
For Dell servers, it looks like the BOSS card is a good replacement.
“BOSS-S1 utilizes one or two read-intensive (Boot Class) 80mm M.2 SATA Solid State Devices (SSDs) which can be used in “pass-thru” or two devices in Hardware RAID 1 (mirroring).”
https://vinfrastructure.it/2018/12/installing-esxi-on-a-dell-emc-boss-card/
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@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
@Pete-S said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
According to vmware you need 128 TBW (over 5 years). Industrial SD cards for example can have that. SD cards that goes into phones and cameras don't.
For Dell servers, it looks like the BOSS card is a good replacement.
“BOSS-S1 utilizes one or two read-intensive (Boot Class) 80mm M.2 SATA Solid State Devices (SSDs) which can be used in “pass-thru” or two devices in Hardware RAID 1 (mirroring).”
https://vinfrastructure.it/2018/12/installing-esxi-on-a-dell-emc-boss-card/
I use BOSS cards and recommend them always if possible.
Don't know if it is just me, but it seem BOSS card pricing has jumped rather high as compared to other server component prices??????
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@pmoncho said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
Don't know if it is just me, but it seem BOSS card pricing has jumped rather high as compared to other server component prices??????
Since the 2020 chip shortages, and they have not gone down.
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@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
@dafyre said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:
We are. Currently, my day job is heavily invested in the VMware ecosystem, and there's no likelihood that will change any time soon... So we are already at the point of testing it, though that probably wont' happen until after the New Year.
I haven’t looked at the vmware hcl, but I heard a lot of hardware is no longer supported. I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.
That's all correct. Part of the point of VMware (and to their credit) is to dramatically limit you to a small pool of high quality, well tested hardware. That's partially how they maintain stability.
KVM has a small pool of hardware smart to use. But "supports" almost anything. It's handy to know it will always work, but sucks because people deploy it on crap all of the time.
