When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
whenever I do updates... that's the app down
You said the above which leads us to believe that you thought there would be 100% uptime. That's why we said that it doesn't really exist (outside of possibly really huge enterprise systems that I have never seen)
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Would like like me to send you a quote for an hour of consulting time to help you understand?
How much is an hour of consulting time? I fI can afford it I'd probably hire you to teach me. I'm very serious
Hahah lol
No, i'd like you to not be rude actually. From the page I am looking at, that product is the minimum you need for vMotion - which is what we were just talking about where I referred to the price... so... yeah...
I'm not the one being rude here.
He's definitely rude (and he knows it) but he's also correct 99% of the time
Yeah, probably. But i'm just curious as to why i'm wrong here. Not being rude about it from my side at all. It does look to be 5k. And i'd still need the same multiple IIS servers, and SQL servers... and yes, i'd want them sitting behing something like HA proxy. At that point I have application level high availability, so even less need for vMotion.
But at that point you'd have at least 12 individual system before you're even managing the Hypervisor its self.
That's a stupidly long dependency chain with a lot of things that can go wrong. Not even mentioning the time to setup and test the system. And then to find someone who would want to support it from the Bus effect.
Yeah, agree i'd have 12 systems. Of course I have 12. Why on earth wouldn't I. If I had only 1 x SQL Server, or 1 x IIS, whenever I do updates... that's the app down. Surely I'm not the only person to see that? I need application HA in addition to the hardware level... and in this case, once I have that... vMotion does nothing for me.
Every system has down time, even wall street. There is no such thing as 100% up time. You're in a dream world if you think this is a viable, cost effective solution.
And unless you are Wall Street, the entire setup here would only make sense for the 1% of the top 1% of organizations.
Where did I say 100% uptime? I didn't. 12 VMs is small. Everywhere has downtime, yes, but this isn't complex and for IIS and SQL Server etc... this is not an unreasonable setup. Not hard to manage or design either. I'm shocked y'all think its suck a crazy setup.
12 VM's is complex for the reported 99.999% up time you'd gain. You're creating a scenario that very few businesses need to justify vMotion (a single feature of ESXi) as not being a viable option.
You're purposefully attempting to say ESXi sucks because you can do something else with Hyper-V.
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@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
whenever I do updates... that's the app down
You said the above which leads us to believe that you thought there would be 100% uptime. That's why we said that it doesn't really exist
If I have 1 x IIS server VM, using 1 x SQL Server VM (2 VMs), when I update either one, my app is down.Having 2 x SQL for SQL cluster, and 2 x IIS behind a haproxy is not weird... and means updates do not cause downtime.
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@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
whenever I do updates... that's the app down
You said the above which leads us to believe that you thought there would be 100% uptime. That's why we said that it doesn't really exist (outside of possibly really huge enterprise systems that I have never seen)
Very few people have seen systems like this. The top 1% of IT engineers in the world are the only people to see systems like this.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
whenever I do updates... that's the app down
You said the above which leads us to believe that you thought there would be 100% uptime. That's why we said that it doesn't really exist (outside of possibly really huge enterprise systems that I have never seen)
Very few people have seen systems like this. The top 1% of IT engineers in the world are the only people to see systems like this.
Ok, so... vMotion allows you to plan a move of a VM from node1 to node2. Then you can perform downtime to node1. That's hardware HA. HypreV allows you to do that... benefit of buying the VMWare for this = 0. In that case, the 1x VM its self goes down, then that's downtime to the service as its not application level HA... if that's ok by you then fine, even more reason not to get VMWare. If you need the app to be able to stay up if the VM is restarted, you need application level HA with SQL server and IIS etc.. in which case, doesn't matter again if you have VMWare.
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@Jimmy9008 Why does VMware effect what application you are hosting?
You're mixing things up.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@wirestyle22 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
with VMWare at 5k a pop
FFS, you have no idea WTF you are talking about. Stop arguing and go learn. Then you can discuss instead of argue.
This is the product right?
£4712 with VAT... not far out of the 5k I said no?
So where are you saying I'm wrong here?
Would like like me to send you a quote for an hour of consulting time to help you understand?
How much is an hour of consulting time? I fI can afford it I'd probably hire you to teach me. I'm very serious
Hahah lol
No, i'd like you to not be rude actually. From the page I am looking at, that product is the minimum you need for vMotion - which is what we were just talking about where I referred to the price... so... yeah...
I'm not the one being rude here.
He's definitely rude (and he knows it) but he's also correct 99% of the time
Yeah, probably. But i'm just curious as to why i'm wrong here. Not being rude about it from my side at all. It does look to be 5k. And i'd still need the same multiple IIS servers, and SQL servers... and yes, i'd want them sitting behing something like HA proxy. At that point I have application level high availability, so even less need for vMotion.
But at that point you'd have at least 12 individual system before you're even managing the Hypervisor its self.
That's a stupidly long dependency chain with a lot of things that can go wrong. Not even mentioning the time to setup and test the system. And then to find someone who would want to support it from the Bus effect.
Yeah, agree i'd have 12 systems. Of course I have 12. Why on earth wouldn't I. If I had only 1 x SQL Server, or 1 x IIS, whenever I do updates... that's the app down. Surely I'm not the only person to see that? I need application HA in addition to the hardware level... and in this case, once I have that... vMotion does nothing for me.
Every system has down time, even wall street. There is no such thing as 100% up time. You're in a dream world if you think this is a viable, cost effective solution.
And unless you are Wall Street, the entire setup here would only make sense for the 1% of the top 1% of organizations.
Where did I say 100% uptime? I didn't. 12 VMs is small. Everywhere has downtime, yes, but this isn't complex and for IIS and SQL Server etc... this is not an unreasonable setup. Not hard to manage or design either. I'm shocked y'all think its suck a crazy setup.
You're purposefully attempting to say ESXi sucks because you can do something else with Hyper-V.
I'm sure VMWare has its awesome points. I was just saying that vMotion, if the system is built in the right way, makes that pointless. Especially as Hyper-V does it anyway. This is a question of when to use VMWare over free hypervisiors - vMotion IMO is not one of them.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 Why does VMware effect what application you are hosting?
You're mixing things up.
I'm trying to say that the HA you get from VMWare (when we were talking about vMotion), compared to what you can do with free hyper-v, if the application is built correctly at application HA level, makes VMWare pointless.
If I can survive multiple host failures as I have application level high availability, the hypervisor that sits on doesn't matter. The free one does the same as the HA is app level.
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@Jimmy9008 So again, you're taking the 1 feature I listed randomly and harping on it.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 So again, you're taking the 1 feature I listed randomly and harping on it.
I see it looks like that lol - in all honesty I didn't realise this would go on so long... to me, that feature doesn't mean pay. Other probably do. And since this post is asking when to use VMWare over free - I thought it was sensible to put my view that the one feature imo doesn't = pay.
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I can see where @Jimmy9008 is coming from, vMotion is literally the only specific feature that has been brought up so far in this thread
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 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?:
I absolutely need vMotion to ensure my systems are up 100% of the time, I have a server infrastructure of 3 or more hosts.
vMotion is live migration + HA? Don't know if it works with SAN or without. but for live migration at least vSAN is required for 100% uptime: share nothing live migration can't work. You can accomplish this other ways:
- KVM has ovirt+gluster
- hyper-v has native starwind
- starwind seems to be available outside windows
- Xen has HA Lizard - I think.
don't know about the setup time and labor, this could be the only discriminant. in Italy vMotion + vSAN is so expensive that I can pay for setup of other solutions and stay in budget.
Maintainance costs is probably another factor. But here others win hands down. RTO and RPO can't be discussed because this is HA.
Can you share some real cases of why you think you have to ditch others for VMWare? just curious. This has been my hypervisors week
The difference is that VMWare has a solution for 100% uptime with "VMware VMotion (which) enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity."
That is HA without the need for a vSAN or other Highly available storage. The hypervisor has this built in.
... isn't vMotion then exactly the same as in Hyper-V 'Move' then? I can move VMs in Hyper-V from one host, to another, without shared storage, and with 0 downtime.
vMotion sounds just like the move option in Hyper-V. Nothing special. If HostA crashes, does vMotion move the VM to another host instantly without any downtime to service and no shared storage? - Now that would be different...
It does.
No it needs shared storage. Either vSAN or iSCSI or NFS. Every hypervisor I've seen can do it with shared storage. Even KVM has built in mechanisms to live migrate between two live hosts with shared storage.
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Full disclosure I work at VMware blah blah blah words are my own...
- vSphere is an eco system. There are TONs of solutions that it interacts with (and has really tight integration with). Running Horizon for VDI? Your only option is ESXi (although, Azure will be an option at some point here). There are tons of Ecosystem features that you REALLY can't get anywhere else, or are less mature on other platforms. Examples include
Microsegmentation with selective layer 7 service offload (NSX).
Platform residency like Pro-active HA (as well as vSphere HA and VMFS being far more resilient and tunable than other platform's options).
Platform features (vSAN isn't the only local storage replication system, but it's more tightly integrated and offers more data services and maturity than most systems out there).
Granular performance controls (DRS's algorithms are unmatched in the industry, NIOCv2, SIOCv2, highly mature APD/PDL detection at the storage PSP layer that would require a 3rd party software on most platforms). Using all this stuff I typically see 40% denser host utilization than people using purely free solutions (or just ESXi free).
Wholistic monitoring solutions and integrations (vROPS, Hyperic and LogInsight have crazy amounts of out of the box functionality across everything from hosts, to applications, to networking and external devices).
Hybrid cloud. Your replicating to a VMware partner in the vCloud Air Network like OVH or Softlayer (VCAN), or wanting to run Hybrid cloud operations to AWS (coming soon (TM).
Operational reasons. I can throw a rock and hit someone who knows how to manage ESXi and vSphere. There are a bazillion people are trained and know how to do not just basic Install configure manage, but also advanced troubleshooting.
Low cost 24/7 Enterprise support. I can support 3 hosts with 24/7 phone support for ~$1200 on an essentials plus bundle. Microsoft's lowest flat fee support option I've seen is 40K a year as part of an ELA.
Lost cost (Essentials Plus is ~6K. For similar functionality I'd need to buy SCCM VMM which costs more and lacks a 24/7 support option).
Better driver/firmware quality control. VMware VCG doesn't blindly certify anything for a 5 pack of heineken (Realtek was banned for a VERY long time). Do to what customers use the drivers for (Never consumer use cases) they get more attention and there is a higher expectation.
The vDS is incredibly advanced and mature. Beyond NIOCv2 shaping functionalities that are a check box away, Advanced LACP, single click to setup CDP/LLDP send/receive. VERY rich load balancing algorithms hashes (not just a basic IP hash). Other platforms historically require 3rd party NIC vendor dependent tools do things like this.
Security/Compliance. There are platform features that are painful to replicate in other places, or if doable require endless amounts of scripts or 3rd party projects that may or may not be stable. There is a full DISA STIG for classified use case. Due to ESXi's tiny size (few hundred MB for the kernel) it's patch surface is tiny. Compared to platforms that minimum install is 20+GB who require monthly patching to remain compliant.
Mature native backup API's (VADP/CBT), Native Write Splitting API's (VAIO allows near zero RPO) and all kinds of fun platform features that allow for a rich 3rd party ecosystem.
Rich API's, and SDK's that are stable and managed by grown up's (This isn't docker where everything breaks every 3 months).
VMFork plus Photon allows for linked clones VM's that have zero net Memory/CPU/Disk overhead and can be booted in 400ms. This can be controlled by Kuberentes or Docker endpoints and gives you the benefits of containers, with the isolation of VM's (Performance control, microseg, visibility) with vSphere integrated containers.
Free OpenStack deployment that's a simple wizard to setup (vSphere Integrated OpenStack).
Also, ESXi is free and offers a nice HTML5 UI that's quite easy to use.
Anecdotally, it's just easier to deploy and manage, and tends to do weird things a lot less (and when it does you've got support to reach out to). The new VCSA vSAN bootstrap system, and the configuration assist for bulk setup is awesome. With a simple wizard I can have my entire cluster deployed in under an hour.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Where did I say 100% uptime? I didn't. 12 VMs is small. Everywhere has downtime, yes, but this isn't complex and for IIS and SQL Server etc... this is not an unreasonable setup. Not hard to manage or design either. I'm shocked y'all think its suck a crazy setup.
Why I like having hypervisor clusters even for app clusters is it let me do host maintenance in the middle of the day when resources are cheap vs at night where they are expensive (overtime pay, comp time, or just burning out my operations staff). Also Proactive HA will detect a host is failing (FANs fail, thermal warnings, memory errors) and evacuate a host and put it into quarantine. Still collecting stats on what % this prevents on host failure but you'd be surprised how many hosts give off warning signs that they are failing.
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I see them a lot more often. Oil gas is GREAT about building applications that if they fail people could die or millions are lost, but they lack native HA.
I saw a OEM build a vSAN cluster with FTT=2 RAID 1 (3 copies of data) and THEN ran FT (So 2 copies of VM's with a shadow VM) so 6 copies of data! I asked them why and they mumbled something about people could die so I dropped the issue of wasted capacity
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@Jimmy9008 This is list price FWIW.
Also Production support (24/7) is a VERY low cost to add on and worth it for 99% of people. I know some people may not value support, but when you've got an issue at 3AM forums and Slack are not as helpful as you'd think.
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@John-Nicholson I agree, there are reasons to need these kinds of systems, but they are far and few in between.
The argument being made here by @Jimmy9008 is I can do it on something other than ESXi, which sure he can do so. But its added complexity for little gain.
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Ok, I'll bite on VMware. Be careful about throwing HA out there. People seem to mean different things when they say HA. In VMware's product line, HA will restart virtual machines on other hosts in the cluster if a host fails that was running VMs. It does not protect you from data loss and certainly does not produce 100% uptime as it must be able to detect a host failure (or even a failure of a host to connect to its storage) and then react. Even so, when HA boots up a VM on another host the VM has potential to completely blue screen or have guest OS data corruption.
In the words of @John-Nicholson, HA is something you do and not something you buy.
As for vMotion, there are multiple levels. The traditional vMotion concept assumes you have shared storage and that you are moving the CPU and RAM that a VM is using from one host to another. The VM will change hosts (but not necessarily change its back end storage location) with no downtime. There's also storage vMotion, which allows you to move the VM files from one storage device to another with no downtime (VM does not change hosts in this case). There is also enhanced vMotion, which allows you to move a VM from one host to another (CPU and RAM) and also move its actual files also (from one storage device to another). So in the case of enhanced vMotion, you certainly can use it to move VMs on local storage on host A to local storage on host B with no downtime (assuming host processor family compatibility), but if you're moving a 500 GB VMDK across the wire it is going to take quite a while.
If you really want little to no downtime, you can get license to FT (fault tolerance). That creates a primary VM running on one host and a secondary VM on another host. The two are kept in lockstep with one another so that if the primary fails the secondary takes over with no downtime; then another secondary VM is spun up on a different host.
From a licensing perspective, you can get the Essentials kit for $600 (covers 6 CPUs spread over up to 3 hosts) which gets you vCenter (management console) and access to 3rd party agentless backups. You get no license to HA here and no license for vMotion. The Essentials Plus kit (about $5K to cover 3 hosts) gets you HA, vMotion, vSphere Replication, etc. This does not include storage vMotion (higher license needed for that). Things like DRS, FT, and storage vMotion cost more money. So does FT.
If you can power the VM off and have networking setup correctly between hosts, you can migrate the VM in its entirety (CPU, RAM, storage) from one host to another even on the Essentials kit, even on local storage, even with hosts belonging to different processor families.
Product comparison - https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere.html.
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@Jimmy9008 Application clusters require exponential more complexity in support, monitoring, and operations (patching, troubleshooting). I've seen SQL clusters cause more outages than they solved in many cases. Hypervisor HA is VERY simple in comparison. App HA in some cases (AAG, Oracle RAC) has a VERY steep entry price (quickly gets over 100K). If my operations teams are not trained/certified/skilled on these solutions I could be extending outages, or extending costs for basic tasks.
An aircraft carrier is a superior solution to a Catamaran except when you only have a 4 man crew who never were in the Navy...
While I love App HA, and many people need it. For some Hypervisor HA is a good middle ground.
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And as @John-Nicholson said, ESXi can be free and has a really nice HTML5 interface (no special management software). You can run agent-based backups on your VMs for recovery. Do you get all the secret sauce features for free? No.
I can run Linux VMs on free ESXi all day and just buy myself a server. With Hyper-V I must have a license of Windows. Of course, if I'm running Windows VMs on ESXi, I have to license those just as I would if I wanted Windows VMs on Hyper-V.
