When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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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.
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@John-Nicholson
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).If smb these are good selling points. Others are garbage in smb.
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@matteo-nunziati SMB's have far more diverse needs than you would think.
I worked for a 50 man call center where a missed phone call could mean someone did get a lung transplant (We did dispatching for Organ transplant). Don't assume everyone in SMB is a small retail shop who could loose their computer for 4 hours and loose $20. I'd argue larger shops often have greater tolerances for downtime than small shops in some cases because they have operational contingencies.
That said, if $1200 a year for flat rate support on 3 hosts that can easily run 100VM's is too much I'd question why the entire project of what your doing is viable. You can't get support at that pricing on any other platform I've seen.
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@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
With Hyper-V I must have a license of Windows.
Hyper-V is free and requires no licensing of any kind, and especially does not require any Windows licenses.
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@Tim_G It's free like a puppy
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G It's free like a puppy
VMware is free like a kitten
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@stacksofplates 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?:
@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.
So VMWare has FT now and can do shared nothing with 4 VMs but is really resource heavy. @John-Nicholson set me straight.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@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.
I somewhat agree. It depends, as always. The example I was giving is not complex and should be a starting point if you are thinking of HA for IIS and SQL Server. Just jumping to hardware level HA using nodes with VMWare or nodes with HyperV or whatever is just lazy. Think about application level HA too as a start point.
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@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
With Hyper-V I must have a license of Windows.
Hyper-V is free and requires no licensing of any kind, and especially does not require any Windows licenses.
Oops - thanks for setting me straight.
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@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@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.
I somewhat agree. It depends, as always. The example I was giving is not complex and should be a starting point if you are thinking of HA for IIS and SQL Server. Just jumping to hardware level HA using nodes with VMWare or nodes with HyperV or whatever is just lazy. Think about application level HA too as a start point.
It's not lazy it's considering licensing of application stuff, as well as operational costs. Back in the day Hypervisor HA was considered exotic and expensive (and it often was). Now it's mundane (tons of ops people know how to deploy/support it), and cheap (Compared to application HA clustering on licensing and opex). Now SOME app's are cheap (DHCP/AD being examples), so there is some thought I agree but it's not lazy for someone with a mixture of apps and things who wants to be able to do basic hardware lifecycle management without disruption and hypervisor patching (which is painful otherwise on a monthly basis) to go straight for Hypervisor HA then evaluate what next?
Past a dozen VM's rebooting EVERYTHING just to do a host patch gets REALLY annoying to fully validate everything.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.
True, but they don't do anything useful without an insane amount of training, time, and money ^_^
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@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
When is VMWare ever the recommended option for a new setup?? Is it ever?
I'm not considering it or anything, I'm just curious.
I'm like almost 100 posts late on this one, had to sleep. So I've not seen anything else posted yet...
VMware has loads of good use cases, it's the best technology stack in virtualization. But it comes with high price tag and the overhead of cumbersome licenses.
VMware's primary value is in support. No one offers support like VMware. Not that RH and others are bad, but VMware really shines in this area. RH is certainly the next tier competitor, then Citrix, then I guess you can say that MS offers support, sort of.
Once you are into the fully supported range, VMware can make sense. Typically it doesn't make sense until you are past the entry threshold, but if you are going to pay for support, it comes down to a cost analysis of the features and support benefits versus the features and flexibility and support offerings for the other products that you are considering.
