XenServer 7.3 Release
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/sigh
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I see a big coming back of VMware in the SMB, maybe from deluded cloud customers (lift and shift burned people, mainly).
It's IMHO the obvious choice for non-Linux people.
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.
I'm a Linux guy and I've many KVM hosts in home lab and in the field, but the VMware GUI/CLI are doing very well in the latest release. And there is also the "Veeam factor": 2/3 of KVM threads are about "how to backup KVM guest".Yes, I've always been again "that closed shit", but VMware has a very nice products that is starting to be usable again.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
I see a big coming back of VMware in the SMB, maybe from deluded cloud customers (lift and shift burned people, mainly).
I doubt it, it just keeps moving more and more away from the needs of the SMB.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.Except... at that price it's ridiculous. Maybe in Europe that's seen as a deal. In the US, that's pure insanity. SMBs can't throw around that kind of money. And it doesn't come with ANY support, and it isn't powerful at that price, it's actually quite pathetic. For half that cost, you can hire someone to install something more powerful.
Underpowered, insanely expensive.... where's the selling point relative to the market?
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@dashrender said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
/sigh
XS was always a crippled Xen product, but with some simple options. But once it stops being as powerful or as simple, or starts to have a questionable future, the scales tip.
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@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.Except... at that price it's ridiculous. Maybe in Europe that's seen as a deal. In the US, that's pure insanity. SMBs can't throw around that kind of money. And it doesn't come with ANY support, and it isn't powerful at that price, it's actually quite pathetic. For half that cost, you can hire someone to install something more powerful.
Underpowered, insanely expensive.... where's the selling point relative to the market?
Where can you hire a sysadmin to install a KVM environment in ONE DAY that has centralized web-based management with advanced automation tools, backup API, stateless installation that fit an usb (no need for endurance on a BOSS card / additional stoarge array) and easy to manage networking across vlans (openvswitch/Linux bridges, I've been there) for 300€/$?
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@scottalanmiller and don't try to sell me the HyperV stuff, because as you stated some months ago, Windows and it's license is ultimately needed to effectively manage HyperV, so the price is not that far away from VMware :D.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@scottalanmiller and don't try to sell me the HyperV stuff, because as you stated some months ago, Windows and it's license is ultimately needed to effectively manage HyperV, so the price is not that far away from VMware :D.
That would only be a valid concern if you hadn't already stated that the situation was for people without Linux experience. If you don't have Windows, and you don't have Linux, what exactly do you need to virtualize?
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.Except... at that price it's ridiculous. Maybe in Europe that's seen as a deal. In the US, that's pure insanity. SMBs can't throw around that kind of money. And it doesn't come with ANY support, and it isn't powerful at that price, it's actually quite pathetic. For half that cost, you can hire someone to install something more powerful.
Underpowered, insanely expensive.... where's the selling point relative to the market?
Where can you hire a sysadmin to install a KVM environment in ONE DAY that has centralized web-based management with advanced automation tools, backup API, stateless installation that fit an usb (no need for endurance on a BOSS card / additional stoarge array) and easy to manage networking across vlans (openvswitch/Linux bridges, I've been there) for 300€/$?
None of that matters. What does matter is that for 300€ you can get a better system than Vmware.
Web based management is nice, but not a deal breaker for a small shop, VMware only got that recently anyway. Backup API isn't really good for the SMB, in fact, it might be a bad thing. Stateless installation on USB, what value is there to that? Sure, use it if you have it, but really, who cares... no SMB, that's for sure. And VLANs... those don't belong in an SMB generally.
This stuff sound great, but actually, for half the price, you can probably get a better KVM deployment that isn't chock full of things you shouldn't have but might have deployed only because VMware was so expensive that you felt like you had to.
Plus, if you get VMware for 600€ and can't install KVM yourself, but need all those features... you now have to hire even more expensive support. VMware support will likely cost more than KVM support because "they see you coming."
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@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@scottalanmiller and don't try to sell me the HyperV stuff, because as you stated some months ago, Windows and it's license is ultimately needed to effectively manage HyperV, so the price is not that far away from VMware :D.
That would only be a valid concern if you hadn't already stated that the situation was for people without Linux experience. If you don't have Windows, and you don't have Linux, what exactly do you need to virtualize?
Maybe I need to be even more precise: a GOOD KVM implementation requires not only a very good Linux experience but also a broad experience with KVM itself. It's easy to mess up things when you have to do almost everything in a "handmade" way. Remember, I was a fan of KVM before you even consider it for production workloads...
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@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.Except... at that price it's ridiculous. Maybe in Europe that's seen as a deal. In the US, that's pure insanity. SMBs can't throw around that kind of money. And it doesn't come with ANY support, and it isn't powerful at that price, it's actually quite pathetic. For half that cost, you can hire someone to install something more powerful.
Underpowered, insanely expensive.... where's the selling point relative to the market?
Where can you hire a sysadmin to install a KVM environment in ONE DAY that has centralized web-based management with advanced automation tools, backup API, stateless installation that fit an usb (no need for endurance on a BOSS card / additional stoarge array) and easy to manage networking across vlans (openvswitch/Linux bridges, I've been there) for 300€/$?
None of that matters. What does matter is that for 300€ you can get a better system than Vmware.
Web based management is nice, but not a deal breaker for a small shop, VMware only got that recently anyway. Backup API isn't really good for the SMB, in fact, it might be a bad thing. Stateless installation on USB, what value is there to that? Sure, use it if you have it, but really, who cares... no SMB, that's for sure. And VLANs... those don't belong in an SMB generally.
This stuff sound great, but actually, for half the price, you can probably get a better KVM deployment that isn't chock full of things you shouldn't have but might have deployed only because VMware was so expensive that you felt like you had to.
Plus, if you get VMware for 600€ and can't install KVM yourself, but need all those features... you now have to hire even more expensive support. VMware support will likely cost more than KVM support because "they see you coming."
I've fried SEVERAL USB thumbs with XS. And in small installation you usually don't have a separate array just for the hypervisor or stuff like boot from SAN.
I think any ML user (even ones that aren't familiar with VMware) are able to correctly configure a virtual switch with 10 minutes of messing with the gui or powershell.Now, try that with a standard KVM (CentOS/Fedora) installation.
Maybe it's just me, but the whole MANUAL taking up the bridge / add the NIC / activate the interface / delay the autostart of the VM since everything is up... is not the best part of life, really. No, Linux don't bring up everything in the right order, you have to script it manually and hope that no upgrade broke the compatibility with your script. And yes, you have to integrate it as a systemd unit. There are also the log to configure, of course. I'm able to do that, ok, but it takes months of my time to debug any of those little issue before releasing the whole mess in production.I don't see how backup API can be a downside...
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
I see a big coming back of VMware in the SMB, maybe from deluded cloud customers (lift and shift burned people, mainly).
It's IMHO the obvious choice for non-Linux people.
It's extremely reliable, powerful, has an incredible ecosystem.
That 600€ of essential license are blessed.
I'm a Linux guy and I've many KVM hosts in home lab and in the field, but the VMware GUI/CLI are doing very well in the latest release. And there is also the "Veeam factor": 2/3 of KVM threads are about "how to backup KVM guest".Yes, I've always been again "that closed shit", but VMware has a very nice products that is starting to be usable again.
I would expect users to use Hyper-V before going with VMware if they a non-Linux users.
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Maybe in your dream world every SMB has NO VLAN, NO application like SAP that are only certified to run on VMware, no shared storage (redundant SAN/Switches, no IPOD)... Linux DM-MPIO + Clustered GFS is MUCH harder than the simple "Add VMFS" of VMware. Generally speaking, the whole clustering stack of Linux is really a mess, I have two books on that corosync/pacemaker/blabla hell.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
Maybe in your dream world every SMB has NO VLAN, NO application like SAP that are only certified to run on VMware, no shared storage (redundant SAN/Switches, no IPOD)...
It's should, not do. SMBs do BAD things, it's often what makes them SMBs. But we should also look at IT from what people should do, not how to make things bad. Sure bad decisions happen, but that doesn't make them better.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
I don't see how backup API can be a downside...
Well the important part is that they really aren't a very big upside.
But they do bring the "human" caveat of making people do bad things by encouraging them to think badly about backups. I saw this in a thread just today - someone was so completely confused because of the availability of Backup APIs that he couldnt' understand anything in the backup ecosystem. Sadly, in the real world of the SMB, simple things like "it has a backup API" can lead to "oh, you can't take backups of other things" and reckless decision making based around one major misunderstanding.
This is a real world human failure I see triggered by this specific technology all of the time. It's not the fault of the technology, but by not having it, SMBs tend to act more rationally.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
Now, try that with a standard KVM (CentOS/Fedora) installation.
Maybe it's just me, but the whole MANUAL taking up the bridge / add the NIC / activate the interface / delay the autostart of the VM since everything is up... is not the best part of life, really. No, Linux don't bring up everything in the right order, you have to script it manually and hope that no upgrade broke the compatibility with your script. And yes, you have to integrate it as a systemd unit. There are also the log to configure, of course. I'm able to do that, ok, but it takes months of my time to debug any of those little issue before releasing the whole mess in production.I've done KVM and had none of this. Was all automated and SO simple. Certainly as easy as VMware. No manual bridging, no start order problems. Just worked.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
Now, try that with a standard KVM (CentOS/Fedora) installation.
Maybe it's just me, but the whole MANUAL taking up the bridge / add the NIC / activate the interface / delay the autostart of the VM since everything is up... is not the best part of life, really. No, Linux don't bring up everything in the right order, you have to script it manually and hope that no upgrade broke the compatibility with your script. And yes, you have to integrate it as a systemd unit. There are also the log to configure, of course. I'm able to do that, ok, but it takes months of my time to debug any of those little issue before releasing the whole mess in production.
I don't see how backup API can be a downside...I've been running KVM in production for years now and have never had to do this. If you need a bridge that can be done in your kickstart. Pull in your template and you're ready to go. I've never had to weirdly script anything. SystemD units are easy to write, not sure what the issue is there. And not sure what you mean with logging. If you're using syslog, just point it at your logging server. If you're using something like beats, just set up beats...
You can fully automate your system installs. I'll speak to Ansible because that's what I use. Ansible builds a PXE boot file and a Kickstart definition for every machine that's defined in it's dictionary. We PXE boot the machine and walk away. When it's done, it reboots it does a provisioning callback to Tower (or AWX if you don't want to pay for it) from a SystemD service and timer set up in the kickstart and Ansible builds that system with whatever provisioning you've defined for it. Ansible can either rebuild the templates with virt-build or pull in templates you've previously set up. I've literally never seen the things you're talking about.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
Linux DM-MPIO + Clustered GFS is MUCH harder than the simple "Add VMFS" of VMware.
What small shop that has
non-Linux peopleor even Linux people is going to be doing this? We don't even do this as a multi-billion dollar company. -
Maybe the reality in UE is different than in US, but that's what I see almost everyday. Or maybe it's just confirmation bias.
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@francesco-provino said in XenServer 7.3 Release:
Maybe the reality in UE is different than in US, but that's what I see almost everyday. Or maybe it's just confirmation bias.
That was part of my point... EU companies have SO much more money than US ones. It's mind boggling how different it is. What you see as "average" in the EU are setups larger than the entire average budget of a US IT department!
