Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On
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@FATeknollogee said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@StorageNinja Net, net you feel/believe ESXi is a better play for SMB's?
Disclaimer: I work for VMware, but my prior gig was an MSP/Consulting and then before that, I was a customer (in a verrry small SMB maybe 4 million total revenue a year).
A few thoughts...
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It's dead simple to install as it comes pre-installed for no real added net cost by most OEM's (Pre-installed to SD card, SATA DOM, M.2 drives). Even if you do an install it's largely mashing enter with things like creating partitions and sizing them is all automated.
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It comes with a great HTML5 interface baked into it out of the box (The H5 Host Client is free!).
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Just because a company is a SMB today doesn't mean it will remain one tomorrow. I"ve seen people grow on VMware from 5 VM's to thousands. While there are dangers to aggressively over buying for growth the Essentials and essentials plus bundles cost less than my houses Starbucks/energy drink habits on a daily cost basis over a lifetime. Powerful central management, alerting, features that can scale with you for less than my last office spent on coffee is being made into a much bigger deal than it is.
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Skills wise I can throw a rock and hit someone who knows how to use vSphere and unlike Microsoft flat rate 24/7 mfg support is cheap (~1200 a year for essentials plus). At 3AM when I'm trying to figure out why something isn't working I'd rather call someone than poke around in forums. It's true you can get this from RedHat but it actually costs a good bit more for a subscription last time I checked.
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If your SMB ever needs to deploy software that has very restricted HCL's and supported configurations (SAP HANA, Intersystems Cache, EPIC, A good number of PBX's) you are often limited to vSphere/AIX etc. You might not be there now, but even some of the smaller EMR's can be. You might say "Well I'm going to control every software purchase we make" but that's not the reality of how company purchasing evolves. Also, you might end up M&A'ing a company who has a large presence on VMware/AIX/etc. It's worth noting that some companies (SAP) don't just say "Linux is Linux". they will often force very specific distributions (Redhat and sometimes SuSE). As companies grow they often own less and less of the code they run and are at the mercy of various black box packages and what they run. Most people would rather have one platform for everything over one AIX box to deal with Caché.
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When I consulted I worked with a lot of M&A where SMB's merged or were purchased. Given how often vSphere was deployed it made the roll in, and roll out of VM's a lot easier. Anything else (physical, legacy Alpha, Hyper-V etc) all got platformed. I saw a lot of xxxx --> vSphere but never anyone seriously going the other way as part of a M&A.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.
IDC survey's, Free installs tend to have default mirrors they check out security patches from (It's true some people run their own repo's and do a fan out, but that fan out doesn't get wide in SMB's), 3rd party inventory tools that collect and anonymize their stats. There are ways (again, I view the war as actually making revenue as well as market share).
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
- There's a massive long tail of other niche vendors....
This is misleading because you are looking at the market from the "vendor" perspective - your view is vendors and revenue. But from the IT side, market is by products and deployments. Everything you list is a vendor and a revenue stream, not a product and a deployment. That stuff is meaningful when you are a vendor or an investor on the vendor side and you are looking about where to invest your funds. But we aren't on that side, this is the IT perspective and/or customer perspective here that we represent and none of that matters in the least. What we care about are the products (ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, Xen), what they cost, how they are used, what we get for our effort or money.
Bottom line, having loads of experience with all four, today I get more bang for the buck both in money AND in time with KVM. Sure, people who haven't learned all four tend to see whatever they are used to as the easy one. But unless you are doing all of them, and in a recent context, you can't really tell.
That's why it seems like it is reasonable to think that deployments can be tracked, because the perspective is "revenue" from deployments. But the biggest deployment factors are the ones that aren't tracked.
In the real world, even many companies have no idea how much of their own stuff is deployed. That stuff is rarely centralized. Even when I was at IBM, IBM didn't know what OSes or hardware was in use in production. It was all isolated in small departments that didn't communicate centrally.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.
IDC survey's, Free installs tend to have default mirrors they check out security patches from (It's true some people run their own repo's and do a fan out, but that fan out doesn't get wide in SMB's), 3rd party inventory tools that collect and anonymize their stats. There are ways (again, I view the war as actually making revenue as well as market share).
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey? It's easy to say things like surveys tell us something, but surveys are designed to get results desired. You can make a reasonable sounding survey to get any result you want. Just look at SW surveys, they are all engineers to have false answers and whatever they want to not be represented just is left off.
Most surveys pre-isolated the desired audience. In SW, as an example, their community is built by acquiring interest through people who used the software, software that was free, collected data illegally (but obviously), and only ran on Windows. So any survey of that audience is almost entirely isolated to environments that are price conscious, but run Windows anyway, but don't take security seriously, and don't try to acquire open source. So the results of any survey are obviously insanely skewed.
How does IDC find people to survey? I doubt that they stop by small shops in rural communities and get universal access to IT departments to ask them questions. It's absurd to think that someone like IDC would have any visibility into the market. I mean... seriously, think about it. They only get access via vendors, no vendor to promote the survey, no reasonable access to people to survey. It's "magic" how then the surveys always favour vendor based relationships.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.
If your talking embedded OEM stuff, the era of SCADA and forget it, is coming to an end. I know Honeywell is uber obsessive about getting those boxes updated. The general shift for embedded appliances is them joining the Internet of Shit, so lifecycle is becoming a bigger deal.
If you're talking about the market share of free hypervisors that are deployed and never get a security patch or any maintenance and are managed by muppets.... Fine. KVM can have that market. Who knows maybe they have 100% of it today. I'd argue broken clusters based on Hyper-V 2008 (Which should have been called a beta product) did more to damage their market shares going forward. Being the king of the misfit toy deployments is dangerous. It works if your goal is ship "good enough" and hope to dilute undermine a market, but for anyone who has high needs they will associate that product with muppet levels of uptime (even if the product isn't that bad). It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.
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IDC might have a better reputation than Gartner, but these are the biggest scams in the industry. Those are paid results and have no place in a discussion with IT. Those are tools used to sucker the most uneducated and clueless managers. No self respecting IT person would use them. Vendors do, because the big money is in scamming management and there is no getting around that. You pretty much have to play their game because they and bad managers have made it that way. But it has no place on the IT side.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey?
Yup, got a phone call from them when I was a customer. Asked me 20 questions, sent me a $100 gift card I think it was.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey?
Yup, got a phone call from them when I was a customer. Asked me 20 questions, sent me a $100 gift card I think it was.
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
They were asking me primarily about Citrix which I didn't use so I'm going to say Not Citrix (Survey was about application streaming). I was using RDSH and we discussed that.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.
If your talking embedded OEM stuff, the era of SCADA and forget it, is coming to an end. I know Honeywell is uber obsessive about getting those boxes updated. The general shift for embedded appliances is them joining the Internet of Shit, so lifecycle is becoming a bigger deal.
If you're talking about the market share of free hypervisors that are deployed and never get a security patch or any maintenance and are managed by muppets.... Fine. KVM can have that market. Who knows maybe they have 100% of it today. I'd argue broken clusters based on Hyper-V 2008 (Which should have been called a beta product) did more to damage their market shares going forward. Being the king of the misfit toy deployments is dangerous. It works if your goal is ship "good enough" and hope to dilute undermine a market, but for anyone who has high needs they will associate that product with muppet levels of uptime (even if the product isn't that bad). It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.
All systems get poorly managed by the majority of customers. I'd argue that VMware promotes that more than any other vendor, as the only one that charges for, and cuts people off from updates. As we saw in another thread, shops opt for Vmware, and then figure out that licensing was too complex for them to have worked out, and get stuck without the budget to keep it up to date but don't get approved to replace it.
Avoiding "good enough" is specifically one of the reasons that I feel KVM is easier. Because it fixes some of the hardest challenges with Vmware - budgetary approval and license understanding. The things that are beyond so many shops (the average shop.)
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?
They were asking me primarily about Citrix which I didn't use so I'm going to say Not Citrix (Survey was about application streaming). I was using RDSH and we discussed that.
Right, but how did they get your number? How did they get through to IT? Someone had to sell your information to them for them to have it. There is no global list of businesses to magically call to find out what people use. And the average business couldn't even answer what they use, so how do they filter the results?
Humans guessing what is used results in some pretty bad IT info. Just look at SW surveys again. When we know who is answering, we often saw people getting their own environment info wrong because they weren't understanding what they had.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those are paid results and have no place in a discussion with IT.
Gartner has much more of its monetization tied to the companies it's providing MQ's about (and the lack of disclosure is... interesting). IDC not so much. I'm pretty sure more money for them comes from Investment bankers.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.
I'm not disagreeing here. There is a good reason for things like managed-only systems, or like VMware's very tight supported hardware list system. That stuff is smart and does a ton of good for making sure that products are used in a good way. You need other options, it doesn't satisfy the entire market, but it's a good approach with good value and protects a lot of companies that otherwise would just do stupid things because "they can."
And I think that VMware, through many market changes, is moving more and more into the "small, but better deployment space." Fewer deployments to maintain, but those that remain are better, and I'm sure pay more. Not entirely unlike Microsoft moving customers from perpetual licenses to O365 - it actually decreased their market penetration, by a lot, but it increased revenue and decreased cost. Big wins, but market share went down.
That's where I see Vmware. Market share is shrinking, it's not the go to product any more. But better customers, at higher revenue. That's better for Vmware.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Those are paid results and have no place in a discussion with IT.
Gartner has much more of its monetization tied to the companies it's providing MQ's about (and the lack of disclosure is... interesting). IDC not so much. I'm pretty sure more money for them comes from Investment bankers.
Gartner is nothing but paid ads, it's pure scam. IDC I've heard is more in the middle. Actually does something of research, but it is still "purchased results", I think. I've heard that Info-Tech is 100% paid subscriptions, but I no longer trust any third party research firm. There are way too many ways to make money promoting certain kinds of products the incentives are just too strong.
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ANd even paid research, people want to hear certain results. People don't like bad news. There is often too much money in just telling people what they want to hear. Even someone trying to not service vendors, may end up doing so trying to keep the customer happy.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Right, but how did they get your number? How did they get through to IT? Someone had to sell your information to them for them to have it. There is no global list of businesses to magically call to find out what people use. And the average business couldn't even answer what they use, so how do they filter the results?
Humans guessing what is used results in some pretty bad IT info. Just look at SW surveys again. When we know who is answering, we often saw people getting their own environment info wrong because they weren't understanding what they had.You are correct that the list of secret squirrel/spies would be poorly covered by any market survey with calls to customers. Now IDC also tracks sales into the channel so if the licensing was sold through say CDW-G executing through IngramMicro as a distributor IDC isn't going to know that it was sold to the FBI, but they will know that xxxx number of units was moved.
Now if your argument is that you are secret squirrels who:
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Are committed to never purchasing anything from a company or distribution.
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obfuscating downloads and compiling all security updates from source to avoid incrementing the download counters.
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Always using burner emails and phone numbers whose contact information never ends up on one of the bazillion marketing (note all it takes is you forget to uncheck a box once in your career) that exist are not surveyed that might be true.
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Disable all phone home, and kill any support telemetry features.
It's true there are some mimes running around forests, but I would argue tracking people who are spending zero dollars on software isn't really what IDC's goal is to do in their software revenue tracking metrics...
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@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
And I think that VMware, through many market changes, is moving more and more into the "small, but better deployment space." Fewer deployments to maintain, but those that remain are better, and I'm sure pay more. Not entirely unlike Microsoft moving customers from perpetual licenses to O365 - it actually decreased their market penetration, by a lot, but it increased revenue and decreased cost. Big wins, but market share went down.
That's where I see Vmware. Market share is shrinking, it's not the go to product any more. But better customers, at higher revenue. That's better for Vmware.I think though that on-premises workload while not shrinking are not keeping pace with cloud-hosted workloads. Now plenty of those workloads end up on clouds running vSphere, but even those that do not can still end up managed by VMware. VMware is more than vSphere.
NSX-T/VeloCloud runs just fine on Public Cloud, Containers, even KVM etc. I've seen iSCSI from vSAN shared to bare metal Oracle RAC clusters. Airwatch (leading MDM platform) has really nothing to do with vSphere. WaveFront at purchase couldn't even inject metrics from vSphere and it was a while before they added it (It's focused on application telemetry and ML of that datasets). VMware Horizon View can run on Azure, and the CMP products can manage Azure/AWS etc also. CloudHealth provides compliance across all public clouds also. With the Outpost announcement, I will be able to run vSphere, on AWS leased hardware that's installed in my own datacenter and consume EBS volumes into vSAN while layering AWS RDS on top to provide Postgres or Oracle databases as part of a blueprint to a Project Tango application stack for the ultimate multi-vendor meta sandwich... Spending over a billion on R&D, and a few billion on M&A gets you some damn nice toys
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Now if your argument is that you are secret squirrels who:
- Are committed to never purchasing anything from a company or distribution.
Of course, if using anything open source is considered "secret squirrel." But this is how IT buys loads and loads of stuff. "Buying" isn't from vendors or through channels. It's free acquisition. Turning to a channel for the majority of things that we use seems weird. We use them when we need things from the channel, but so much of what we use isn't from a channel.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
- obfuscating downloads and compiling all security updates from source to avoid incrementing the download counters.
I get this, but there are SO MANY download counters. We know that they are not unified. Even accidentally people will do this. Whether it is that we use a cloud that caches those things, or we just use a cache, or we use our own tools. Having worked in the enterprise, everything like that was run internally. Tens of thousands of installs, only one copy would have been known about and it was a complete download that would be discarded in any stats because it doesn't represent anything. Download counters are interesting, but don't even start to give a complete picture in any way. And so many of them don't report to any central source. There is simply no "source of truth" on these things.
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@StorageNinja said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
- Disable all phone home, and kill any support telemetry features.
While loads and loads of shops do do this, so many things that we use simply don't do this. It's a mechanism that is rarely deployed.
