KVM or VMWare
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Taking a clone is fine, but now you either have to maintain that template or it gets old and you have an ancient template sitting somewhere that is just as out of date as the initial OS install, or nearly (sure it'll have SOME updates.)
This is one place where KVM shines, but only libvirt/QEMU. You can update templates without spinning them up through libguestfs and the next time the template is cloned, the clone has all of the updates.
KVM has a lot of features like this, but it needs automated, is limited to libvirt (which cuts down the number of places KVM is deployed), and needs separate tools installed which are only cli based.
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't. The APIs are hard to use and don't have all of the features you would expect. You can't even clone a system with virsh. You need a separate tool to do a lot of manual work behind the scenes.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
On a call with a major vendor talking about a customer solution (no customer on the call.) All of the managers kept saying "We need VMware because who is going to support KVM?" And the support team kept saying "What are you talking about, you are a KVM vendor will a full KVM support organization and we don't have those skills in VMware and will have to farm it out."
Who was this? People don't believe things you say because you make statements like this and never say who it is. It sounds completely made up.
I could say yesterday I talked with a client who said they wanted to run SQL server on a Mac pro. If I never give details who these places are no one will believe me.
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Who was this? People don't believe things you say because you make statements like this and never say who it is. It sounds completely made up.
In IT rarely can you disclose the players involved.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
And what does it hedge against, an OS install is only a few minutes anyway.
This discounts any specific setup. Sure you can install an OS in a couple minutes but when you need any customization it adds up exponentially.
Absolutely. But if you are using some kind of OS automation it doesn't necessarily make any real difference. If you lack the automation, then cloning / templating because much more important. But you have to keep it up to date.
Right. This specifically helps you in the case where you don't have automation. You create a template and don't have the automation. The next time something happens. Just redeploy from the template. Apply updates to the template periodically and you're fine.
This scenario helps in both cases. Arguably moreso for people who don't have any existing automation.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
Literally anything. I can tell you that I am working with one of the big four right now. Can't say which one, but I can tell you that.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Who was this? People don't believe things you say because you make statements like this and never say who it is. It sounds completely made up.
In IT rarely can you disclose the players involved.
That's just not true. Everyone blasts their customers on their sites. The number of times you can't give any information is very low.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
Literally anything. I can tell you that I am working with one of the big four right now. Can't say which one, but I can tell you that.
The big four vendors? This isn't a vendor THAT big. I'm not sure how to give away anything about this vendor without it being obvious quickly. Nothing like the size of the big four. But a vendor that has an IT arm.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
Literally anything. I can tell you that I am working with one of the big four right now. Can't say which one, but I can tell you that.
The big four vendors? This isn't a vendor THAT big. I'm not sure how to give away anything about this vendor without it being obvious quickly. Nothing like the size of the big four. But a vendor that has an IT arm.
Big four accounting.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Who was this? People don't believe things you say because you make statements like this and never say who it is. It sounds completely made up.
In IT rarely can you disclose the players involved.
That's just not true. Everyone blasts their customers on their sites. The number of times you can't give any information is very low.
When I worked for the big Wall St. firm, you could never mention them, even in a position context. Red Hat threw a shit fit when I posted that we never needed to call the vendor (Red Hat) for support because their stuff was always able to be fixed by internal IT. They were furious because it suggested that you could get by without paying for support.
They brought reams of papers to the bank and demanded that I be fired. Legal went through and pointed out that I never mentioned the bank so they could go F themselves. That it was positive or negative wasn' the point, few companies are okay with their IT teams discussing them. Most have NDAs. And especially when they make mistakes or do something embarrassing.
No professional IT person is going to disclose customers making mistakes, NDA or not.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
Literally anything. I can tell you that I am working with one of the big four right now. Can't say which one, but I can tell you that.
The big four vendors? This isn't a vendor THAT big. I'm not sure how to give away anything about this vendor without it being obvious quickly. Nothing like the size of the big four. But a vendor that has an IT arm.
Big four accounting.
OH, okay. I do work for someone in the Fortune 10. But this isn't them. So that doesn't help, lol.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Taking a clone is fine, but now you either have to maintain that template or it gets old and you have an ancient template sitting somewhere that is just as out of date as the initial OS install, or nearly (sure it'll have SOME updates.)
This is one place where KVM shines, but only libvirt/QEMU. You can update templates without spinning them up through libguestfs and the next time the template is cloned, the clone has all of the updates.
KVM has a lot of features like this, but it needs automated, is limited to libvirt (which cuts down the number of places KVM is deployed), and needs separate tools installed which are only cli based.
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't. The APIs are hard to use and don't have all of the features you would expect. You can't even clone a system with virsh. You need a separate tool to do a lot of manual work behind the scenes.
What does the method of automation matter to making decisions on what to use? One uses an API, the other standard UNIX based tools, both accomplish the same thing.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
I understand NDAs but you have to at least be able to give some more information than "major vendor".
What information would that be? LOL.
Literally anything. I can tell you that I am working with one of the big four right now. Can't say which one, but I can tell you that.
The big four vendors? This isn't a vendor THAT big. I'm not sure how to give away anything about this vendor without it being obvious quickly. Nothing like the size of the big four. But a vendor that has an IT arm.
Big four accounting.
OH, okay. I do work for someone in the Fortune 10. But this isn't them. So that doesn't help, lol.
If it was a vet clinic, and we service hundreds, I could say more specifically "a vet clinic with five doctors in the north east" and give nothing away. But more unique businesses, especially those that are known throughout the industry, you can't.
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@travisdh1 said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Taking a clone is fine, but now you either have to maintain that template or it gets old and you have an ancient template sitting somewhere that is just as out of date as the initial OS install, or nearly (sure it'll have SOME updates.)
This is one place where KVM shines, but only libvirt/QEMU. You can update templates without spinning them up through libguestfs and the next time the template is cloned, the clone has all of the updates.
KVM has a lot of features like this, but it needs automated, is limited to libvirt (which cuts down the number of places KVM is deployed), and needs separate tools installed which are only cli based.
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't. The APIs are hard to use and don't have all of the features you would expect. You can't even clone a system with virsh. You need a separate tool to do a lot of manual work behind the scenes.
What does the method of automation matter to making decisions on what to use? One uses an API, the other standard UNIX based tools, both accomplish the same thing.
Because one is easy to write integrations with, the other is not. The landscape would change because people and companies could easily create integrations and tools.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
The landscape would change because people and companies could easily create integrations and tools.
did you mean... If?
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
The landscape would change because people and companies could easily create integrations and tools.
did you mean... If?
Yeah I said that earlier here:
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
The landscape would change because people and companies could easily create integrations and tools.
did you mean... If?
Yeah I said that earlier here:
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't.
I thought so, but you typed "because" and it didn't quite make sense. Yes, I agree, cool APIs that make loads of automation easily consumable by third party applications would be a great upgrade and make it even more broadly applicable.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
The landscape would change because people and companies could easily create integrations and tools.
did you mean... If?
Yeah I said that earlier here:
If KVM had APIs (not just REST APIs) like VMware, the whole landscape would change, but they don't.
I thought so, but you typed "because" and it didn't quite make sense. Yes, I agree, cool APIs that make loads of automation easily consumable by third party applications would be a great upgrade and make it even more broadly applicable.
IF they had that, I would change my opinion about the easier tool to use. Sure cloud providers can write the tooling for KVM (libvirt or not) but VMware makes things much more consumable.
For instance, you want to give someone their own storage space and access to only their VMs. Have fun with bare KVM. You need to use polkit and write custom rules around Unix users who can access those VMs. But that only manages the guest domain. Not the networking or actual storage. In VMware, it's just creating a folder and giving permissions to a user in that folder with some resource scoping.
Bare KVM is fine if you have one person or a couple people with the same privileges managing systems. Outside of that it gets really hard really fast.
Edit: forgot the VMware side.
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Let's talk about why Microsoft are not releasing Hyper-V Server no more. I should imagine they were eventually going to kill it, but they have done it quite quickly then imagined.
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@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
Let's talk about why Microsoft are not releasing Hyper-V Server no more. I should imagine they were eventually going to kill it, but they have done it quite quickly then imagined.
Because they want you to use Azure Stack HCI instead.
