KVM or VMWare
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I would of thought the industry standard would be vmware. I know a lot of datacenteres use KVM/Proxmox though
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Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
Sure, and as well, what does VMware talent, mean? It's not one sided. When someone hires a VMware resource, the average is pretty bad. This is nothing about VMware as a product or vendor, I'm talking purely IT practicioners out in the field selling themselves to employers. If I put out a job req for "VMware experience" or the like, what do I get and what do companies expect.
In many cases, as employees, you just get people who have a passing ability to install and spin up VMs. Rarely do you get someone who can even have a conversation about how VMware works at all. Knowledge rarely goes deeper than what can be gleaned by anyone who knows a little about virtualization looking at the interface for a few minutes. Even fundamental information about how to license it is often over their heads, something I think is a big piece of the baseline minimal viable knowledge base.
If you hire a VMware firm, most don't have anything more than one or two employees similar to the above, some don't even have that. The majority are just sales people who then call VMware and pay for support from the vendor. They aren't VMware experts or even VMware support, they are just resellers. Some, sure, have skills, but not the majority. Anyone and everyone can just call VMware (or any other vendor of this nature) and sign up to resell their product and maybe, and only sometimes, have to pass some minimal certification level.
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@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
I would of thought the industry standard would be vmware. I know a lot of datacenteres use KVM/Proxmox though
"Industry standard" means nothing here. First, no one knows the real deployment numbers in the industry. But studies suggest that VMware absolutely dominates the in house deployments and KVM absolutely dominates the huge enterprise / cloud space (all the Amazons, Alibabas, Googles, IBMs, etc.) So it really depends what you are looking at.
But like Windows, VMware is often installed because there was no evaluation. SOmeone just used the name that they know or what a sales person said to buy. How often is it evaluated versus just sold and no one does the IT work around the process? No one knows.
Also, do we define "industry standard" simply by "what lay people know best" or "what companies install most, even when no IT is involved?"
Same for operating systems. There's no industry standard. Same with office suites. Same with essentially everything. CRM, ERP, IDE, accounting apps, servers, desktops, etc. There are market leaders. There are good and bad products. But not industry standards.
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
These are trends anymore. They are best practices.
Wow, um, no. Anything but. The absolutely, total opposite. Best practice means that there is essentially no exception. These aren't even "good for the majority."
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
You can say all these requirements are stupid, and the most companies fail at IT. At the end of the day, these companies are making billions of dollars and revenue and are leaders in their industry. These leaders are paying $200-300 an hour for contractors and consultants to increase their maturity levels.
Your expertise is mostly with businesses with less than 10 employees who are struggling to survive let alone care about IT processes. It's such an apple and oranges comparison to Fortune 500s. You may have had expertise in enterprise over a decade ago, but it's obvious that's it's been over 10 years since you've had any experience. Nothing wrong with having a niche, but I wonder why you left $500k + job to deal with these tiny businesses.Y'all like to say I've no experience for over a decade. Yet I was still on Wall St. full time just six years ago and have never had a gap of more than maybe two years since the 90s that I wasn't working for a Fortune 100. I still work in the space today. Just because I've manage to add lots and lots of other companies, too, doesn't mean I don't still work in the enterprise space. And I can tell you, we still see absolutely enormous companies working, for better or worse, absolutely nothing like you describe. Not that others don't, of course they do. But trust me that Fortune 10 CIOs still demand in house servers when SaaS would be better and on prem instead of hosted and on and on.
I'm only for the "every situation should be evaluated and nothing be knee jerk" camp, I push these types of solutions all of the time. The amount of "no cloud here" and "no saas here" in the Fortune 10 is far more than you are implying it is (which is basically zero.)
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
I also think you shouldn't reject new concepts without understanding them. You should do some training in modern IT. I honestly think you'd love it! Embrace new concepts and at least give them the time of day. The attitude of everyone is stupid except me gets old. Especially when you aren't grasping the concepts or are basing your opinions off how things were 15 years ago.
Simply saying that new ways don't supplant everything else is not the same as not embracing new concepts. My biggest problem with people talking about lots of new concepts is that instead of seeing them in the grand scope of decades of IT, it is always (almost) presents as "this new thing replaces absolutely everything" and that unlike the entire history of the industry, suddenly there is "one size fits all" and everyone should change to work in a singular way (not necessarily overnight, I understand.)
But that's never been how it is and I see nothing to suggest that any new trend is changing that. Cloud was the example almost twenty years ago now and it is mature enough to make a good study. People used to think that cloud was going to replace everything in IT, even the jobs, almost overnight and that no other computing model had any place in the world.
Many years later, we know that this is so far from the truth. Of those that use cloud, most don't use it meaningfully. And so many don't use it at all. And of people claiming to use it, almost none actually are. Still almost no one in the industry is even sure, after all this time, what cloud even is or when they've used it. That doesn't mean that they should or shouldn't, just that they can't talk about it and tell you their own situation.
I see all of this today as the same. Super useful, very powerful, critical new paradigms that have an important place in our IT toolbox. Brilliant stuff. Fun stuff. Exciting stuff. But does it have a reasonable place replacing everything, everywhere for every business? No, not at all. For the average business, even pretty big ones, it often does not apply at all. It just doesn't have a place.
Keep in mind, this thread is about a small IT team in a small business, a private school. The needs for all that stuff doesn't apply to them, at all. Any effort put into all that auditing and governance is lost. How do we show financial or educational value to justify it? How would school administration benefit from it?
You pointed out that I don't work with the biggest enterprises anymore (I do, but not exclusively), but we have to point out that this thread isn't about an enterprise or even a traditional business. So the framing of my experience that people want to make, also has to be made about the context of the question. We aren't talking about what might or might not be good for a Fortune 100 financial or medical firm, we are talking specifically about the area that you've pointed out has also long been my area of expertise.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
Sure, and as well, what does VMware talent, mean? It's not one sided. When someone hires a VMware resource, the average is pretty bad. This is nothing about VMware as a product or vendor, I'm talking purely IT practicioners out in the field selling themselves to employers. If I put out a job req for "VMware experience" or the like, what do I get and what do companies expect.
In many cases, as employees, you just get people who have a passing ability to install and spin up VMs. Rarely do you get someone who can even have a conversation about how VMware works at all. Knowledge rarely goes deeper than what can be gleaned by anyone who knows a little about virtualization looking at the interface for a few minutes. Even fundamental information about how to license it is often over their heads, something I think is a big piece of the baseline minimal viable knowledge base.
If you hire a VMware firm, most don't have anything more than one or two employees similar to the above, some don't even have that. The majority are just sales people who then call VMware and pay for support from the vendor. They aren't VMware experts or even VMware support, they are just resellers. Some, sure, have skills, but not the majority. Anyone and everyone can just call VMware (or any other vendor of this nature) and sign up to resell their product and maybe, and only sometimes, have to pass some minimal certification level.
So KVM talent, to you, means "more than the passing ability to install and spin up VMware VMs" and who can "have a conversation about how VMWare works"?
That seems more of a dance around the question.
Edit: OK just seen this later
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
Yeah this just doesn't widely exist.
You still haven't pointed to any companies that provide KVM expertise (excluding yours because you're making the claim and truthfully I don't think you have it either).
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
These are trends anymore. They are best practices.
Wow, um, no. Anything but. The absolutely, total opposite. Best practice means that there is essentially no exception. These aren't even "good for the majority."
That's just plain incorrect.
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
Yeah this just doesn't widely exist.
You still haven't pointed to any companies that provide KVM expertise (excluding yours because you're making the claim and truthfully I don't think you have it either).
I'm thinking about this - who's right? Do these skills exist in abundance out there or not?
I'm sure anyone can really accurately measure this?
How does a company find NTG? or any vendor who does support KVM - Google searches are generally trash in this regard - they are frequently limited to the huge companies who spend tons on advertising and search optimization.
So Scott could be right, the might be tons of talent out there, there might be tons of companies with that talent on-board, but how is one supposed to find those companies in the first place.
Yes, I know that's the job of the person in charge of IT....
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Keep in mind, this thread is about a small IT team in a small business, a private school. The needs for all that stuff doesn't apply to them, at all.
Yet you somehow claim there's tons of KVM talent out there for them to pick from.
That was the whole point of all of this. The only people hiring KVM expertise are enterprises and mainly tech ones. Sure some companies like DO hire them but that's maybe only a handful since the company only has 500 some employees total.
The KVM talent is eaten up by large companies that pay them well because it's hard to do correctly. And with the current landscape it's getting more and more specialized. When I can spin up vms with kubevirt automatically and have it orchestrate and manage them for me, the uses for bare KVM are much smaller.
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
So Scott could be right, the might be tons of talent out there, there might be tons of companies with that talent on-board, but how is one supposed to find those companies in the first place.
Because to make the claim you have to know where they are.
If I told you there's a pile of diamonds the size of a house somewhere but couldn't tell you where it was, would you believe me that it exists?
Anyone can make claims based on statements like "we see", "we know", etc but that doesn't mean it's true.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Because to make the claim you have to know where they are.
And this is where I've always run aground of the claims of Scott's saying there are tons of jobs out there or talent out there. I never see the crazy amount of known real job postings.
We've had several discussions of how many if not even most job listings are really nothing more than applications gathering campaigns for headhunters.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots and lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
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@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots on lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
CNCF doesn't mean public cloud. It's about the fastest growing open source 12 factor native applications. I never said all companies are on public cloud. I said companies want cloud native tooling. Those are two very different things.
Edit: not sure what happened but I somehow I posted with the keyboard accidentally before I was done typing.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@pete-s said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.A used car sales man could with 100% confidence say that basically all families are looking to buy a new car. He meet lots on lots of them all the time and everyone has this same issue.
We all live in bubbles. I have no argument on either side of KVM hiring but it's very risky to think that what we ourselves is experiencing is happening everywhere.
The latest Goldman Sachs survey shows that the 2000 largest companies in the world, only have 23% of their workloads in the public cloud. Other surveys shows about the same numbers.
I have worked with a few of the companies on that list and they are not cloud centric at all. If I would guess I'd say they have maybe 5% in the cloud. But I wouldn't dare extrapolate that into thinking all of them are the same.
Another thing is that people lump things together. You're either running on-prem servers with no automation and no containers and nothing modern or you are 100% on cloud infrastructure and IaC. I don't think that's how things work. There might be huge difference just within the same company and different divisions.
CNCF doesn't mean public cloud. It's about the fastest growing open source 12 factor native applications. I never said all companies are on public cloud. I said companies want cloud native tooling. Those are two very different things.
Edit: not sure what happened but I somehow I posted with the keyboard accidentally before I was done typing.
I did however say "on prem servers", but didn't mean the only other option was public cloud. I was driving and didn't explain well. I meant that as legacy virtualization.
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@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
@hobbit666 said in KVM or VMWare:
Didn't get on with KVM but thats down to my skill set. (i.e. limited linux skills)
No business should run on just KVM. Until the most current iteration of Proxmox I would never recommend KVM for a business.
I have used it personally for years now. But that is different than running a business. A business needs simple easy to follow processes that are enabled by things like Proxmox, vCenter, and Hyper-V Manager.
This is probably the best "common sense" answer I've seen in a long time. (I haven't read the rest of this thread yet).
And people wonder why, despite it's hefty price tag, vmWare continues to dominate!
Free isn't always free! -
@fateknollogee said in KVM or VMWare:
@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
@hobbit666 said in KVM or VMWare:
Didn't get on with KVM but thats down to my skill set. (i.e. limited linux skills)
No business should run on just KVM. Until the most current iteration of Proxmox I would never recommend KVM for a business.
I have used it personally for years now. But that is different than running a business. A business needs simple easy to follow processes that are enabled by things like Proxmox, vCenter, and Hyper-V Manager.
This is probably the best "common sense" answer I've seen in a long time. (I haven't read the rest of this thread yet).
And people wonder why, despite it's hefty price tag, vmWare continues to dominate!
Free isn't always free!And in the SMB, the price tag just isn’t that hefty, unless you require HA.
