KVM or VMWare
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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.
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
@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.
List price is $576. At $50,000 a year salary that's only 15 hours of troubleshooting of any other tool before you make that back. Plus you get the benefits of easier automation, better integrations with other tools, etc.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
@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.
List price is $576. At $50,000 a year salary that's only 15 hours of troubleshooting of any other tool before you make that back. Plus you get the benefits of easier automation, better integrations with other tools, etc.
Right, and you'd never make that back in an SMB. That's my point. And there is no support at that number. YOu have to pay more to get support. And the licensing takes time. All things you can never make back because other products in the SMB work so well, require so little support... their TCO is so much lower than spending extra to them have the same or higher ongoing support cost just doesn't make any sense.
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
@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.
It's not that it is hefty, it is that it is not justifiable since it doesn't lower any costs anywhere else. A bad decision is a bad decision, using "but it isn't a big bad decision" isn't a good logical step to ever take.
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@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 "not free" is rarely "actually cheaper." That KVM takes less time and effort to support than VMware is being overlooked. VMware doesn't have some magical "easier to support" just because you pay for it. In fact, we often use more support just in the process of buying the VMware license than KVM requires in total.
The mantra that "the more you spend, the less you spend" is one of the craziest things in IT. There is some bizarre sales tactic that has promoted the idea that just by raising the cost on things, that they are actually cheaper. Trying explaining that to the CFO.
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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.
I agree. IT is a huge continuum of solutions with many, many axes. On prem, hosted. Cloud, VM, even physical. Modern apps, client-server, web, fat clients. Automated, manual. It goes on and on. And even withina single company there are after many of these and sometimes, all of them.
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@dashrender said in KVM or VMWare:
@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.
Postings tell us literally nothing of what skills exists. Only what skills someone is posting about, which may or may not be related to what is being hired. Even ignoring that almost all job postings are fake, knowing how many positions require "VMware" written by some HR person tells us nothing. Tons of people want CIsco skills for non-Cisco shops, VMware skills because they confuse that with cloud, and so forth. ANd those jobs might be temporary, or it's a small aspect of the job.
If you produce a billion job postings asking for VMware, that doesn't tell me that there is a single real job out there. If you fail to produce any, it doesn't tell me that everyone doesn't need VMware. It's not that it's the opposite, it just tells us completely nothing.
