XenServer Backup
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Question, does the paid one include the ability to backup?
Does anyone see this like VMWare? Most features included, but a critical one isn't to push you to a paid version? lol Not complaining, just observing.
Except it IS all free. All of it. That's the difference.
VMware is almost nothing free. Literally, just about nothing. Both XenServer and Xen Orchestra are both completely free. Every feature.
With XenServer, there isn't even someone to buy more features from. The Linux Foundation doesn't have any sort of sales system.
Support - and the huge warnings around support are the issue here. When you're running a critical service to your business, the last thing you want to have happen is a failure, and when the boss comes to you and says - so what are you doing to resolve that - you answer, I'm waiting on someone to respond to a forum post I put up.
Is this kind of support often enough, sure. But it may not be enough for everyone.
I'm not sure how often XO would be considered critical though. It doesn't do anything outside of management, well unless you are using it for your backups too... then you would probably have issue but still if it were down no one would notice immediately.
On top of that you could easily purchase support for XenServer from several different vendors. Just because the manufacturer doesn't offer support doesn't mean a 3rd party doesn't.
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Hi lads!
Remind me to create my next startup doing only SaaS software and without any public code ^^ (just kidding, I love open source
).@anonymous : I would like to eat at the end of the month, and to do that, I need some income. My team think the same (damn it!
). We are all working on XO every day. We are not Google, we are a small company working only on XO.So we started to target companies and sell them a turnkney solution: XOA, which is the appliance running XO + an easy updater + support on a controlled environment.
But in the same time, because we love Open Source, all XO features are also released on GitHub. That's not the same audience: companies want something working out of the box and support. Individuals are different. And we even took the time to document the installation from the sources ^^ If you don't want to pay, play with the sources
About XOA, it runs on Debian, but it should work on any Linux, even MacOS or Windows!
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Question, does the paid one include the ability to backup?
Does anyone see this like VMWare? Most features included, but a critical one isn't to push you to a paid version? lol Not complaining, just observing.
Except it IS all free. All of it. That's the difference.
VMware is almost nothing free. Literally, just about nothing. Both XenServer and Xen Orchestra are both completely free. Every feature.
With XenServer, there isn't even someone to buy more features from. The Linux Foundation doesn't have any sort of sales system.
Support - and the huge warnings around support are the issue here. When you're running a critical service to your business, the last thing you want to have happen is a failure, and when the boss comes to you and says - so what are you doing to resolve that - you answer, I'm waiting on someone to respond to a forum post I put up.
Is this kind of support often enough, sure. But it may not be enough for everyone.
But you can buy support if you want. You are talking features, not support. Paying for support and paying for features are two different things.
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@coliver Will be more critical feature after feature. When it's only for basic management as an admin, you can just use the Free XOA anyway.
Backups can be more critical, and well, that's exactly the point of Starter
Then you'll have the possibility to use it extensively with other people thanks to ACLs (VM delegation for example), thus it's more critical.
And finally, you can use it at scale, when Premium can deliver the most of its potential.
We got customers with huge need of software support (maybe you know a small entity in US, which is about flying stuff, starting with "F" and finishing by a "A", with another "A" in the middle
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@olivier First of all, thanks for your reply!
Second, I want you to eat too! All I am asking is that you consider making XOA with all the features available for Home Lab use only. This is pretty common in the industry. I know your concerned that if you did that, no one would pay for it anymore, so I suggest you limit it to 1 or 2 (hopefully 2) hosts.
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@anonymous said:
@olivier First of all, thanks for your reply!
Second, I want you to eat too! All I am asking is that you consider making XOA with all the features available for Home Lab use only. This is pretty common in the industry. I know your concerned that if you did that, no one would pay for it anymore, so I suggest you limit it to 1 or 2 (hopefully 2) hosts.
How would he be able to do this, and ensure that he's not getting ripped off?
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@anonymous That's something we discussed a lot here. Limiting to a number of host or VM or whatever will need to spend some times to develop this feature. And because our working bandwidth is not infinite, we prefer to focus on XO features first.
Check the number of contributors on GitHub: we are a VERY small team ^^
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Question, does the paid one include the ability to backup?
Does anyone see this like VMWare? Most features included, but a critical one isn't to push you to a paid version? lol Not complaining, just observing.
Except it IS all free. All of it. That's the difference.
VMware is almost nothing free. Literally, just about nothing. Both XenServer and Xen Orchestra are both completely free. Every feature.
With XenServer, there isn't even someone to buy more features from. The Linux Foundation doesn't have any sort of sales system.
Support - and the huge warnings around support are the issue here. When you're running a critical service to your business, the last thing you want to have happen is a failure, and when the boss comes to you and says - so what are you doing to resolve that - you answer, I'm waiting on someone to respond to a forum post I put up.
Is this kind of support often enough, sure. But it may not be enough for everyone.
But you can buy support if you want. You are talking features, not support. Paying for support and paying for features are two different things.
I agree, the features themselves are all free - but it doesn't appear that way. When you download the free OVA, it doesn't include backup - it says, you want backup, buy the paid version.
Weren't you the one who said that SMBs don't buy support, they buy software. If the vendor is lucky, the buyer will continue to buy support year after year. If not, the vendor got at least one purchase.
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@DustinB3403 By developing the need of a constant connection to our server to check some stuff. Something like that will pop in the next month (to allow a more flexible invoicing on XO usage for a certain kind of customers).
But that's a lot of time just to think to protect the product and not developing features. I prefer releasing cool features first ^^ And you? (talking to the whole topic
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@DustinB3403 The 2 host limit helps, but I guess you right, in a smaller company this could happen....
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@anonymous said:
@olivier First of all, thanks for your reply!
Second, I want you to eat too! All I am asking is that you consider making XOA with all the features available for Home Lab use only. This is pretty common in the industry. I know your concerned that if you did that, no one would pay for it anymore, so I suggest you limit it to 1 or 2 (hopefully 2) hosts.
I too thank you, @olivier, thanks for replying.
I disagree with the above, I don't think you should include backups in the XOA, you should get rid of the free XOA completely. Reduce the offerings down to install from source and the paid version. Additionally, make it hugely known that the differences are only in ease of deployment and support, not features.
You want free - absolutely fine, you have to work a bit for it.
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@Dashrender said:
I too thank you, @olivier, thanks for replying.
I disagree with the above, I don't think you should include backups in the XOA, you should get rid of the free XOA completely. Reduce the offerings down to install from source and the paid version. Additionally, make it hugely known that the differences are only in ease of deployment and support, not features.
You want free - absolutely fine, you have to work a bit for it.
If you can't do what I suggested, I am fully in support of this idea. At least then it is clear
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@Dashrender said:
@anonymous said:
@olivier First of all, thanks for your reply!
Second, I want you to eat too! All I am asking is that you consider making XOA with all the features available for Home Lab use only. This is pretty common in the industry. I know your concerned that if you did that, no one would pay for it anymore, so I suggest you limit it to 1 or 2 (hopefully 2) hosts.
I too thank you, @olivier, thanks for replying.
I disagree with the above, I don't think you should include backups in the XOA, you should get rid of the free XOA completely. Reduce the offerings down to install from source and the paid version. Additionally, make it hugely known that the differences are only in ease of deployment and support, not features.
You want free - absolutely fine, you have to work a bit for it.
I agree, if you want to free version, here build it.
If you want a turn key solution, here pay for it.
And @olivier I totally want features, that are amazing. Like Delta Backup capabilities.
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@olivier said:
@anonymous That's something we discussed a lot here. Limiting to a number of host or VM or whatever will need to spend some times to develop this feature. And because our working bandwidth is not infinite, we prefer to focus on XO features first.
Check the number of contributors on GitHub: we are a VERY small team ^^
From my perspective, I think just making the "Build from Source" option is visible and clearly states that it is inclusive. We are so used to products where all the functionality is in non-open source add-ons that we just assume that building from source would have the same limitations as the appliance. I know way too many people that looked at XO and immediately looked elsewhere because of the assumption that even for testing that there was no free option.
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@Dashrender said:
Weren't you the one who said that SMBs don't buy support, they buy software. If the vendor is lucky, the buyer will continue to buy support year after year. If not, the vendor got at least one purchase.
Yes, that was me. And in doing so was trying to point out that this is one of the misconceptions and failings of the SMB - not understanding that the two are different things. That's why they keep overspending on Windows and VMware, because they are confused about what they are paying for.
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XOA Free is a quick way to test the product (and we even have users totally happy about it, and using it everyday for basic tasks).
We got a trial, which is relatively easy to access (about 100 new trial users per month), so it serves the purpose to make people discover without having to pay anything.
Sincerely, if a company can't afford a "Starter" plan for using a basic backup solution (without limitations!), they won't be become a paid customer anytime.
The only way to please (almost) everyone, is to have something which seems totally free, like Facebook or Google, even if it's not in reality. But this strategy can only work on huge volumes and not in our niche market.
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@Dashrender said:
I disagree with the above, I don't think you should include backups in the XOA, you should get rid of the free XOA completely. Reduce the offerings down to install from source and the paid version.
From a business point of view this isn't a good idea at all. I bet many, many company's start with the free version (because why not, it's free) and end up upgrading for features and support. By removing it completely, many company's will never consider/try it.
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This thread is more a business thread than a technical one now ^^ But yeah, this is the point: having people liking your product but test it first. That's also the goal of the trial version. It helped us a lot to convert people from Free to paid plans.
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@anonymous said:
@Dashrender said:
I disagree with the above, I don't think you should include backups in the XOA, you should get rid of the free XOA completely. Reduce the offerings down to install from source and the paid version.
From a business point of view this isn't a good idea at all. I bet many, many company's start with the free version (because why not, it's free) and end up upgrading for features and support. By removing it completely, many company's will never consider/try it.
So you'd rather pay for features, then for support? That seems insane. I always want better functionality and features, support I can deal with if something isn't working as expected when it comes to it.
Learn to lift the fork.....
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@olivier said:
Sincerely, if a company can't afford a "Starter" plan for using a basic backup solution (without limitations!), they won't be become a paid customer anytime.
Not sure if I agree there. Well, with the "afford" bit, yes. But one of the things that I know affects my decision making is the availability of a fully free version. I've been places paying for RHEL, but the staff would not have stood for it if CentOS wasn't free for them to use at home. I know lots of places that will pay for XenServer, but need their engineers to have free access to Xen at home.
Remember that engineers drive business buying decisions in good shops. Shops need to know that their staff has access to learn, has been learning, has been testing. And often we test years before deploying. XO as a product to buy and pay for support is something I never even thought of recommending to shops before - because lacking a totally free version to install myself I wasn't going to invest a lot of money in a supported version or use a very limited free version at home or in the lab to learn how it might work or not work for them.
I think the fully free options matter more than people often realize for enabling the purchase of bigger support contracts.
