What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Issues on EC2? We do a lot of telephony on Rackspace, which is Xen with OpenStack, and haven't had issues for years, not even before they were open stack. I'm very surprised that EC2 isn't as good or better.
There are some inherent issues with EC2 but they rarely cause issues with SMB customers. The real issue with EC2 is the elasticity it offers customers. There have been numerous times customers have had a cloud consultant downsize their pbx instance to save a few dollars, only for it to cause issues later on. At least with on-premises virtualisation resources don't change that often.
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@markds said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Issues on EC2? We do a lot of telephony on Rackspace, which is Xen with OpenStack, and haven't had issues for years, not even before they were open stack. I'm very surprised that EC2 isn't as good or better.
There are some inherent issues with EC2 but they rarely cause issues with SMB customers. The real issue with EC2 is the elasticity it offers customers. There have been numerous times customers have had a cloud consultant downsize their pbx instance to save a few dollars, only for it to cause issues later on. At least with on-premises virtualisation resources don't change that often.
A "cloud consultant"? Where does that person come from?
The elasticity of EC2 is supposed to be in spinning up other VMs, not constantly resizing existing ones.
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@scottalanmiller said:
A "cloud consultant"? Where does that person come from?
The cloud naturally <grin>. In essence its usually a potential MSP doing an audit and offering to save the customer $x.
The elasticity of EC2 is supposed to be in spinning up other VMs, not constantly resizing existing ones.
Agreed, but Amazon's online advisor tool, makes it too easy for people without proper understanding to perform actions. That being said the ability to terminate a VM, reattach the ESB to a new instance and spin up is quiet useful. If only Amazon would allow you to annotate an instance with "requires min 2 cores, 2gb ram"
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@markds said:
@scottalanmiller said:
A "cloud consultant"? Where does that person come from?
The cloud naturally <grin>. In essence its usually a potential MSP doing an audit and offering to save the customer $x.Ah. So not an EC2 issue, a company doing foolish things and/or hiring someone who doesn't know what they are doing to do foolish things. They might do the same thing on local resources too.
I thought that this was some kind of automated, Amazon provided tool that I did not know about
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@markds said:
Agreed, but Amazon's online advisor tool, makes it too easy for people without proper understanding to perform actions. That being said the ability to terminate a VM, reattach the ESB to a new instance and spin up is quiet useful. If only Amazon would allow you to annotate an instance with "requires min 2 cores, 2gb ram"
I have all that power to be foolish with local resources, too. And I use it often. We tune memory very tightly, for example, just because we can.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I thought that this was some kind of automated, Amazon provided tool that I did not know about
Just Trusted Advisor and the wrong people using it
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/ -
The "wrong people" being the key issue. Any top command will cause the same issues to happen even on physical hardware.
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@scottalanmiller Just thought of another upside. I think ESXi manages swapping better. Every vm has a preallocated swap file at the hypervisor level equal to its assigned memory. Meaning if you overcommit memory, and you run out of host memory you will begin to swap at the hypervisor level . The virtual machine doesn't know a swap file is being used and just the memory access suddenly got slow (ie true memory virtualisation). The swap file always exists ensuring that storage is more or less guaranteed.
With Xen memory overcommit seems to be a bit of an after thought, with only allowing balloning (via DMR) within the virtual machine and forcing it to use its own swap (if provisioned) within the virtual machine on the virtual disk. This is not only slower but also make the machine misreport its memory usage to tools like munin.
I think this was one of the reasons why Amazon disable balloning in EC2. It exposes too much information to the virtualised machine.
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@markds said:
@scottalanmiller Just thought of another upside. I think ESXi manages swapping better. Every vm has a preallocated swap file at the hypervisor level equal to its assigned memory.
Absolutely, VMware remains the general technology leader. No question there. Everyone plays catchup with few exceptions, one being PV and PVH in Xen that no one else can touch, and MirageOS, but the real question would be, in the SMB how many people are swapping on their VMs, and how important is hiding details if they do?
In the enterprise on massive scales, yes, there can be some huge advantages here. But this seems like a niche case in the SMB. The cost of VMware Essentials alone would be more than the total memory budget of an SMB. Use the money to buy enough hardware to avoid swapping and suddenly the performance advantage goes from nominally in VMware's court to dramatically in everyone elses', right? A normal SMB only has around 64GB - 128GB total server memory across all systems. $500 from not needing an up front VMware license would be enough to double that and still save money, and I don't see many SMBs running out of memory and swapping anyway.
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It has been half of a year and I am circling back around. No question that VMware has some unique advantages, but also it seems pretty clear that very few of these typically make sense in the SMB market (things like improved swap handling don't pay off when the additional licensing cost could have purchased more memory to avoid swapping, for example.) So only very specific deployments benefit from most of those things.
Now that XenServer 7 is out and Hyper-V 2016 is nearly out, how is VMware holding up in the SMB space? Are there new advancements to put VMware back onto the map, or have they fallen farther behind?
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@scottalanmiller I kind of look at it slightly a different way... In Aus, the essentials license costs $1,025, for 3 hosts and 3 years of support. Which to me is fairly cheap, esp given that you get phone support.
Therefore, one could rephrase the question as, should I pay $100 per year per host for the market leader. However, its not as simple as that....
If SMBs want VM based backups, then most likely will look at something like Veeam, which is ridiculously expensive. in comparison the the hyper-visor license. $3600 for 3 hosts.
So I think the real question how much will my entire infrastructure licensing costs be, between Xen and VMware platforms.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Therefore, one could rephrase the question as, should I pay $100 per year per host for the market leader. However, its not as simple as that....
market leaders are normally a bad thing... Cisco, Lenovo... that's where you pay too much and don't get good service. VMware is actually exceptionally good for a market leader, but it isn't market leading that makes them good. They manage to remain good in spite of it.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
If SMBs want VM based backups, then most likely will look at something like Veeam, which is ridiculously expensive. in comparison the the hyper-visor license. $3600 for 3 hosts.
But that is available for free with XenServer. So I think remains an ancillary concern. Yes, Veeam is very, very expensive, no doubt there. But I think that that just adds to the concerns about the VMware ecosystem, that the things that you want or need are all extra. You are always paying a premium to get what is free and included in the other products.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
So I think the real question how much will my entire infrastructure licensing costs be, between Xen and VMware platforms.
Sounds like $4,600 compared to $0.
Support is a factor, but very few SMBs use VMware support, I don't think, and even fewer use the Essentials Plus license that gets them that. Most go for Essentials which does not come with support.
If, for some reason, you need support AND need to pay for it up front, VMware Essentials Plus is not too horrible - but leaves you with a lot of limitations. How unlikely would it be for someone that feels that support is that valuable to also not have qualified people staffed that wouldn't need support and/or would find having more than three nodes under a single pane of glass valuable?
I think that there is serious merit there, but that it hits an extreme niche. If you need support for your hypervisor, something else is almost always wrong. And if you can be limited to just three hosts, while still needing support and big time features, I would guess that you are in the massive minority.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
@scottalanmiller I kind of look at it slightly a different way... In Aus, the essentials license costs $1,025, for 3 hosts and 3 years of support.
Ah, just realized, you said Essentials in Australia. It is similar cost in the US but comes with zero support. So you get nothing that XenServer doesn't come with for free. Less, actually, since there is good free community support with XenServer to a level that Vmware doesn't really have. Both have some, of course.
People often mention support with Essentials but at least in the US, it's a myth. Only Essentials Plus has support.
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Vmware's entry level supported product in the US is $4,500. So with Veeam is just over $8,000. That's not for three years, that's just up front for the first year! That's non-trivial. Not many SMBs can start throwing $8,000 around without blinking. If they needed to spend it, sure, even someone at home can drop that if they have to. But when a lot of these SMBs have total server infrastructure budgets of only $4,000 to $15,000 and you want to tack on as much as 200% higher cost just for software that they could get for free from multiple other top tier vendors, that's pretty significant.
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Essentials, at $500 up front and $65 more per year does allow you to pay $300 per incident for support. But that's pretty crappy and is very different from coming with support. It's just access to buy support. Like Windows products. They are unsupported, but you are free to purchase support as you go. VMware has a much better support reputation, of course, but pay as you go product support tends to be bad.
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@scottalanmiller I think it really comes down to what you are familiar with... An hour saved by using VMware more than pays for the license cost. At least with the figures I put forward.
Even if you don't get support there is time saved in the fact that VMware is more prevalent / supported. VMware is by far the widest supported HV (which is what I meant by them being the market leader). This means you are always guaranteed to get driver support etc....
There are alternatives to Veeam, which are far cheaper. I was just stating it to show where the VMware platform falls short.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
@scottalanmiller I think it really comes down to what you are familiar with... An hour saved by using VMware more than pays for the license cost. At least with the figures I put forward.
You are making way more per hour than the people that I know in the SMB space! Even with your numbers we'd be looking at a day or two of labour, minimum, from normal IT staff. And having worked with both, I normally find that VMware has the larger learning curve (licensing alone tips the scales to XenServer's favour) with possibly break even up front but XenServer winning over time more and more as its ease of use and lower cost continues to be to its advantage.
Even knowing VMware well and XenServer not at all, the time needed to switch is only a few hours. Easy recuperated from a single licensing research incident for Vmware.
Effort especially is a place where XenServer wins pretty heavily, IMHO.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Even if you don't get support there is time saved in the fact that VMware is more prevalent / supported. VMware is by far the widest supported HV (which is what I meant by them being the market leader). This means you are always guaranteed to get driver support etc....
I'd call this only kind of true. Because Xen and KVM leverage the vastly larger and more broadly supported Linux ecosystem. So they have much broader driver support. Many times larger. So if driver support is a goal (I'm not saying that it should be) then Vmware loses big time. Xen and KVM would be tops, Hyper-V next to last and VMware a distant last with only a small fraction of the driver support of all of its competitors.
Now, that being said, I think that VMware's lack of driver support is actually an advantage that it has - it essentially blocks questionable products from being able to run VMware ESXi by lacking driver support. It's very effective at curtailing some common problems. But it limits the product. If your IT department has good processes you can voluntarily bring these advantages to Xen or whatever, too.
Xen and KVM also have enterprise software RAID drivers built in. And storage replication technology built in. These are non-trivial features in many cases.
