Why is VMWare considered so often
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@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson I'm not here to attack the product at all (I don't even know what half of the acronyms meant). I'm not building an hypervisor.
I'm just here to try to survive with the crumbs left from server virt market, without leaving my philosophy (making Free software).
There's a lot of crumbs (maybe even spare slices of bread) in the hypervisor market (especially Xen) for easier to use management stacks and tool chains. Look at what Scale Computing is doing in going after the SMB market. There's a lot of people with 2-12VM's 1-2 IT guys, and they are not going to the cloud.
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@John-Nicholson I never searched the VMWare contribution into the OSS, so I can be wrong but I never heard a lot people contributing to it (on major projects not those tailored only for VMWare itself)
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Anyway, my point was:
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Free software is great and powerful, you just trade this against time to understand how it works (or cross your fingers, but it's not acceptable in production). Note that you could mitigate the risk in different ways but you should understand most of your infrastructure.
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Support/Service on proprietary software can be useful if you have money and you don't care about what's happening here (ie not your core business)
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Support/Service on Open Source software is a kind of best of both worlds.
But that's my opinion
One of the benefit of open source is that there are multiple parties contributing to it that you are not having to pay. (The challenge is their needs may not align with yours, although this happens with commercial software also). The SMB is perpetually in an awkward drafting of larger enterprises hoping for lower cost solutions that solve their problems to fall off the truck. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When I worked for a SMB I'd always grown when I saw new versions come out that supported 10K VM's instead of 5000VMs and so forth...
The VMware VCSA uses Postgres, Photon Linux (you can find on GitHub). The major proprietary "Secret sauce" is the 150MB worth of proprietary VIB's on a host and the ESXi kernel itself. If you include GPL drivers, BusyBox, Linux, Tomcat/Apache, I think your typical vSphere deployment actually has more "Free" code on a per MB basis than not...
Have you actually read the license contract? It's so horrendous I wonder how anyone actually uses VMware for anything. When an audit happen, it's crazy town time, and we all know audits happen.
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@John-Nicholson That's what we are doing on XenServer market (for a lot of reasons, especially the API itself is good enough to stay agent less on our side)
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@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Have you actually read the license contract? It's so horrendous I wonder how anyone actually uses VMware for anything. When an audit happen, it's crazy town time, and we all know audits happen.
I've never seen/heard anyone not under an ELA audited by VMware. (ELA's are a $250K minimum). VMware audits are conducted by a 3rd party professional auditing company (It's one of the big 4 firms IT auditing wing if I'm not mistaken). They work with your IT team to run a quick discovery tool then get out of your hair. It's painless, and given a lot of ELA's are on weird burn down/token/consumption type agreements it is actually helpful to the customer to know where they stand against their ELA.
If you have any examples of VMware staff or auditors abusing customers on this, or maliciously lying please PM me the details so I can report them to our Ethics team.
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@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson That's what we are doing on XenServer market (for a lot of reasons, especially the API itself is good enough to stay agent less on our side)
We've gotten rather militant with API's (You can't ship a VMware feature without a public API for it). This is part of why it's taken so long to get to the point of replacing the C# and Flex client, was the amount of stuff managed by the evil kludge (known as the inventory service). Everyone thought it was flash that was the speed problem...
I used to not think API's where that important but then I saw the error of my ways....
I used to not think API's where that important but then I saw the error of my ways.... -
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Have you actually read the license contract? It's so horrendous I wonder how anyone actually uses VMware for anything. When an audit happen, it's crazy town time, and we all know audits happen.
I've never seen/heard anyone not under an ELA audited by VMware. (ELA's are a $250K minimum). VMware audits are conducted by a 3rd party professional auditing company (It's one of the big 4 firms IT auditing wing if I'm not mistaken). They work with your IT team to run a quick discovery tool then get out of your hair. It's painless, and given a lot of ELA's are on weird burn down/token/consumption type agreements it is actually helpful to the customer to know where they stand against their ELA.
If you have any examples of VMware staff or auditors abusing customers on this, or maliciously lying please PM me the details so I can report them to our Ethics team.
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
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@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
Also can you please PM me any ethics violations your seeing from our field or auditors? I didn't get it.
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There is a middle ground between everything known and using proprietary software everywhere.
Some people consider this is a philosophical debate, some don't.
My point of view is transparency is the key, value is in the service/experience, not the (closed) code itself. At least, this is how it evolves (see the proportion of OSS in companies 15 y ago vs now).
/my 2 cents
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language
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@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language
I hated that class!
BTW, out of curiosity i looked it up. Redhat does licensing audits too.
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language
I hated that class!
BTW, out of curiosity i looked it up. Redhat does licensing audits too.
Of course they do. I've never heard of them collecting crazy amounts of impertinent information for their audits.
As we're on XenServer and CentOS... we have zero auditing cost, and zero risk of a second hand company loosing that information.
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@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language
I hated that class!
BTW, out of curiosity i looked it up. Redhat does licensing audits too.
Of course they do. I've never heard of them collecting crazy amounts of impertinent information for their audits.
As we're on XenServer and CentOS... we have zero auditing cost, and zero risk of a second hand company loosing that information.
WTF dude? Take off the tin foil hat.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
At this small of scale what's wrong with agents? Any decent backup product using Windows 2008 On VM's can do image level, bare metal restore (or V2P, P2V etc). Symantec had this 3 years ago even.
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@JaredBusch said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?
Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....
Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.
Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right
I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language
I hated that class!
BTW, out of curiosity i looked it up. Redhat does licensing audits too.
Of course they do. I've never heard of them collecting crazy amounts of impertinent information for their audits.
As we're on XenServer and CentOS... we have zero auditing cost, and zero risk of a second hand company loosing that information.
WTF dude? Take off the tin foil hat.
I don't wear a tin foil hat, but we have been served 3 warrants over the past 4 years. None of them turned out to be valid, or any criminal investigation happening that would justify a warrant. So yes, I'm freaking paranoid as hell, because I know the government is out to shut us down.
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
At this small of scale what's wrong with agents? Any decent backup product using Windows 2008 On VM's can do image level, bare metal restore (or V2P, P2V etc). Symantec had this 3 years ago even.
We use agents for almost everything. Our CM takes care of setting it up during provisioning and any changes after. Super easy.
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@Dashrender said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Wow.. that maintenance costs seems a bit high, but I guess it's only $311 per processor. I'll have to lookup what my customer just paid for their maintenance.
When its 3AM and you have to restore something and need help you don't question what you paid for backup vendor support. It's one of those things I couldn't imagine going without.
Years ago, I had a DRDB cluster go split brain on me, and not having real enterprise support to deal with the issue (and mess of sorting the data back together) made me realize why storage/backups are normally something you normally have enterprise support vs. build your own. I lost 3 days of my life to that mess and still want it back...
Just in case anyone missed this.... DRBD certainly has enterprise support options. Linbit does this exclusively. John didn't have that support package, but it is available out there.
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@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
See we can all get along. One thing that Xen/XenServer has to go up against is the massive amount of training and operational experience that is in the field.
But in the enterprise space, you expect that for any product. In the SMB space, you expect good ones to either have it "luckily", often through a team that is just passionate, or through working with their ITSP/MSP whose purpose is to get enterprise level skills to their level. It's shops doing other things, like not having a good IT staffing strategy and trying to run with one or two people, that then see things like a lack of XS support skills as a reflection of that other problem. XS isn't the problem there, nor the lack of skills for it, but just one of likely many, many unsupportable items caused by attempting to build an in house team to do something that is not in the wheelhouse of the business.
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@travisdh1 To be clear, VMware (and Microsoft, and RedHat) don't want to shut you down.
They want.... Your money. That's it really. If they shut you down then they can't get your money.Now if you receive a fake warrant you need to call the FBI or U.S Marshals as they will very much arrest whoever sent you a fake warrant (Got a friend who's an FBI agent, who would love to do nothing more than throw someone in jail who does this). Now if the federal GOVERNMENT is presenting fake warrants, you need to file suit in federal court against them (and go to the press).
Just to be clear, your not doing business with Sudan, Iran, North Korea or Cuba by any chance....
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@scottalanmiller said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@Dashrender said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Wow.. that maintenance costs seems a bit high, but I guess it's only $311 per processor. I'll have to lookup what my customer just paid for their maintenance.
When its 3AM and you have to restore something and need help you don't question what you paid for backup vendor support. It's one of those things I couldn't imagine going without.
Years ago, I had a DRDB cluster go split brain on me, and not having real enterprise support to deal with the issue (and mess of sorting the data back together) made me realize why storage/backups are normally something you normally have enterprise support vs. build your own. I lost 3 days of my life to that mess and still want it back...
Just in case anyone missed this.... DRBD certainly has enterprise support options. Linbit does this exclusively. John didn't have that support package, but it is available out there.
I don't think they existed back then. That said, One of the benefits of a modern HCI system (Like Scale Computing, VxRAIL, etc) is reducing the number of people you have to call. If you have an outage if you have 3 vendors that gets fun (and why your better off being fronted by a 3rd party IT service provider who's fronting all this stuff) or even better just putting your stuff on a hosting provider's cloud who takes care of all this for you (Where a LOT of Xen/XenServer adoption is).
