@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

The fact it is wasn't a poor decision, just a more expensive one to use SQL Server. Nothing broken.

That's not how IT ever works. Broken is not a definition of good or bad. Not being the most cost effective solution for the business by definition is what makes it poor. That is the sole criteria by which IT is judged.

You can never say it was not a poor decision without knowing how and why the original decision was made, there is no ability to evaluate that. What we do know is that in decades of doing this evaluation, I've never found a company that made this choice AND it wasn't poor once analyzed.

In the 1990s, with SQL Server 7, this was sometimes a good choice. By the early 2000s, that era had essentially ended.

But equally, we cannot say it was. I have to just go based on what senior management, directors, boards are saying... 'We use SQL Server'.

Anyway, off to bed. Great discussing this with you... Best, Jim

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Yeah, agree. But, the development team are the team who select what they want to use, for reasons I'm not privy to... they wanted SQL Server when they assessed it a long time ago, and that's what the solution has been built on.

It sounds like layer after layer of business and political failures resulting in IT trying to find expensive technical band-aids to poor management oversight. Not a good situation. Good that there is enough money to pay for some fixes, but bad that money is needed to fix things that never needed to be broken.

I really don't know the reasons why back in day one, the decision was to use this stack. That was decided a long time ago, and i'n never at this stage be able to get them to change their entire stack. Maybe it was a good decision, maybe bad... I don't know as I wasn't there. The fact it is wasn't a poor decision, just a more expensive one to use SQL Server. Nothing broken.

The fact is, we are highly available in a range of different ways, and IT can do what we need when we need without affecting customers. In addition, the company is happy with the cost, and know Linux is cheaper, and are happy to be paying more to have a happy team of developers using the products they are most used to and happy with. That's not broken. More expensive, yes - but not broken and entirely fine for the business as management are happy with our profit and figures.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Yeah, agree. But, the development team are the team who select what they want to use, for reasons I'm not privy to... they wanted SQL Server when they assessed it a long time ago, and that's what the solution has been built on.

It sounds like layer after layer of business and political failures resulting in IT trying to find expensive technical band-aids to poor management oversight. Not a good situation. Good that there is enough money to pay for some fixes, but bad that money is needed to fix things that never needed to be broken.

I really don't know the reasons why back in day one, the decision was to use this stack. That was decided a long time ago, and i'n never at this stage be able to get them to change their entire stack. Maybe it was a good decision, maybe bad... I don't know as I wasn't there. The fact it is wasn't a poor decision, just a more expensive one to use SQL Server. Nothing broken.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Same licenses we need for Windows Server and SQL Server as that's the db of choice for our devs... all the same... but no VMWare.

Different discussion, but why would you ever let devs have a say in that (that's an IT decision, not a dev one and I come from a dev background) and this is the exact scenario I warn SMBs about all of the time - building technical debt into the bespoke systems making little things unnecessarily costly. That means that every penny of Windows, SQL Server and lots of your admin costs are all created by the devs. Has anyone looked at the devs to see what kind of impact letting them make those kinds of decisions on IT is having on the business?

As someone that manages dev teams, while there are insanely rare exceptions where that kind of stuff makes sense, it just doesn't make sense. Windows and especially SQL Server as dev platforms are huge red flags to something being really wrong and proper business analysis failing. Again... always an exception somewhere. But "dev preference" or "dev skills" certainly would never apply in that case. It huge money that we are talking.

Yeah, agree. But, the development team are the team who select what they want to use, for reasons I'm not privy to... they wanted SQL Server when they assessed it a long time ago, and that's what the solution has been built on. I hope their reasons were good. But, its still what we have to use.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

So, is memory of the VM stored on the shares storage too or something, so when the node fails, a partner can instantly grab the running state of the VM?

No, memory would be too slow to do that. Your memory would be limited to the speed of a disk. Imagine if ALL memory was the speed of swap! Eek.

HA doesn't maintain memory state. It just recovers in a few seconds.
FT keeps the CPU and memory in lock step. So both systems have the VMs loaded into memory. So all transactions are live in both places. Everything is live between the two. Same as mainframes.

Ahhh, I see. Now that's cool. So, the VMs are sort of warm mirror, and when node1 dies, node 2 would be fairly instant. That's cool... and is one reason why i'd consider VMWare

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I will have to read up on that... but my comments again, were in relation to people saying vMotion = HA etc.

People is Dustin and it's established that he didn't know what either was at all. He thought vMotion was something WAY different from HA, in fact. All of his info was wrong.

vMotion and HA are different, and free from everyone but Vmware. Let's move past that. No need to keep responding to that misinformation as if anyone else believes it. That was one person off on a tangent. Now in the real world, they are different things, and free.

Agreed you know, chatting face to face is such an easier process! Darn internet. Lol.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Where is the reckless spending? Its an extra 1 x Windows Server Standard license (£900). That's it.
The host we would need anyway is doing HA with VMWare... which to have vMotion with (something OOB with Hyper-V), is around 4-5k like I said earlier.

It's an extra physical server, extra Windows licenses, and SQL Server Standard SA upgrade. Plus the power draw, maintenance time and so forth. It adds up. Given that in the US, any server purchase is nearly impossible, having two often means you can't get funds to maintain them. Nearly doubling the budget is rarely trivial.

Why would you need VMware anyway? that makes no sense. We already covered that Vmware would never apply in a company of your size. Failover with someone else would be free. Of course, what we are pointing out, is that likely you don't need that either.

The post was asking when to consider VMWare over Hyper-V, and at an early stage HA came up as a reason... hence saying what I am saying. For any HA, you would need that second server, even with HyperV. So if you need that you need that, its not double cost... its needed. To have the second server for HA, with VMWare... is even more cost.

If you need HA, you have to have that second server. So its not an additional cost - as both VMWare and HyperV, if you need HA would have that cost.

IF you need HA, you need two servers. But HA is free beyond that (except with Vmware.) But first you have to decide what the value of HA is to your business. Most SMBs, (like 95%) should not have HA.

Agree. And for us, we do need it. And as I tried to show, we do that without having to license VMWare just through using Hyper-V. Same kit. Same licenses we need for Windows Server and SQL Server as that's the db of choice for our devs... all the same... but no VMWare.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

2 x Windows Server Standard with SA.
1 x SQL Svr, 4 core.
Done....

WOW... so expensive!

Well, plus the second server. This stuff adds up. It is almost half the cost to not have the HA, and nearly all of the cost for Windows.

In percentage of total cost, it's enormous. Is it a lot for the needs of the business, no way to tell. But in the SMB, those are absolutely big numbers to most companies.

No. Those are the total licenses. You don't need to duplicate that number for the second server.

You do, except for SQL Server. Windows gives you two VMs per host. You need two hosts of licenses instead of one. That's double.

Node1: Windows Server License x 1 = 2 VMs of Windows Server allowed.
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS.
VM2 = Windows Server Standard with SQL Svr Standard. (1 copy of SQL Svr standard allows you to install SQL Server on a second windows server standard, for free, and use high availability groups for the database).

Node2: Windows Server License x 1
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS
VM2 = Windows Server Standard (with the allowed free version of SQL Server for high availability groups).

In total... 2 copies of Windows Server Standard with SA (£1800 total), plus 1 x SQL Server set of licenses for however many cores you want to license.

Yes, SQL Server is expensive... but its something most SMBs have and the standard version allows you to get to a highly available application level setup.

No, this is wrong.

You have to double everything if you ever think you are going to migrate servers for routine maintenance.

With this... you don't have to migrate servers at all. Why cant you see that. You can set HAProxy to point to the webserver on node 2, and run powershell to move the availability group to the SQL Server on node 2... then you can do whatever the hell you want to node 1. No need to migrate anything....... BUT.... if you wanted to, you still can as Hyper-V has the ability to move a VM from node1, to node2, without shares storage at all, for FREE! VMWare needs vMotion, which was NOT.

Do you have a link to the "free" install of SQL Server Standard? I'm not finding it on MS' site. Their high level licensing docs state otherwise.

Passive only, and it's not free, you have to buy SA to get it, so while the second node is cheaper, it isn't free.

I was just looking for that myself also, I did say SA previously (I think).
Yes passive, but that's fine for us and brings us online in mere seconds if something happens. With VMWare, am I correct that the 1 x SQL Server on node1, would have to boot on node2 should something happen? - like I said before, I could still be wrong on that...

HA with anything will be seconds, probably not as fast as SQL Server failover, but similar. You rarely notice it at all, but a trading app would show the hiccup, for example. A nuclear power plant, you'd not want it.

FT with Vmware or Xen (free) will do it without losing a single network packet. Failover can be instant.

I will have to read up on that... but my comments again, were in relation to people saying vMotion = HA etc.

So, is memory of the VM stored on the shares storage too or something, so when the node fails, a partner can instantly grab the running state of the VM? [probably way off, just finding it difficult to see how the running state of a VM on node1 in VMWare, would go down if that node died and not have to boot up on node2]... Here I could be way off as not done much in VMWare... just knew vMotion != HA.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Where is the reckless spending? Its an extra 1 x Windows Server Standard license (£900). That's it.
The host we would need anyway is doing HA with VMWare... which to have vMotion with (something OOB with Hyper-V), is around 4-5k like I said earlier.

It's an extra physical server, extra Windows licenses, and SQL Server Standard SA upgrade. Plus the power draw, maintenance time and so forth. It adds up. Given that in the US, any server purchase is nearly impossible, having two often means you can't get funds to maintain them. Nearly doubling the budget is rarely trivial.

Why would you need VMware anyway? that makes no sense. We already covered that Vmware would never apply in a company of your size. Failover with someone else would be free. Of course, what we are pointing out, is that likely you don't need that either.

The post was asking when to consider VMWare over Hyper-V, and at an early stage HA came up as a reason... hence saying what I am saying. For any HA, you would need that second server, even with HyperV. So if you need that you need that, its not double cost... its needed. To have the second server for HA, with VMWare... is even more cost.

If you need HA, you have to have that second server. So its not an additional cost - as both VMWare and HyperV, if you need HA would have that cost.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.

If you have 24x7 needs, that can make sense. But admins after hours is free in all but the oddest of cases. Literally no cost at all 99% of the time.

Sadly, that is often the case. But I like to be better than that. I don't want my teams staying late to do work. They have family. Go home. Here, you can do what you need during your normal day. Go home without a phone always on. Turn off and chill. That is an important thing.

That is horrible business process thinking.

How? How on earth is me wanting teams to go home and forget work as were 'good' horrible? Are your subordinates nothing to you?! Insane. How many hosts on Spiceworks do we get about employers asking for unreasonable out of hours from their overworked staff... that is horrible.

Wanting staff to go home and forget about work and enjoy their time is absolutely not horrible in any way.

You are right, it's great thinking. But it isn't what we are talking about. We're not seeing how what you are doing helps the employees go home early, we only see how it makes IT less valuable to the business and makes the business less competitive.

If your key concern was employee happiness, wouldn't you keep them at home full time and let them work whenever it makes sense? That's what both @JaredBusch and I do with our staff. So to you, you are being nice and letting people go home early and spending extra money to let them do that. But to us, you are not giving your staff flexibility to be home all the time and making them have less leverage for better benefits by lowering their value to the business (and ergo lowering the value of the business.)

I get that you want to let them go home and forget about work. But that sounds less than ideal to me. Working for the Fortune 100, I had it better. I totally appreciate the feel that you think you are being really nice, but I feel like you might be missing the big picture or at least not seeing why we don't see it as giving the employees anything while the business pays for something of possibly no value.

I'm not from fortune 100 perspective. I'm from SMB perspective. Regardless of what I want, most SMBs want arses in seats during the normal business day. Therefore, since they have to be 8am - 5pm, because companies want people I seats, when they go home...... they go home.

Right, so the issue is that you have a bad culture that doesn't value the people and you are working to curtail that as much as possible. I kind of get that, but would management feel the same way if IT was being more aggressively valuable? Has IT ever presented what reckless spending that is for the company to do and how against the interests of the business it is? Is the business aware that it is paying thousands of dollars in licensing for that one bit of bad culture?
3

Where is the reckless spending? Its an extra 1 x Windows Server Standard license (£900). That's it.
The host we would need anyway is doing HA with VMWare... which to have vMotion with (something OOB with Hyper-V), is around 4-5k like I said earlier.

I realize that SMBs in the UK spend nothing like the US, but to us what you are describing is huge money for normal SMBs.

£900 here, for the places I've seen, is cheap.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

2 x Windows Server Standard with SA.
1 x SQL Svr, 4 core.
Done....

WOW... so expensive!

Well, plus the second server. This stuff adds up. It is almost half the cost to not have the HA, and nearly all of the cost for Windows.

In percentage of total cost, it's enormous. Is it a lot for the needs of the business, no way to tell. But in the SMB, those are absolutely big numbers to most companies.

No. Those are the total licenses. You don't need to duplicate that number for the second server.

You do, except for SQL Server. Windows gives you two VMs per host. You need two hosts of licenses instead of one. That's double.

Node1: Windows Server License x 1 = 2 VMs of Windows Server allowed.
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS.
VM2 = Windows Server Standard with SQL Svr Standard. (1 copy of SQL Svr standard allows you to install SQL Server on a second windows server standard, for free, and use high availability groups for the database).

Node2: Windows Server License x 1
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS
VM2 = Windows Server Standard (with the allowed free version of SQL Server for high availability groups).

In total... 2 copies of Windows Server Standard with SA (£1800 total), plus 1 x SQL Server set of licenses for however many cores you want to license.

Yes, SQL Server is expensive... but its something most SMBs have and the standard version allows you to get to a highly available application level setup.

No, this is wrong.

You have to double everything if you ever think you are going to migrate servers for routine maintenance.

With this... you don't have to migrate servers at all. Why cant you see that. You can set HAProxy to point to the webserver on node 2, and run powershell to move the availability group to the SQL Server on node 2... then you can do whatever the hell you want to node 1. No need to migrate anything....... BUT.... if you wanted to, you still can as Hyper-V has the ability to move a VM from node1, to node2, without shares storage at all, for FREE! VMWare needs vMotion, which was NOT.

Do you have a link to the "free" install of SQL Server Standard? I'm not finding it on MS' site. Their high level licensing docs state otherwise.

Passive only, and it's not free, you have to buy SA to get it, so while the second node is cheaper, it isn't free.

I was just looking for that myself also, I did say SA previously (I think).
Yes passive, but that's fine for us and brings us online in mere seconds if something happens. With VMWare, am I correct that the 1 x SQL Server on node1, would have to boot on node2 should something happen? - like I said before, I could still be wrong on that...

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.

If you have 24x7 needs, that can make sense. But admins after hours is free in all but the oddest of cases. Literally no cost at all 99% of the time.

Sadly, that is often the case. But I like to be better than that. I don't want my teams staying late to do work. They have family. Go home. Here, you can do what you need during your normal day. Go home without a phone always on. Turn off and chill. That is an important thing.

That is horrible business process thinking.

How? How on earth is me wanting teams to go home and forget work as were 'good' horrible? Are your subordinates nothing to you?! Insane. How many hosts on Spiceworks do we get about employers asking for unreasonable out of hours from their overworked staff... that is horrible.

Wanting staff to go home and forget about work and enjoy their time is absolutely not horrible in any way.

You are right, it's great thinking. But it isn't what we are talking about. We're not seeing how what you are doing helps the employees go home early, we only see how it makes IT less valuable to the business and makes the business less competitive.

If your key concern was employee happiness, wouldn't you keep them at home full time and let them work whenever it makes sense? That's what both @JaredBusch and I do with our staff. So to you, you are being nice and letting people go home early and spending extra money to let them do that. But to us, you are not giving your staff flexibility to be home all the time and making them have less leverage for better benefits by lowering their value to the business (and ergo lowering the value of the business.)

I get that you want to let them go home and forget about work. But that sounds less than ideal to me. Working for the Fortune 100, I had it better. I totally appreciate the feel that you think you are being really nice, but I feel like you might be missing the big picture or at least not seeing why we don't see it as giving the employees anything while the business pays for something of possibly no value.

I'm not from fortune 100 perspective. I'm from SMB perspective. Regardless of what I want, most SMBs want arses in seats during the normal business day. Therefore, since they have to be 8am - 5pm, because companies want people I seats, when they go home...... they go home.

Right, so the issue is that you have a bad culture that doesn't value the people and you are working to curtail that as much as possible. I kind of get that, but would management feel the same way if IT was being more aggressively valuable? Has IT ever presented what reckless spending that is for the company to do and how against the interests of the business it is? Is the business aware that it is paying thousands of dollars in licensing for that one bit of bad culture?
3

Where is the reckless spending? Its an extra 1 x Windows Server Standard license (£900). That's it.
The host we would need anyway is doing HA with VMWare... which to have vMotion with (something OOB with Hyper-V), is around 4-5k like I said earlier.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.

If you have 24x7 needs, that can make sense. But admins after hours is free in all but the oddest of cases. Literally no cost at all 99% of the time.

Sadly, that is often the case. But I like to be better than that. I don't want my teams staying late to do work. They have family. Go home. Here, you can do what you need during your normal day. Go home without a phone always on. Turn off and chill. That is an important thing.

That is horrible business process thinking.

How? How on earth is me wanting teams to go home and forget work as were 'good' horrible? Are your subordinates nothing to you?! Insane. How many hosts on Spiceworks do we get about employers asking for unreasonable out of hours from their overworked staff... that is horrible.

Wanting staff to go home and forget about work and enjoy their time is absolutely not horrible in any way.

You are right, it's great thinking. But it isn't what we are talking about. We're not seeing how what you are doing helps the employees go home early, we only see how it makes IT less valuable to the business and makes the business less competitive.

If your key concern was employee happiness, wouldn't you keep them at home full time and let them work whenever it makes sense? That's what both @JaredBusch and I do with our staff. So to you, you are being nice and letting people go home early and spending extra money to let them do that. But to us, you are not giving your staff flexibility to be home all the time and making them have less leverage for better benefits by lowering their value to the business (and ergo lowering the value of the business.)

I get that you want to let them go home and forget about work. But that sounds less than ideal to me. Working for the Fortune 100, I had it better. I totally appreciate the feel that you think you are being really nice, but I feel like you might be missing the big picture or at least not seeing why we don't see it as giving the employees anything while the business pays for something of possibly no value.

I'm not from fortune 100 perspective. I'm from SMB perspective. Regardless of what I want, most SMBs want arses in seats during the normal business day. Therefore, since they have to be 8am - 5pm, because companies want people I seats, when they go home...... they go home.

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

2 x Windows Server Standard with SA.
1 x SQL Svr, 4 core.
Done....

WOW... so expensive!

Well, plus the second server. This stuff adds up. It is almost half the cost to not have the HA, and nearly all of the cost for Windows.

In percentage of total cost, it's enormous. Is it a lot for the needs of the business, no way to tell. But in the SMB, those are absolutely big numbers to most companies.

No. Those are the total licenses. You don't need to duplicate that number for the second server.

You do, except for SQL Server. Windows gives you two VMs per host. You need two hosts of licenses instead of one. That's double.

Node1: Windows Server License x 1 = 2 VMs of Windows Server allowed.
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS.
VM2 = Windows Server Standard with SQL Svr Standard. (1 copy of SQL Svr standard allows you to install SQL Server on a second windows server standard, for free, and use high availability groups for the database).

Node2: Windows Server License x 1
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS
VM2 = Windows Server Standard (with the allowed free version of SQL Server for high availability groups).

In total... 2 copies of Windows Server Standard with SA (£1800 total), plus 1 x SQL Server set of licenses for however many cores you want to license.

Yes, SQL Server is expensive... but its something most SMBs have and the standard version allows you to get to a highly available application level setup.

No, this is wrong.

You have to double everything if you ever think you are going to migrate servers for routine maintenance.

With this... you don't have to migrate servers at all. Why cant you see that. You can set HAProxy to point to the webserver on node 2, and run powershell to move the availability group to the SQL Server on node 2... then you can do whatever the hell you want to node 1. No need to migrate anything....... BUT.... if you wanted to, you still can as Hyper-V has the ability to move a VM from node1, to node2, without shares storage at all, for FREE! VMWare needs vMotion, which was NOT.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Yes, SQL Server is expensive... but its something most SMBs have and the standard version allows you to get to a highly available application level setup.

That most SMBs do things badly is never viable justification for something. That doesn't mean that SQL Server is wrong for you, I'm just saying that 1% or 99% of SMBs using it matters zero to you. It's the value of it TO YOU that matters and nothing else.

Most SMBs have it as a mistake. Mostly because they were sold on SQL Server Express and once trapped got stuck. We see this on SW every day, SQL Server is one of the worst things to see an SMB deploying because they never tell their management what the long term lock in and cost are going to end up being nor tell anyone that free alternatives with all the same power exist.

SQL Server is a great product, but like VMware has almost no place in the SMB. All of the logic for why VMware is expensive applies equally to SQL Server. All that cost, what did you get for it?

The one legit reason I see for SQL Server in the SMB is if a key application that is not bespoke depends on it AND was justified with the Windows, SQL Server and debt costs included. I've never seen an SMB do this, but that's the one acceptable scenario for it.

The alternatives are free, both for the OS and the high availability. So that SQL Server Standard lets you do that isn't really any more of a benefit than ESXi vMotion is.

Either way, if they have it already, like us, it can be highly available with no additional cost as you can use availability groups. If they don't have it and done need it, again, can be free by not using it and getting MySQL clustered db.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

Why would the admins need to be in the office to do this work? Why wouldn't they do it from home anyway? Admins, of all roles, have no need to be in an office for anything.

Well, they could do it from home... but why. At night, at home - that is their time. I want them to do things they want to do in their own time. That's why they are home. In the office, they can do what they need with no downtime to service at all.

@JaredBusch said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.

If you have 24x7 needs, that can make sense. But admins after hours is free in all but the oddest of cases. Literally no cost at all 99% of the time.

Sadly, that is often the case. But I like to be better than that. I don't want my teams staying late to do work. They have family. Go home. Here, you can do what you need during your normal day. Go home without a phone always on. Turn off and chill. That is an important thing.

That is horrible business process thinking.

How? How on earth is me wanting teams to go home and forget work as were 'good' horrible? Are your subordinates nothing to you?! Insane. How many hosts on Spiceworks do we get about employers asking for unreasonable out of hours from their overworked staff... that is horrible.

Wanting staff to go home and forget about work and enjoy their time is absolutely not horrible in any way.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

2 x Windows Server Standard with SA.
1 x SQL Svr, 4 core.
Done....

WOW... so expensive!

Well, plus the second server. This stuff adds up. It is almost half the cost to not have the HA, and nearly all of the cost for Windows.

In percentage of total cost, it's enormous. Is it a lot for the needs of the business, no way to tell. But in the SMB, those are absolutely big numbers to most companies.

No. Those are the total licenses. You don't need to duplicate that number for the second server.

You do, except for SQL Server. Windows gives you two VMs per host. You need two hosts of licenses instead of one. That's double.

Node1: Windows Server License x 1 = 2 VMs of Windows Server allowed.
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS.
VM2 = Windows Server Standard with SQL Svr Standard. (1 copy of SQL Svr standard allows you to install SQL Server on a second windows server standard, for free, and use high availability groups for the database).

Node2: Windows Server License x 1
VM1 = Windows Server Standard with IIS
VM2 = Windows Server Standard (with the allowed free version of SQL Server for high availability groups).

In total... 2 copies of Windows Server Standard with SA (£1800 total), plus 1 x SQL Server set of licenses for however many cores you want to license.

Yes, SQL Server is expensive... but its something most SMBs have and the standard version allows you to get to a highly available application level setup.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

I guess we are going to have to disagree on this. The flexibility being able to do maintenance as and when, during the day, on both VMs (as we have application level HA), and hardware (as we have hardware level HA) is very important. We are able to do what we need when we need, without having to plan downtime or hold off on changes to fit in to a schedule. Having expensive admins stay late to do work adds up, when if its BAU during the day as its all HA, for very little extra work, you make savings and can be more agile.

If you have 24x7 needs, that can make sense. But admins after hours is free in all but the oddest of cases. Literally no cost at all 99% of the time.

Sadly, that is often the case. But I like to be better than that. I don't want my teams staying late to do work. They have family. Go home. Here, you can do what you need during your normal day. Go home without a phone always on. Turn off and chill. That is an important thing.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

2 x Windows Server Standard with SA.
1 x SQL Svr, 4 core.
Done....

WOW... so expensive!

Well, plus the second server. This stuff adds up. It is almost half the cost to not have the HA, and nearly all of the cost for Windows.

In percentage of total cost, it's enormous. Is it a lot for the needs of the business, no way to tell. But in the SMB, those are absolutely big numbers to most companies.

No. Those are the total licenses. You don't need to duplicate that number for the second server.