Posts made by markds

@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.

@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.

@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.

@johnhooks said:

Apparently it won't let you if more than one person is in a shell session, but still.

And what happens when you run "systemctl reboot -i"?

In Debian both cases, give me "Failed to start reboot.target: Access denied"

@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/

@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"

@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.

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said:

I have not, that would be an interesting study to do. It's a little difficult as it wouldn't be licensing, but support. But if you lump the two together for a general comparison it would be meaningful.

Indeed. When I first looked at Nutanix I was shocked at the pricing, that was until I subtracted hardware & labor (install and migration). We didn't end up proceeding with Nutanix due to concerns over their closed review policies and lack of guarantees on performance.

Scale pricing would be extra interesting seeing that you would also exclude hypervisor pricing as well as (I think it uses KVM internally?)

@scottalanmiller said:

Funny, when we first tested VMware, Xen was so much faster than it literally came down to one being able to run workloads and one not, on the same hardware. Because we did virtualized PBXs, Xen was the only option as VMware simply wasn't fast enough for audio processing.

We do a lot of voice stuff and whilst our termination gear is not virtualised, most of our customers who do choose to virtualise their endpoints are using VMware. They don't have problems once we tell VMware to reserve resources for that VM. The customers that do have problems are those who virtualise onto EC2, but thats a totally different issue.

I think biggest issue with VMware is the looming threat of licensing costs. $500 is not much even for SMBs and esp compared to labour costs. However, there is going to come a time as the business grows that its going to need more than 3 hosts, want high availability and converged storage. That jump is not linear with VMware and in some cases I can see it being cheaper to migrate away from VMware at that stage, esp with the pricing from hyperconverged vendors starting to become more reasonable.

Speaking of, did you calculate the effective cost of your Scale licensing ie price from Scale - effective cost of Dell hardware etc?

@scottalanmiller said:

Do you know what Xen version it was? Xen 4.4 is current.

The last version we ran in production was v4 but I think we tested 4.3.3

@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:

And, of course... welcome to the community!!

Thanks!

@scottalanmiller One common case we saw back then was virtualising Exchange servers. For some reason there was a very noticeable degradation in disk performance. Something that is likely to have improved since then.

Virtualising linux VMs was excellent under Xen until we pushed cpu contention beyond a ratio of around 4x physical cores. We also found that Xen didn't perform well when overcommitting memory. From memory (no pun intended) VMware does page deduplication and compression when available memory gets low.

This meant we could push contention ratios far more which made up for the cost of a license. I think in the SMB area this would be true as $500 is going to be cheaper than buying an additional host (let alone the running cost).

@scottalanmiller Ok I'll bite.

From our experience VMware is far more performant, especially when resources are highly contented. This is something that can happen in an SMB environment where their budget limits them to only purchasing 2 hosts.

Whilst, I have seen benchmarks that indicated the reverse but they were primarily based on cpu / mem throughput. In real world usage, VMware's IO emulation appears to be faster. This was particularly the case for us when virtualising the few Windows machines we had.

Granted this is a) a small sample size 2) comparing VMware with Xen under Redhat (as opposed to Xen Server) 3) we moved to VMware 2 years ago and haven't looked back

As we are predominantly a Linux shop we would have loved for Xen to be our solution but we ran into too many roadblocks. Our choice back then was either pay for Xen-Server or pay for VMware Essentials.

VMware has amazing docs online and good community forums (ie free support). Xen didn't back then. We only had two speed bumps with our migrations and both were solved on the first page of google.

One big feature you miss out with the VMware Essentials license ($500) is vMotion. However, whilst you do get that with Xen Server, it appears to require shared storage. Something the SMBs shouldn't have.

Ideally it would be amazing if VMware included vSan and vMotion within the Essentials license but I can't see that happening given that its a good revenue stream for them. Free tools like SolarWind narrow this gap.