@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson I think you are mixing Xen and XenServer here.
You are correct. BTW, first time I tried Xen was with Solaris as the DOM0. It was... interesting. It was powerful but operationally it was a mess. Oddly now I see more Xen adoption in the field from Oracle XVM than XenServer (Purely my anecdotal recent meetings with larger customers, who are doing it to deal with Oracle Licensing FUD)
@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Anyway, if you are from VMWare, I'll be glad to ask you some questions regarding licensing, segmentation is crazy and I have some difficulties to compute in head to head scenario the cost of XO/XS vs VMWare/VEEAM. I'll send you a message in private if you have a bit of time Thanks!
With Licensing I"m reminded of a quote from Balmer.
Sure we could simplify our licensing but SOMEONE would loose out and have to pay more....
Fun fact, there is a Opex SKU for Essentials Plus that everyone forgets about.
@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Years ago, I had a DRDB cluster go split brain on me
This, totally agree. Before adopting a product in a real prod env, you have 2 choices:
- pay for a turnkey solution (packaged with support)
- install it by yourself ONLY after having enough knowledge on how it works.
As you said earlier, you can't master something in 4h. You need to practice, validate, crash it, restore it etc.
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. It reminds me of the linux desktop. Linux makes a decent desktop, but without 3rd party vendors seeing value (and porting apps) and existing staff seeing value in re-training) it's hard to get larger adoption. You'll have to not only reach feature parity (and cost) but actually have "killer app" incentives to switch (of which drives VMware R&D to adapt). This is the arms race of our industry (and honestly we all benefit from this, vendors, customers, and end users...).
@scottalanmiller said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@TAHIN said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
VMware needs to realize that their pricing model is losing thousands of potential customers.
They realize and they don't care. I mean that literally. They basically don't want to deal with the "freebie" market and use their price model as a means of eliminating it. They only sell VMware, so going to something free like their competitors would leave them with essentially nothing to sell.
The pricing model is actually pretty damn cheap if you think about it...
The free product works fine for people who use it and an Essentials Plus kit can easily run up to 200 VM's for 6K up front and ~1K a year for 24/7 support on 3 hosts. That works out to ~$3 a day per host for 24/7 support of a hypervisor, build in backup and replication software (With agents for SQL/Exchange/Sharepoint/Dedupe etc), central monitoring and email alerts, historic performance monitoring and a HTML5 interface. The management software doesn't require a Windows Server or SQL database anymore (less licensing than SCCM/SCOM) .
Let's quit being dramatic and Lets go over thing's that are more expensive than the daily support cost per host here is...
If you think a 6K capital purchase and 1K a year for 3 hosts support is "OUTRAGEOUS".
Assuming your a standard sysadmin paid 70K a year ($35 an Hr, with a 20% overhead fringe cost, so closer to $42 an hour cost to the business) your looking at the cost in your time being 10 minutes. If it can save you close to 10 minutes a day with all the management/features (Ignoring other values like Backup software, support to help cut the time of an outage in 1/2 etc) then it pays for itself. If you try to price out 24/7 engineering support (who can get developers to issue a hotfix) for other platforms (Hyper-V, Xen/KVM from RedHat etc) I'm fairly certain that VMware has the cheapest option here.
@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...
Disk based quiescence alone isn't enough for support for Microsoft applications (Microsoft demands you do full app level quiescence). You could do scripts to stun the service and trigger log flushes but at this point your starting to have to aggressively track changes in every patch and version (this is why backup software is expensive, all the QA work).
Didn't realize you could do a remote synthetic roll up. If your not doing compression /dedupe that's still a lot of IO over the wire. I've seen smaller shops keep 20TB's backed up using a 1Mbps upload link with Veeam. CBT with a agent that does data reduction local, then hits a WAN accelerator cache can reduce transport by a lot. (You could buy a silver peak VM to run stuff thru but that's not the cheapest solution to this). Bandwidth isn't free yet for everyone sadly.
Crash consistency isn't as ugly as it used to be. The bigger issue is time to restore can take forever if SQL/Exchange have a lot of logs that need to be replayed. I've had to stare at a crash consistent DB restore for 4 hours before it came back online (was fine, no corruption, just SQL didn't see itself as being properly backed up). Also, without the backup software being application integrated your not doing a log flush (and transaction logs will eventually build up and fill the file system). You can work around this by doing local application level backups to a VHD (Then backing that up), but that's a LOT more data/IO to move/store (especially without dedupe).
@coliver said:
@Breffni-Potter said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Well this is new.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/05/goodbye-vsphere-client-for-windows-c-hello-html5.html
They've been talking about this for awhile now. We ran into it in the past year where they told us they wouldn't be updating the desktop client to work with TLS1.1 or 1.2.
You've got a ton of options for management of hosts.
HTML5 native, SSH, PowerCLI (PowerShell), RESTFUL API's with SDK's for Python, C, Java and a bunch of other languages, SOAP API. If you want a thick client just use Fusion/WorkStation (What I use at my house for quick VM/console access). There's other interfaces you can use too (vRA, VCD have their own).
@scottalanmiller said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
Ability to restore individual files is huge.
Ability to Recover Individual Emails, GPO's, Schema's on databases is a good way to not have to waste 1/2 a day on a recovery of something small.
Ability to test backups.
Ability to orchestrate DR (IE handle IP changes etc). Can chain DR copies from backups.
Use of proper CBT API's for Hyper-V and VMware meaning 95% faster backup windows vs. agent based backups on XS.
WAN efficient replication (Built in WAN accelerator, compression etc).
Dedupe and compression for backups for space efficiency. Tape, and cloud repository support.
SureBackup lets me automate my backup tests so I actually know the recovery will work 
@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@Carnival-Boy But you can't even justify using ESXi Free for the very reasons mentioned in this topic.
What benefit do you get to using ESXi over say XenServer?
There are none besides "I'm familiar with with"
Which the learning curve to XenServer is hardly a speed bump in a school parking lot.
There's a massive difference between the skills to manage day to day and the skills to handle a broken snapshot chain. If you think a hypervisor is something you learn full operational capabilities, troubleshooting and management in a 4 hour class at the back of a Pizza Hut you likely haven't had to rebuild enough downed clusters. Every customer I moved off of XS said the same thing. "IT was easy enough, until when something broke then it got VERY hard". Given that a number of their integration partners have abandoned it (StorageLink was buggy as hell and vendors have dropped it).
@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@Carnival-Boy I must've missed that part.
But still the justification of cost for such a tiny deployment of a single host and 2 VM's to have to pay even the $500 seems insane.
Why do you need the Backup API's for 2 VM's. Just use in guest agent backup tools (Unitrends, ShadowProtect). There are backup options for ESXi Free (Trilliad, and GhettoVCB).
The backup API's (CBT/VADP) are only valuable at scale, and given that Hyper-V hasn't had a CBT API Until 2016 (which isn't wildly supported yet by backup products) Arguing that you NEED essentials license to get a comparable functionality isn't actually true. Xen doesn't have a CBT based backup API (Doing external backups still requires doing a full read). XO does have a non-application consistent forever reverse incremental snapshot system, but that's still going to require a full read of IO for synthetic roll ups, and the lack of application consistency makes it un-usable for transnational workloads.
For some reason everyone on SW and ML seems to think that the Backup API's are CRITICAL when your talking about a tiny SMB (they aren't) and ignores their value at scale (Where they are critical to reducing backup windows by 95%). I've never really understood this...
This can be a monumental lift and shift happening all at once or it could be done gradually over time in a phased approach. It is not uncommon to tackle one workload per week or even per month. Slow, planned, controlled migrations are often the safest approach.
I'd argue this shouldn't take long for a few reasons...
Stick with your existing Hypervisor/platform. If done in the trial window this means typically a "Net" reduction in licensing costs as Hypervisor licensing is perpetual.
You should use your vendor's burn in tools. VMware has the Proactive tests, that you can automate the creation of 10 IO Blazers per host with different workloads to stress the environment, as well as automated Netperf network testing between hosts so you can "Break" weak points before going live. HCI Bench is another great free tool for shaking out a bad driver, or flaky drive. Testing with 1-2 VM's a month isn't actually putting real load, and if the problem is a flaky SSD Firmware you still might not detect it until you move your heavy LOB app that does 90% of your IO.
Every month you have a new asset sitting there unused is wasted hardware and support depreciation. I remember when storage migrations had to be done at the app level and it was not uncommon to take 6-9 months to migrate data into an array, and another 6-9 months to migrate it out. This led to the creation of Storage Virutalization as having an asset spend 1/4 of it's life not being fully leveraged was just silly.
Migrations should be easy and non-disruptive if using your hypervisors tools.
Older clusters can also be used as backup targets, on premises or off premises disaster recovery platforms and more. There are many effective ways for the majority of businesses to effectively reuse and re-purpose older gear when moving to hyperconvergence to keep from having to completely scrap everything that had come before, but with an eye towards an effective, long term strategy to reduce technical debt and move towards a unified, forward looking infrastructure.
I hate this, because it leads to undersized, 1/2 dead, out of support DR environments. It also means you can't upgrade production to a hypervisor version/VM Hardware Version that the Ancient DR site gear can't support. I get not having like for like (N+0 instead of N+1) but you need SOMETHING that can handle the load and I've seen many a DR plan fail because the blade system at DR was 8 years old and dead, or the ancient EVA Array couldn't handle the boot storm.
Of course, there is always the option to keep the old infrastructure indefinitely. This can be an excellent choice if the old infrastructure is purpose designed for a specific workload, such as perhaps VDI, and the HC cluster is designed for more general purpose needs (or vice versa, of course.) Using each tuned for specific use cases is absolutely viable, but does require knowledge of and support of two different clusters each of a unique type which creates IT overhead, but remains a very realistic option.
I'd argue dropping the skill sets to maintain legacy clusters is one of the main appeals to HCI. (I Personally want to FORGET about HBA Queue depth management, and FC Zoning). The problem of running old gear indefinably is the hardware support costs, environmental costs, and lack of support for new hypervisor versions and other things eventually catch up with you before you realize it.
Because of the easy growth options available in most hyperconvergent systems, purchasing only enough capacity for initial workloads and buying more capacity over time as workloads migrate can aid in lowering up front investment, allowing the platform to prove itself and squeezing more use out of the older platforms before fulling retiring or re-purposing them.
HOW you can grow HCI is important as it has a lot of other trickle down costs. If I can only expand by adding more nodes (and not by growing capacity inside an existing node) this means I may be forced to buy an entire server/node just to add 4TB of Capacity. If your HCI system can start with 1/2 the drive bay's populated and grow by simply adding drives you can grow without incurring secondary costs. This is an advantage of HCI systems that are fundamentally true software offerings.
Secondary costs for Socket's include...
Disclaimer, I work for VMware SABU, who make software for HCI
There is no reason that a new hyperconverged cluster cannot run side by side with the pre-existing infrastructure.
The Challenge comes that a lot of HCI vendors/platforms don't "play nice" with existing storage assets. By this I mean they can't mount external storage arrays, re-use existing assets that still have support-depreciation. This lock out can be support/technical (I don't think Scale Computing supports you using external storage with their product), This can be hardware limited (You can't get FC cards for a Simplivity/Nutanix box) or it can be administrative. An example of this EVERY HCI Product other than UCP-HC and VxRAIL that has a management system that outright is hostile/doesn't support extending it's ease of management to external products. Beyond the example of SPBM allowing management of HCI storage (as well as extending it's support to external arrays with VVOLs) it should be noted that HCI systems tend to make their own storage easier (While actively trying to make it harder to add external assets). Why does this matter? Expansion costs and support fee's. HCI vendors are increasingly adopting the legacy storage vendor model of discounting hugely up front, then charging significantly higher support renewals (and removing discounts once you get past your starter pack). Signs of this are when you go to add node 4 or 5 discovering that it costs as much as nodes 1-2 and 3. Another sign is a support renewal of 6-12K for an otherwise ordinary server. While I'm not opposed to an increasing shift to opex for IT (It's necessary especially to keep companies from running gear into the ground foolishly), doing so in way that you don't realize until year 2 or 4 support renewals is something everyone should watch out for and be aware of. Price != Costs, and while HCI does reduce a LOT of hidden opex costs, you need to be aware of the real Total cost of ownership of what your buying. A great read on this topic is HDS's "34 costs of storage" white paper.
@hobbit666 Normally you just use VUM and have it download the newest version
If your old school you can just consult this handy KB and compare it to your build number. In your case you are a few patches behind on the 6.0 branch.
Express Patch 7 is the newest in the 6.0 major release family.
@scottalanmiller said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
I've had the opposite. Had a staffing agency call me a liar for saying that I made more than "anyone pays." Totally by coincidence, that agency was forced to pick up my current contract and pay me what they claimed I could not be paid.
It's funny when both sides of a staffing agencies negotiation gets exposed. I've seen them lie and say the candidate was demanding more, while simultaneously telling the candidate that they needed to cut their expectations and the company wasn't willing to pay more. The agency got screwed in this as the hiring manager and contractor were drinking buddies.
@Dashrender said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
@John-Nicholson said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
@scottalanmiller said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
@Jimmy9008 said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
In the states, can new employers see what you made in previous jobs?
No, only if you disclose it.
I have seem a request for a current pay stub to prove your work history for a background check as a weird way around this. Seemed silly to me.
Not sure I'd be willing to work at that place - shows a HUGE amount of distrust. The previous/current employer should be willing to at least confirm that you were employed there.
it's interesting that some here seem to feel that a new employer should limit what they pay you based upon what you made at the previous employer. When I was new to IT, I made several huge jumps in salary. 50%, 40%, 35% increases over the last few. An internal promotion would almost certainly never provided those kinds of increases.
Deepends. I went from something like 56 --> 70 ---> 100 in the span of less than 18 months as I moved provisionally into a management role, then formally into it.
@Jimmy9008 said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:
For real, if 55k is similar to what you make now, and the benefits are the same, but the drive is 4x longer, and you don't need to move jobs... Pass. Nope. Not for you. Working g for an MSP sucks imo.ch."
Boom.
I liked working for a MSP a lot more than in house. Learned a lot more, very rapidly, got to do a lot of project work. Went from having access to 1-2 new servers a year, to having access to millions of capital budget for new IT projects (total customer spend for the year). Had a good team, and advanced my career a lot.