Posts made by StorageNinja

@scottalanmiller said in Simple Resume Fails:

Working FOR a religious organization is totally different than announcing an affiliation. I've worked for religious groups to which I was in no way affiliated, for example.

Also as an example, many hospitals in the US might have in theory religious affiliations (Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran) but outside of SPECIFIC clergy roles, they can't discriminate in who they hire. No one in their right mind is going to assume the IT guy at Methodist is a Methodist.

Putting that you have kids is a resume is a more odd one that I'm kinda neutral to. While a hiring manager can't ASK that question if volunteered it could be a purposeful signal that he likely doesn't want to consider roles that are 300 days of travel (and be saving a lot of people time).

Non-profit volunteer information might be valuable to companies who encourage that sort of thing (I get 40 hours of "volunteer time, in addition to our vacation policy" as an example). For companies that have policies encouraging community involvement, this might be important.

@JaredBusch said in MangoCon 2019:

$281 for Basic Economy from ORD to DFW (United/American)
$282 from MDW to DAL (Southwest)

You don't want Basic Economy. TRUST ME.

@Dashrender said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

The question is - why is the quality so bad? Isn't the process supposed to catch bad quality?

Their process is consider the windows insider group (extreme power users) to be a good enough replacement for proper QE teams, and writing automated build tests.

@wrx7m said in VMWare Shutdown:

For vmware, if you are going to shutdown only (no patches), do you always put in maintenance mode first?

1. If you have DRS this will force the host to drain VM's off (vMotions are automated).
2. If you have vSAN this will make sure you are not about to offline the last good copy of data.
3. It's an automated step in how VUM works...

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

The vendors. Reducing the amount of legacy stuff you maintain reduces costs a lot. Maybe even by half in some cases. It is unbelievable how much legacy support costs companies.

You get fewer support calls/bug fixes, but there's still plenty of CPD costs tied to security on older platforms that are still in the wild.

The benefits of "Cloud first" is you can ship faster. I think we push features into VMC quarterly which is a hell of a lot faster than our old 18 month waterfall and Microsofts 3 year gap on major products. Cloud first CI/CT or CI/CD process reduces QA costs. Now I'd argue Microsoft Windows has screwed this up by thinking the insider program was a suitable replacement for writing tests (It's a huge dumpster fire right now).

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

And I think that VMware, through many market changes, is moving more and more into the "small, but better deployment space." Fewer deployments to maintain, but those that remain are better, and I'm sure pay more. Not entirely unlike Microsoft moving customers from perpetual licenses to O365 - it actually decreased their market penetration, by a lot, but it increased revenue and decreased cost. Big wins, but market share went down.
That's where I see Vmware. Market share is shrinking, it's not the go to product any more. But better customers, at higher revenue. That's better for Vmware.

I think though that on-premises workload while not shrinking are not keeping pace with cloud-hosted workloads. Now plenty of those workloads end up on clouds running vSphere, but even those that do not can still end up managed by VMware. VMware is more than vSphere.

NSX-T/VeloCloud runs just fine on Public Cloud, Containers, even KVM etc. I've seen iSCSI from vSAN shared to bare metal Oracle RAC clusters. Airwatch (leading MDM platform) has really nothing to do with vSphere. WaveFront at purchase couldn't even inject metrics from vSphere and it was a while before they added it (It's focused on application telemetry and ML of that datasets). VMware Horizon View can run on Azure, and the CMP products can manage Azure/AWS etc also. CloudHealth provides compliance across all public clouds also. With the Outpost announcement, I will be able to run vSphere, on AWS leased hardware that's installed in my own datacenter and consume EBS volumes into vSAN while layering AWS RDS on top to provide Postgres or Oracle databases as part of a blueprint to a Project Tango application stack for the ultimate multi-vendor meta sandwich... Spending over a billion on R&D, and a few billion on M&A gets you some damn nice toys

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

Right, but how did they get your number? How did they get through to IT? Someone had to sell your information to them for them to have it. There is no global list of businesses to magically call to find out what people use. And the average business couldn't even answer what they use, so how do they filter the results?
Humans guessing what is used results in some pretty bad IT info. Just look at SW surveys again. When we know who is answering, we often saw people getting their own environment info wrong because they weren't understanding what they had.

You are correct that the list of secret squirrel/spies would be poorly covered by any market survey with calls to customers. Now IDC also tracks sales into the channel so if the licensing was sold through say CDW-G executing through IngramMicro as a distributor IDC isn't going to know that it was sold to the FBI, but they will know that xxxx number of units was moved.

Now if your argument is that you are secret squirrels who:

1. Are committed to never purchasing anything from a company or distribution.

2. obfuscating downloads and compiling all security updates from source to avoid incrementing the download counters.

3. Always using burner emails and phone numbers whose contact information never ends up on one of the bazillion marketing (note all it takes is you forget to uncheck a box once in your career) that exist are not surveyed that might be true.

4. Disable all phone home, and kill any support telemetry features.

It's true there are some mimes running around forests, but I would argue tracking people who are spending zero dollars on software isn't really what IDC's goal is to do in their software revenue tracking metrics...

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

Those are paid results and have no place in a discussion with IT.

Gartner has much more of its monetization tied to the companies it's providing MQ's about (and the lack of disclosure is... interesting). IDC not so much. I'm pretty sure more money for them comes from Investment bankers.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

A CUSTOMER, right. That's the thing, they call CUSTOMERS. People using KVM or Xen aren't customers. That's the trick that they play. Where do you think that they got your number?

They were asking me primarily about Citrix which I didn't use so I'm going to say Not Citrix (Survey was about application streaming). I was using RDSH and we discussed that.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

IDC surveys of WHOM? Anyone ever heard of someone in the real world getting an IDC survey?

Yup, got a phone call from them when I was a customer. Asked me 20 questions, sent me a $100 gift card I think it was.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

In the REAL world, MOST people don't touch their virtualization environments. They install and leave it. In the enterprise and bigger spaces, or for MSPs, we touch them a lot. For MOST people, they basically never look at them again. People who work in IT often get obsessed with features that normal shops never look at and we deal mostly with systems that we are touching and forget how little the average system gets touched.

If your talking embedded OEM stuff, the era of SCADA and forget it, is coming to an end. I know Honeywell is uber obsessive about getting those boxes updated. The general shift for embedded appliances is them joining the Internet of Shit, so lifecycle is becoming a bigger deal.

If you're talking about the market share of free hypervisors that are deployed and never get a security patch or any maintenance and are managed by muppets.... Fine. KVM can have that market. Who knows maybe they have 100% of it today. I'd argue broken clusters based on Hyper-V 2008 (Which should have been called a beta product) did more to damage their market shares going forward. Being the king of the misfit toy deployments is dangerous. It works if your goal is ship "good enough" and hope to dilute undermine a market, but for anyone who has high needs they will associate that product with muppet levels of uptime (even if the product isn't that bad). It's kind of like why EMC/HDS never let a customer deploy their own VMAX/VSP. When the $$$ they make is from being able to talk about crazy high uptime, fewer better deployments is far better for marketing than lots of broken ones.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

Those aren't facts. Fedora, for example, does not phone home. You can say that people "try" to track free installs, but the FACT is that people do not, an can not.

IDC survey's, Free installs tend to have default mirrors they check out security patches from (It's true some people run their own repo's and do a fan out, but that fan out doesn't get wide in SMB's), 3rd party inventory tools that collect and anonymize their stats. There are ways (again, I view the war as actually making revenue as well as market share).

@FATeknollogee said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

@StorageNinja Net, net you feel/believe ESXi is a better play for SMB's?

Disclaimer: I work for VMware, but my prior gig was an MSP/Consulting and then before that, I was a customer (in a verrry small SMB maybe 4 million total revenue a year).

A few thoughts...

1. It's dead simple to install as it comes pre-installed for no real added net cost by most OEM's (Pre-installed to SD card, SATA DOM, M.2 drives). Even if you do an install it's largely mashing enter with things like creating partitions and sizing them is all automated.

2. It comes with a great HTML5 interface baked into it out of the box (The H5 Host Client is free!).

3. Just because a company is a SMB today doesn't mean it will remain one tomorrow. I"ve seen people grow on VMware from 5 VM's to thousands. While there are dangers to aggressively over buying for growth the Essentials and essentials plus bundles cost less than my houses Starbucks/energy drink habits on a daily cost basis over a lifetime. Powerful central management, alerting, features that can scale with you for less than my last office spent on coffee is being made into a much bigger deal than it is.

4. Skills wise I can throw a rock and hit someone who knows how to use vSphere and unlike Microsoft flat rate 24/7 mfg support is cheap (~1200 a year for essentials plus). At 3AM when I'm trying to figure out why something isn't working I'd rather call someone than poke around in forums. It's true you can get this from RedHat but it actually costs a good bit more for a subscription last time I checked.

5. If your SMB ever needs to deploy software that has very restricted HCL's and supported configurations (SAP HANA, Intersystems Cache, EPIC, A good number of PBX's) you are often limited to vSphere/AIX etc. You might not be there now, but even some of the smaller EMR's can be. You might say "Well I'm going to control every software purchase we make" but that's not the reality of how company purchasing evolves. Also, you might end up M&A'ing a company who has a large presence on VMware/AIX/etc. It's worth noting that some companies (SAP) don't just say "Linux is Linux". they will often force very specific distributions (Redhat and sometimes SuSE). As companies grow they often own less and less of the code they run and are at the mercy of various black box packages and what they run. Most people would rather have one platform for everything over one AIX box to deal with Caché.

6. When I consulted I worked with a lot of M&A where SMB's merged or were purchased. Given how often vSphere was deployed it made the roll in, and roll out of VM's a lot easier. Anything else (physical, legacy Alpha, Hyper-V etc) all got platformed. I saw a lot of xxxx --> vSphere but never anyone seriously going the other way as part of a M&A.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.

It's a misnomer that people don't try to track free installs. There's phone home telemetry for vendor products, download tracking and a host of other voodoo to at least make an attempt at reconciling these data sets. IDC and the like tend to only report revenues, but there are ways to track embedded ESXi free edition at the OEM and distribution level as well as the phone home level etc. Looking at unique downloads of security patches isn't a terrible proxy for active installs that are being maintained. There are also groups like IDC who conduct phone and other survey's in line with statistical models. Vendors who work in the ecosystem and have to make product judgments of where to invest in also do their own private tracking (Backup vendors do some fairly large stuff).

Are you sure you are doing tracking and statistical modeling of this, or are you just reviewing anecdotes and assuming the plural of an anecdote is data? I feel like we were just arguing 3 years ago that Xen going to take over the world.

@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

To say that they won the war, when they appear to have given up, seems odd. In the enterprise I assume that ESXi is still dominating, that's a different game. But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.

To clarify, the "war" was claiming a major stake in revenue and market share when Hypervisors and Hypervisor management software was still in Hypergrowth and a double-digit CAGR. That war is over (It's single-digit growth at best).

I'd argue It's the other hypervisor vendors that have largely given up in this space...

1. Microsoft shifted licensing for datacenter and VMM to per core to drive up costs for server edition and applications and shift customers to hosted providers (making SPLA look a lot cheaper at small volume). They've cut their bounties for partners to deploy Hyper-V, removed partner competitive resources and adjusted field compensation to focus entirely on Azure/AzureStack. Hyper-V as a stand-alone free entity isn't a priority beyond it being a sum of the parts that they want to sell. I'd argue this was a smart move (Stop trying to get a piece out of a market that is in single digit growth which is where revenue is for stand-alone hypervisor management products is today). I would summarize what I've seen of their strategy as "Go to Azure, or go somewhere else". Oracle's pursuing a similar strategy with their cloud (Field Rep's only get paid on cloud consumption).

2. RedHat failed to gain any meaningful market share for KVM and their management platform. I'd argue their new focus is more around containers, and PaaS things. Curious if the marriage of this could make IBM cloud a much more diverse beyond IaaS competitor in the field. Note, IBM Cloud has a massive amount of VMware in it (SDDC as a service in the form of VCF popular for the bigger shops). IBM's service heavy leanings and existing customer base put them at the least married to the hypervisor that they de-facto own/control. KVM could become more strategic (Get everyone off LPAR's and VMware) or it could become less strategic (Redhat has a lot of other IP that will work fine on multiple hypervisors and makes plenty better margin). My bets on the later, but we will see.

3. Citrix last I heard has been losing market share with XenServer and Xen itself is losing market share in public clouds in general.

4. There's a massive long tail of other niche vendors, none of which I"m aware of having 1% market share in Hypervisor management revenues. The Cloud Service Providers (AWS/Microsoft/Google/IBM) are sucking all the air out of the room as public cloud expands. There could be an argument about Hybrid Cloud revenue being a market split between both, but that's still a growing market.

There are other ancillary markets still with a lot of growth that there's still strong battles going on in. There are a few minor players trying to bundle HCI with higher level functions (Containers etc) but I'm seeing more of these falling off analysts and revenue tracking radar than being added on.

• HCI in Hypergrowth, which is mostly being deployed on vSphere. Analysts underestimating the TAM on this one should be a meme. I do think we are past the uniform BBQ phase.

• Cloud Management Products (CMP) - VMware still leading this and outgrowing market but there's a decent bit of diversity and I'm convinced this one will continue to fracture for a while until we see more consolidation. It's worth noting that the CMP's were chosen for app's today will likely Zombie for another 20 years if CA and BMC's continued relevant irrelevance says anything.

• Advanced micro-segmentation and security services - There's a lot of growth but this is currently a small space due to the massive capital requirements of this arms race. I expect security, in general, to end up with fewer players in the long run. Too many vendors cause much confusion on operationalizing them and gaps form.

I have to agree with Jeff Ready. The Unicorn BBQ phase is on. We are not going to see large scale growth of new competitors entering now. I think while HCI has plenty of growth, there is going to be an increasing push to show revenue to maintain investments and this is going to leave a lot fewer players at the dance.

@JaredBusch said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

Once changed, cockpit, of course, shows it. But is stilled greyed out.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but this is stuff that ESXi's had for a decade. It's why I hate "feature checklist" or over-focus on 1-2 aspects of a system. It ignores the operational realities of what most people's day 0, or day 2 operations look like.

If Free KVM UI's were full featured, and intuitive, and had a low-cost support option for backing them I think we would see Scale Computing and other KVM appliance offerings have zero VC/Market Cap. Given these products have existed for 10 years, and they struggle in these most basic of ways I don't feel there is a huge amount of money going into solving this problem (and by proxy) not a lot of market demand.

The fight for the management plane has moved on from Hypervisors (That war is frankly over) and has moved on to containers, hybrid cloud management, networking/security and a host of other things.

In containers Kuberentes has "won", but there's a lot of adjacent product space for making things like Networking and security, not a dumpster fire. The reality is that ESXi "won" the on-premises datacenter war, Hyper-V's entire focus is on Azure/AzureStack now (fighting VMware on a full SDDC stack and Hybrid Cloud). Talking to one large OEM recently Microsoft has pulled all funding for headcounts on competitive Hyper-V trying to displace ESXi on premises. They recognize that the fight has moved on.

KVM is showing up in a few turnkey appliance vendors (Scale Computing, NTNX) but from what I'm seeing adoption numbers are a rounding error of the total addressable market (Some could argue though that everyone underestimates the growth of on-premises IT, especially on the edge making this still an underestimated TAM). I suspect we'll KVM in IoT platforms on a net adoption rate, but not in people actually having SSH to the platform or consuming it at large scale as a pure open source, roll your own. KVM in public cloud (like AWS) still has solid market share growth going on (As it slowly replaces the massive amount of Xen especially at AWS).

Meanwhile OpenStack continues to lurk in Telco where it's gotten a solid footing despite the rest of us all forgetting it exists

@Dashrender said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:

KVM - you need??? in case of VMWare, you need (let's say Veeam - or anything else you buy/Open Source), in

1. GhettoVCB is open source and has been around for years for VMware.
2. KVM lacks a common CBT API. You have one off's of proprietary overlays and forks. It also lacks anything like VAIO as a kernel API enabling IO split and data service insertion (handy for crazy low RPO/RTO stuff).

It's worth noting that people running 2TB and 5VM's are normally just going to use an agent-based solution anyways...

@DustinB3403 said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

Microsoft started pulling Security patches off of their servers after your contract expires but the platform is still supported.

Microsoft no longer provides patches for XP Server 2003 unless you pay them a lot of extra money. It's basically a license with security updates for a fixed interval that can be extended for a ton of money...

@Dashrender said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

And the rest of setup for VMWare itself is like 20 mins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qc6BYlet3I Does a pretty good job of building a full cluster with clustered storage in under 4 minutes using the UI.

@scottalanmiller said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

@Dashrender said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

Are you saying that KVM can be done lock stock and barrel in 1:20 ? The toss in backups - you mentioned all kinds of tech for backups.

That you think 1:20 is even hard, this shows how skewed Vmware has made you. Of course, I can do it in 1:20. We normally do it in closer to :20.

I can instantly clone a nested environment in 10 seconds or less (it's a bit cheeze to clone to` a running state but it's a thing). If we are talking bare metal VMC can auto-scale every 5 minutes without your intervention.

Couple things for a total cluster shutdown)

0. If patching, stage patches to host, and out of bands (if pushing firmware).
1. Gracefully shutdown all virtual machines (from in guest, or using VMtools).
2. If using vSAN change Maintenance Mode behavior to "Do Nothing"
3. Put Hosts in Maintenance Mode.
   3b. If patching issue update commands.
4. Power off hosts once in Maintenance Mode.
5. Power back on.
6. If patching verifies patches if vSAN change cluster policy back.

Sigh

A quick summary of what we've learned here...

1. vSphere retail on-premise socket licensing (What spending less than 250K) is normally perpetual.

2. The only exceptions to this would certain OEM Appliance licensing (Think VxRAIL), or the retail subscription for Essentials/Essentials Plus - (Note, I never met anyone who purchased this SKU).

2b. It's worth noting that VMware has vSphere in cloud providers where it's monthly terms.

3. Sns - You don't need a current subscription to download security patches (those VIB's are on the public web). It's worth noting the big thing here is access to updates and upgrades that include features, as well as the ability to call someone and troubleshoot the platform. If you have any security questions the team's PGP key can be found here. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1055

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1055

@DustinB3403 said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:

As VMWare removes access to the files if you aren't under maintenance.

Upgrade VIBs/Offline bundles sit on the public internet with no logon. Otherwise I couldn't CLI upgrade a host doing this...

# esxcli software vib install -v https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/esx/vmw/vib20/tools-light/VMware_locker_tools-light_5.0.0-0.7.515841.vib