Why is VMWare considered so often
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@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...
- My wife's Starbucks addiction.
- My household booze budget/Sams Bar Tabs.
- What you spend to go to a single IT conference.
- Less than 1 minute of my time a day billed at my standard rate when I was consulting.
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.
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@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...).
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@John-Nicholson I think you are mixing Xen and XenServer here.
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@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. -
So you edited your post and now I don't agree with you
You can have support for XS and also support for XO (our pricing model is based on a dedicated appliance + support).
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@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)
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@John-Nicholson I think indeed you are not yet leading the licensing FUD, Oracle seems always better than anyone else on earth.
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@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:
@John-Nicholson I think indeed you are not yet leading the licensing FUD, Oracle seems always better than anyone else on earth.
I've never met anyone at VMware ACTIVELY try to over license people with threats of lawsuits or breach notices (and If you do run into them, please report them as that's not the culture and I can see Pat personally firing anyone who tries that). You can not be "cheap" without being an asshole who's shaking down clients to pay for a new Yauht.
Most of the products are inexpensive IF you are using the functionality. The alternative to NSX is physically attaching a Layer 4 firewall like a ASA to every NIC port coming out of a ESXi Host, Buying Nexus 7K's with OTV licenses to do Layer 2 encapsulation over the WAN, and having to increase the size of your IDS/F5's/PaloAlto's by 20x. Does NSX SOUND expensive at first? Sure. The alternative though so laughable expensive that you historically had to leave gaps in your security strategy for east/west traffic or expect it to take weeks/months to move a VM between data centers vs. seconds...
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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
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@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).
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@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...
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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.
-
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)
-
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
