When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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Not that Xen does it as well or as easily as Vmware. But it's important not to overlook that it is there and has been around for a while. But in both VMware and Xen camps, people avoid fault tolerance almost always even when they can easily afford it. It is so hard to justify with all of the overhead and limitations.
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@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.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I hope their reasons were good. But, its still what we have to use.
There is no reasonable possibility of that. The logic to using SQL Server in the SMB is similar to VMware, but far worse. It's not easier, not as well known , not as powerful, not as flexible as free alternatives.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
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.
That's the danger. This kind of technical debt can, and normally does, haunt a company for decades with far reaching ramifications that are normally ignored. Like the cost of SQL Server, Windows licenses, license managment, extra admin time, and so forth. Things that might seem trivial at start up time but when considered over decades of use and how that technical debt will often spawn more related technical debt, what feels like a few thousands dollars might result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in long term tech debt.
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@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.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
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.
That's broken by business criteria.
Can you HONESTLY go to your management and say "you could be more profitable and we could all be making more... but are you happy enough earning less, so we won't bother" do you think that they would agree that the profits are "enough" and that doing better is not a goal?
In the US, that's not just unlikely, in a public company it is called a violation of fiduciary responsibility. The purpose of a company is to make money. That they would happily earn less for no reason isn't logical.
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@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
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Remember, in IT and business (which are the same thing)... "not being as cost effective as possible" and "broken" are identical. Anyone can make a system work, but the purpose of having IT is to make it work well. If it isn't working as well as it should, that's broken from that perspective.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Remember, in IT and business (which are the same thing)... "not being as cost effective as possible" and "broken" are identical. Anyone can make a system work, but the purpose of having IT is to make it work well. If it isn't working as well as it should, that's broken from that perspective.
It is working well. Very well. Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
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@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?:
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'.
Well whoever says it is IT, that's how we define who IT is. We aren't trying to say that some specific person made a bad decision, only that one was made. Whether that was someone not properly checking in on devs making bad decisions, or someone high up making bad decisions directly... it happened and now you are saddled with high costs that shouldn't be necessary.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Remember, in IT and business (which are the same thing)... "not being as cost effective as possible" and "broken" are identical. Anyone can make a system work, but the purpose of having IT is to make it work well. If it isn't working as well as it should, that's broken from that perspective.
It is working well. Very well. Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
We have VERy different ideas of "working well." I'm not sure what criteria you are using. In IT and business "working well" means delivering high value (ROI) and it is not doing that compared to simple alternatives. As a business person, I immediately see this as "not working well".
If it is working well, by IT standards, we could describe that as the ROI vs. the alternatives. What ROI is this delivering over MariaDB, for example?
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@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?:
Remember, in IT and business (which are the same thing)... "not being as cost effective as possible" and "broken" are identical. Anyone can make a system work, but the purpose of having IT is to make it work well. If it isn't working as well as it should, that's broken from that perspective.
It is working well. Very well. Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
We have VERy different ideas of "working well." I'm not sure what criteria you are using. In IT and business "working well" means delivering high value (ROI) and it is not doing that compared to simple alternatives. As a business person, I immediately see this as "not working well".
If it is working well, by IT standards, we could describe that as the ROI vs. the alternatives. What ROI is this delivering over MariaDB, for example?
Customers get great service using our products. Yes, it costs more than doing it another way, a way which equally would have given great service... but that potential bad decision then, which may not have been as we don't know the particulars, has not left customers with bad service... just the company with a higher, but acceptable, bill. In that sense, customers = happy = paying = working well.
I agree with you, ^ cost = not working well - but if the company is happy with the price then it is working well. Just like if you had purchased VMWare for the features available in free hypervisors... yes, more costly... but no, still great service and working well.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
I totally understand this part. You are forced to support IT decisions made by others. I'm not disputing that in any way, nor blaming you for it. Just pointing out that from a larger perspective, this isn't a good IT situation. It's one mistake justifying another mistake in a tower. Example...
Someone chose a costly infrastructure that results in huge technical debt -> Someone chooses that employees are more important to be seen than to be working -> Costly management is needed to deal with architecture decisions -> Expensive failover systems are needed to address management inefficiencies and bad prioritization -> Systems to address inefficiencies are drastically more expensive than necessary because of technical debt decisions made without looking at the support costs
One builds on another and fixing each one in isolation makes each decision seem reasonable, but if you back up and look at the original decisions it all seems a bit crazy from the outside.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I agree with you, ^ cost = not working well - but if the company is happy with the price then it is working well.
No, that just reflects bad management - WHY would they be happy with losing money? Management has a job to make money, right? Logically losing it without benefit should make them unhappy. If they are happy doing a bad job....
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Just like if you had purchased VMWare for the features available in free hypervisors... yes, more costly... but no, still great service and working well.
No, working poorly. Unless you can show that it has an ROI advantage, it's a failure. IT as business, is not judged by "making money", it is judge by "making money compared to the alternatives." So if you know you spent money and got less for it, that's a failure whether you are able to service customers or not.
Great service and working well are always determined by the ROI comparison, there is no exception to that. Otherwise, you could have the company fail while still saying things were "working well", which obviously can't be true.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Using the tools I have to use. I cant change that, I can only make it as good as it can be.
I totally understand this part. You are forced to support IT decisions made by others. I'm not disputing that in any way, nor blaming you for it. Just pointing out that from a larger perspective, this isn't a good IT situation. It's one mistake justifying another mistake in a tower. Example...
Someone chooses that employees are more important to be seen than to be working -> Costly management is needed to deal with architecture decisions -> Expensive failover systems are needed to address management inefficiencies and bad prioritization
Other than what a few have said on here, my experience is that SMBs in the UK do want bums on seats. Yep, imo a bad decision, but out of my control. Sadly, I cannot change that. But, I can do what I can to make it easier for IT than harder. We already have the systems and licenses, so its no more expensive than doing it another way at this point. We also need HA, not just for this, but because its a business decision from the board on the level of service they want to provide. So...
The board get what they want with HA and don't have to spend more than they have thus far been happy to spend. IT, with that same HA, are able to do what they want during the day without causing any unavailability to customers... and the board are happy as its what they wanted, yes, although at a slightly higher cost.
Everybody happy.
The systems in use are not insanely costly compared to free.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Other than what a few have said on here, my experience is that SMBs in the UK do want bums on seats.
SMBs everywhere are normally SMBs and not larger because they run their businesses poorly. It's what keeps them SMBs. SMBs that run things well stop being SMBs as they grow. That keeping buns on seats is more important than profits is indicative of a lack of core values in the company, which we see in other expected ways like large technical debt. It means that likely there aren't proper cost analysis processes.
That most SMBs do anything should be a reason to know something is likely wrong with that process.
