Hypervisor choice
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@wirestyle22 said in Hypervisor choice:
@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@wirestyle22 said in Hypervisor choice:
@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
@wirestyle22 Until 5nine decides to change the licensing model again. They completely lost my trust with the latest change - I assumed I would at least have the free version features if they increased the price yet again. They have moved full version pricing from <$100 to $350/core to $700 enterprise and killed the free version in the span of a few years.
If XO were to fork a closed source branch, we would at least have full source for the current version.I spoke to someone claiming to be a VP and I told him that this decision is ultimately going to lose them customers. No one is going to pay what they are asking. I'd rather switching hypervisors
5Nines probably doesn't care. Those low end customers weren't paying the bills, so they dumped them.
How many future purchases will that kind of mindset cost them?
Again, probably not many that they care about. This is the same mindset that XOA is in. They don't want the low end SMB, because supporting those people costs them money, not making them money.
Outside of a 10% license cost increase in 5 years VMware's essentials (~$500) has been pretty cheap.
As far as everyone (5 nines, XO, etc) in this space having an intro price of $500-5000? This is pretty smart as it keeps you from wasting your sales people's time talking to people with no budget, and your SE's from supporting their POC's etc.
TO be blunt, if your working in IT and $500 is considered a material amount something is wrong.
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It's going to cost you more in labor/time/opportunity cost to replatform.
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$500 one time purchase spread over 3 years of usefulness is 45 cents a day. 6K over 3 years is $5.40 per day. My wife spends more on Starbucks, and Scott and I average far more than that on Scotch. Assuming your IT labor has a full carry cost of 100K (Cost of benefits, cost of office space, cost of equipment). If paying for some decent management and monitoring and alerting tools save you 5 minutes a day (beyond reducing and helping remediate outages) then even paying 6K is well worth it.
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Lastly, if this REALLY is a huge amount of money for a business that you are a FTE I'd encourage you to stop what you are doing and start applying for a new job. Either your company isn't healthy to the point that your job is at risk, or you are at risk professionally by working somewhere that would have IT people waste huge amounts of time. By the time they fail or you end up wanting to leave it may be too late. As a hiring manager, I interviewed a lot of SMB burn out's who's skills were on 10 year old operating systems, and their management process's lacked any scalability because they had never had the right tools.
Note I'm not saying don't go deploy or use free software. I'm just pointing out that is your willing to radically change your infastructure because you can't get $500 in budget that's a clear warning sign about your buiness.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
Something that confuses me - the company felt there was value in the 5Nine's paid product last year, but not this year - why not? If $750 really is making that much of a big deal to them, I have to wonder how solvent they really are.
Exactly. If this isn't within discretionary spending for IT, and requires some arduous budget approval something is really wrong.
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It's not posted in this thread, but the OP did mention that he volunteers for the Boys and Girls Club - so I assume he's completely unpaid for his efforts.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
Something that confuses me - the company felt there was value in the 5Nine's paid product last year, but not this year - why not? If $750 really is making that much of a big deal to them, I have to wonder how solvent they really are.
Non-profit charity. Not really solvent at all.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
It's not posted in this thread, but the OP did mention that he volunteers for the Boys and Girls Club - so I assume he's completely unpaid for his efforts.
That's why he's trying to do a good job. Volunteers in non-profits are who you can trust. It's the people being paid out of charity budgets when loads of people are willing to volunteer that you have to worry about. Both... why would they think it is okay to accept money for that AND what kind of person pays for labor under those conditions when there is free labour out there willing to help?
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@John-Nicholson said in Hypervisor choice:
@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.
STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.
Right - if the OP is willing to go to bat for a $700 XOA license, why not a $500/600 ESXi essentials license? or a $750 5Nines license?
Not comparable things. In this case, none of the licensing makes sense to me from any product. It's a charity that can use the money elsewhere and none of the paid stuff is needed across the board. But if you did need to pay for it, what you get with XO and what you with Essentials are totally different.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hypervisor choice:
@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@John-Nicholson said in Hypervisor choice:
@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.
STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.
Right - if the OP is willing to go to bat for a $700 XOA license, why not a $500/600 ESXi essentials license? or a $750 5Nines license?
Not comparable things. In this case, none of the licensing makes sense to me from any product. It's a charity that can use the money elsewhere and none of the paid stuff is needed across the board. But if you did need to pay for it, what you get with XO and what you with Essentials are totally different.
Well, in this case, the only wise option would be XO since it includes backups as part of the product, neither of the others do.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@scottalanmiller said in Hypervisor choice:
@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@John-Nicholson said in Hypervisor choice:
@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.
STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.
Right - if the OP is willing to go to bat for a $700 XOA license, why not a $500/600 ESXi essentials license? or a $750 5Nines license?
Not comparable things. In this case, none of the licensing makes sense to me from any product. It's a charity that can use the money elsewhere and none of the paid stuff is needed across the board. But if you did need to pay for it, what you get with XO and what you with Essentials are totally different.
Well, in this case, the only wise option would be XO since it includes backups as part of the product, neither of the others do.
If that matters. That's a big assumption.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
Something that confuses me - the company felt there was value in the 5Nine's paid product last year, but not this year - why not? If $750 really is making that much of a big deal to them, I have to wonder how solvent they really are.
I like to reward SW devs who are making good products. Last year, I purchased and donated the 5nine license with the assumption that if the club couldn't find budget this year, at least I contributed something to a company making a very nice product and then would go on using the feature limited free version. The loss of the free version completely changes that plan.
Also, as I mentioned before, the pricing model has changed drastically in the last several years. The drastic price increases and now change from core base to enterprise license with no free version is what leaves me with no confidence as to what next year's model might be.
As @scottalanmiller says, I could just do another year of 5nine if I can get the club to pony up, but I don't know that they see the value (always a danger when something is/was free), I don't want to donate more product along with my time, and I don't like the direction 5nine seems to be heading. It may well be a good business decision for them, but it doesn't fit my needs, so it's time to move on.
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I also understand that my use case is not typical. I believe strongly in the work the B&G Clubs do and am happy that the money they are saving on IT can be used to provide other services for the kids. If this were a for-profit or the unit directors I work with were pulling down big bucks, my criteria would be different. These local clubs do good work on a shoe string budget.
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@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
I also understand that my use case is not typical. I believe strongly in the work the B&G Clubs do and am happy that the money they are saving on IT can be used to provide other services for the kids. If this were a for-profit or the unit directors I work with were pulling down big bucks, my criteria would be different. These local clubs do good work on a shoe string budget.
I often offer to volunteer my time as I think it is important. Most non-profits turn away IT volunteers, though... too much money to be made handing money off to friends reselling stuff heavily marked up. It's so lucrative that nearly all non-profits I come across will have nothing to do with anyone honest in IT.
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@scottalanmiller said in Hypervisor choice:
I often offer to volunteer my time as I think it is important. Most non-profits turn away IT volunteers, though... too much money to be made handing money off to friends reselling stuff heavily marked up. It's so lucrative that nearly all non-profits I come across will have nothing to do with anyone honest in IT.
Exactly the situation I found when I stepped in. I was disgusted by the waste I found, the unopened network equipment scattered around the offices, the contracts in place for unused support, and on and on. One former staff member had actually been hired by the IT services firm doing most of the work.
Luckily, a new director had recently been hired to oversee operations at all three clubs in the area and he questioned the spending taking place. At this point, they are probably a little too tight, but once bitten...
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@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
Luckily, a new director had recently been hired to oversee operations at all three clubs in the area and he questioned the spending taking place. At this point, they are probably a little too tight, but once bitten...
Better too little than actively funneling money to crooks!
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@scottalanmiller said in Hypervisor choice:
@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
@John-Nicholson said in Hypervisor choice:
@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.
STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.
Right - if the OP is willing to go to bat for a $700 XOA license, why not a $500/600 ESXi essentials license? or a $750 5Nines license?
Not comparable things. In this case, none of the licensing makes sense to me from any product. It's a charity that can use the money elsewhere and none of the paid stuff is needed across the board. But if you did need to pay for it, what you get with XO and what you with Essentials are totally different.
ahhh Non-profit. VMware is 40% off for this, Microsoft discounts hugely also (80%?). SCCM-VMM might not actually be that overpriced.
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Tech Soup.
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I have to admit, I was wrong about 5nine previously licensing on a per core basis. Clearly though, from their price history, they want to position as enterprise class software. In fairness, there have been tremendous gains in functionality during this period.
5nine Manager prices:
2011: $119 / server (and sometimes discounted)
2013: $149 / server
2014: $199 / 2 cpu
2015: $299 / 2 cpu
2016: $350 / 2 cpu
2017: $749 datacenter and no functionality at license expirationAlso, @John Nicholson mentioned the ESXI HTML5 client as an option. I have been using that client in my homelab since it was a VMware fling created to quickly fill the gap when the old Web client broke due to removal of NPAPI in Chrome and FireFox. It's now in general availability and is quite good. Some posts in other forums claim it's still not at feature parity with the old thick client, but I haven't used it much in months, so I can't comment. The client situation was definitely a mess for a while, but seems to be getting better. I also really appreciate the VMware EVALExperience option for homelab use, though I haven't purchased.
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@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:
Tech Soup.
Yes, we use Tech Soup for our Windows desktop and server licensing. It's very, very generous. I don't think they offer VMware products, but SCCM-VMM and Hyper-V would be reasonable after discount.
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Xen has some performance updates this week: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xen-For-Linux-4.13
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You certainly have a few good choices. KVM does seem to be the one that has zero "I feel like I should pay someone" aspect to it.
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So after reading this thread, I logged into our old 5nine account to just check the pricing for myself... then magically, 30 minutes later, I get a call from a 5nine salesperson that wanted to inform me that the $400 option is definitely still available, it's just not on their website. So if you want to give them a call, that may be worth pursuing if you want to hold off changing your entire setup.
