When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller By this logic you should always use DB2 over Microsoft SQL, zOS over Linux or Windows, ARM or Power Processors over X86 and Juniper over... Well anything that isn't so damn weird and complicated as JuneOS.
IT naturally gravitates to commodity platforms for general purpose non-speciality stuff.
What was the statement to which that was a response? LOL
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@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller By this logic you should always use DB2 over Microsoft SQL, zOS over Linux or Windows, ARM or Power Processors over X86 and Juniper over... Well anything that isn't so damn weird and complicated as JuneOS.
IT naturally gravitates to commodity platforms for general purpose non-speciality stuff.
What was the statement to which that was a response? LOL
Windows Support issue.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I absolutely need vMotion to ensure my systems are up 100% of the time, I have a server infrastructure of 3 or more hosts.
vMotion is live migration + HA? Don't know if it works with SAN or without. but for live migration at least vSAN is required for 100% uptime: share nothing live migration can't work. You can accomplish this other ways:
- KVM has ovirt+gluster
- hyper-v has native starwind
- starwind seems to be available outside windows
- Xen has HA Lizard - I think.
don't know about the setup time and labor, this could be the only discriminant. in Italy vMotion + vSAN is so expensive that I can pay for setup of other solutions and stay in budget.
Maintainance costs is probably another factor. But here others win hands down. RTO and RPO can't be discussed because this is HA.
Can you share some real cases of why you think you have to ditch others for VMWare? just curious. This has been my hypervisors week
The difference is that VMWare has a solution for 100% uptime with "VMware VMotion (which) enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity."
That is HA without the need for a vSAN or other Highly available storage. The hypervisor has this built in.
... isn't vMotion then exactly the same as in Hyper-V 'Move' then? I can move VMs in Hyper-V from one host, to another, without shared storage, and with 0 downtime.
vMotion sounds just like the move option in Hyper-V. Nothing special. If HostA crashes, does vMotion move the VM to another host instantly without any downtime to service and no shared storage? - Now that would be different...
It does.
No it needs shared storage. Either vSAN or iSCSI or NFS. Every hypervisor I've seen can do it with shared storage. Even KVM has built in mechanisms to live migrate between two live hosts with shared storage.
So VMWare has FT now and can do shared nothing with 4 VMs but is really resource heavy. @John-Nicholson set me straight.
Except for the VMs, they are totally shared. It's the same kind of overhead that you get in mainframes or NEC's ridiculous two node piece of crap.
Oh, NEC - that was one weird night at SpiceCorps.
Yeah, super weird. We kept saying "why would we do this garbage when we can do it way better with Vmware?" They had no clue what Vmware was or that they were building joke hardware for another era.
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
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@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Love the replies, I have nothing to contribute because the discussion has transcended far beyond my lack of expertise lol
Definitely appears to be a small space where it's beneficial, but for 99% of us the free ones are preferred and most will never see a scenario where it's truly needed
It's more that there is a small space in the SMB where it is beneficial, but a HUGE space in the non-SMB where it is. If I'm running a Fortune 1000, I'd almost always choose VMware because the cost is small compared to the workloads, the support is assumed as a cost no matter what and they make the best stuff.
It's not knee jerk, I'd certainly talk to at least Red Hat, too. MS doesn't handle enterprise well, Hyper-V is perfect for SMB but I'd be super wary above the SME range. Just not the right fit once you want support (nor is Windows in general.) MS is for the "support it yourself only" world. But VMware is certainly the large business shortlist leader.
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@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@NetworkNerd said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@stacksofplates said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I absolutely need vMotion to ensure my systems are up 100% of the time, I have a server infrastructure of 3 or more hosts.
vMotion is live migration + HA? Don't know if it works with SAN or without. but for live migration at least vSAN is required for 100% uptime: share nothing live migration can't work. You can accomplish this other ways:
- KVM has ovirt+gluster
- hyper-v has native starwind
- starwind seems to be available outside windows
- Xen has HA Lizard - I think.
don't know about the setup time and labor, this could be the only discriminant. in Italy vMotion + vSAN is so expensive that I can pay for setup of other solutions and stay in budget.
Maintainance costs is probably another factor. But here others win hands down. RTO and RPO can't be discussed because this is HA.
Can you share some real cases of why you think you have to ditch others for VMWare? just curious. This has been my hypervisors week
The difference is that VMWare has a solution for 100% uptime with "VMware VMotion (which) enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity."
That is HA without the need for a vSAN or other Highly available storage. The hypervisor has this built in.
... isn't vMotion then exactly the same as in Hyper-V 'Move' then? I can move VMs in Hyper-V from one host, to another, without shared storage, and with 0 downtime.
vMotion sounds just like the move option in Hyper-V. Nothing special. If HostA crashes, does vMotion move the VM to another host instantly without any downtime to service and no shared storage? - Now that would be different...
It does.
No it needs shared storage. Either vSAN or iSCSI or NFS. Every hypervisor I've seen can do it with shared storage. Even KVM has built in mechanisms to live migrate between two live hosts with shared storage.
So VMWare has FT now and can do shared nothing with 4 VMs but is really resource heavy. @John-Nicholson set me straight.
Except for the VMs, they are totally shared. It's the same kind of overhead that you get in mainframes or NEC's ridiculous two node piece of crap.
Oh, NEC - that was one weird night at SpiceCorps.
Yeah, super weird. We kept saying "why would we do this garbage when we can do it way better with Vmware?" They had no clue what Vmware was or that they were building joke hardware for another era.
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
Except that kind of hardware is already dead common and has been for decades from every major vendor AND they were not aware that Vmware (and Xen) already had this!!
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller By this logic you should always use DB2 over Microsoft SQL, zOS over Linux or Windows, ARM or Power Processors over X86 and Juniper over... Well anything that isn't so damn weird and complicated as JuneOS.
IT naturally gravitates to commodity platforms for general purpose non-speciality stuff.
What was the statement to which that was a response? LOL
Windows Support issue.
OH. No, it's not that it would drive you to niche platforms. It's just a factor that commodity systems that are overly accessible (and really only normally applies to the SMB market leader, not back runners right behind them) hit in getting good support. it's not that you avoid those platforms because of it, it's just a negative to be weighed against a perceived positive.
It's a bit like a dating site that only allows humans, but has 100 real girls for you to talk to. Or another dating site that has 10,000 automated bots, but 200 girls for you to talk to.
The one with 100 real girls will net a date faster and more reliably while having half as many candidates.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
Right, in that situation, you assume paying for support for the OS already. So those costs are already additive to VMware's costs in most cases.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.
True, but they don't do anything useful without an insane amount of training, time, and money ^_^
And the last time (admittedly some time ago) that we hired VMware training, the class trained the VMware staffer because Vmware didn't know its own product. I've had a certain lack of faith in it ever since Xen and Zones folks were the ones teaching VMware how to use its own software to the "expert" that VMware had on staff.
I'm sure Vmware has loads of great people, but even Vmware stuggled to find what I'd call competent users internally whereas finding people who knew Xen was pretty easy (and still is.)
I suspect this was in the early days and you got a bad teacher. I've had pretty decent trainers for the classes I've done. I'm also helping with some of the curriculum right now. For a product (vSAN) that releases two to 3 times a year it's "fun" keeping this stuff up to date.
As far as training new employee's on the product that's a reality of any company with 20K employees. You will hire people who don't know something and train them. I've seen the NSX team hire people with no networking background but deep Virtualization/VDI just to offset the amount of hardcore networking people who lacked exposure outside of networking (it's a weird product that has to startle a LOT of vertices). Especially for SE's you tend to hire people and give them a training plan (you'll take these classes, do this self study, know these skills at this level by yyy). When you work for a 20 man firm you can hire purple squeals. When your trying to staff an 8000 man field sales force, you have to accept that you need internal training programs.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Is that really true? So many people use it without understanding it. The "using it because it seems easy" mindset makes for a support nightmare, similar to what Windows faces with their ecosystem. So many things are done incorrectly because it seems like you need to knowledge to do it. Then everything blows up.
Obtuse design to keep amateurs away from a product work if your willing to pay the non-trivial opex costs (which are huge). The only reason this works well in a SMB is if you want it to be painful for anyone to drop in and replace you or outsource you.
When I drop into a SMB with 2 servers that are running NetBSD and Gentoo (The ricer of linux) and are not using QWERTY on the console I know someone tried to make himself impossible to replace...
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Is that really true? So many people use it without understanding it. The "using it because it seems easy" mindset makes for a support nightmare, similar to what Windows faces with their ecosystem. So many things are done incorrectly because it seems like you need to knowledge to do it. Then everything blows up.
Obtuse design to keep amateurs away from a product work if your willing to pay the non-trivial opex costs (which are huge). The only reason this works well in a SMB is if you want it to be painful for anyone to drop in and replace you or outsource you.
When I drop into a SMB with 2 servers that are running NetBSD and Gentoo (The ricer of linux) and are not using QWERTY on the console I know someone tried to make himself impossible to replace...
Yes but we aren't talking obtuse. Dead simple systems built well.
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In reality, AD and Windows are overly obtuse for most SMBs. But they are accessible and sold heavily so people claim knowledge and play with them.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
It's more that there is a small space in the SMB where it is beneficial, but a HUGE space in the non-SMB where it is. If I'm running a Fortune 1000, I'd almost always choose VMware because the cost is small compared to the workloads, the support is assumed as a cost no matter what and they make the best stuff.
We have a slide deck somewhere that shows the cost of an Oracle RAC deployment and has a bar graph of all the costs. The VMware licensing piece is so skinny it looks like a rounding error. There are a lot of area's in IT where for a 1-2% cost you can get some damn nice management functionality. My favorite example is people forgetting to pay for iDRAC/iLO. I've argued with the product managers they should have a special SKU/Model number that it is IMPOSSIBLE to remove from the quote (it's just rolled into the motherboard) so that procurement clowns can't strip it from the quote to "Save money!"
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.
True, but they don't do anything useful without an insane amount of training, time, and money ^_^
And the last time (admittedly some time ago) that we hired VMware training, the class trained the VMware staffer because Vmware didn't know its own product. I've had a certain lack of faith in it ever since Xen and Zones folks were the ones teaching VMware how to use its own software to the "expert" that VMware had on staff.
I'm sure Vmware has loads of great people, but even Vmware stuggled to find what I'd call competent users internally whereas finding people who knew Xen was pretty easy (and still is.)
I suspect this was in the early days and you got a bad teacher. I've had pretty decent trainers for the classes I've done. I'm also helping with some of the curriculum right now. For a product (vSAN) that releases two to 3 times a year it's "fun" keeping this stuff up to date.
As far as training new employee's on the product that's a reality of any company with 20K employees. You will hire people who don't know something and train them. I've seen the NSX team hire people with no networking background but deep Virtualization/VDI just to offset the amount of hardcore networking people who lacked exposure outside of networking (it's a weird product that has to startle a LOT of vertices). Especially for SE's you tend to hire people and give them a training plan (you'll take these classes, do this self study, know these skills at this level by yyy). When you work for a 20 man firm you can hire purple squeals. When your trying to staff an 8000 man field sales force, you have to accept that you need internal training programs.
This was a senior trainer assigned to one of the largest clients. He didn't even know the basics that you could see with casual usage in the class. It was as if he'd never seen the product. It was a bit extreme.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
In reality, AD and Windows are overly obtuse for most SMBs. But they are accessible and sold heavily so people claim knowledge and play with them.
Hmmmm For a while there I thought I was the Golden God of GPO (A skill I'm happy to have not used for 2 years now!).
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
Right, in that situation, you assume paying for support for the OS already. So those costs are already additive to VMware's costs in most cases.
It does require a higher level of support to get the hypervisor stuff (at least used to with RedHat) vs just basic instance based support. I think there's a Windows Datacenter like datacenter cross point they might just throw it in.
Again, most people who are paying for Redhat's premium licensing and running it at scale likely care very little about the cost of management/monitoring tools vs. solution stability/density/uptime etc.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
Except that kind of hardware is already dead common and has been for decades from every major vendor AND they were not aware that Vmware (and Xen) already had this!!
To be fair to FT, it doesn't do RDMA transport (yet) for the memory, and it has a scaling wall at 4 Cores. Some of these weird hardware solution can scale a little bit better.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
I get that they were trying to build hardware FT to try and compete with VMware FT, but...they failed big time.
Except that kind of hardware is already dead common and has been for decades from every major vendor AND they were not aware that Vmware (and Xen) already had this!!
To be fair to FT, it doesn't do RDMA transport (yet) for the memory, and it has a scaling wall at 4 Cores. Some of these weird hardware solution can scale a little bit better.
Sure, but not the one in question
IBM has stuff for that, of course.
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@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@scottalanmiller Redhat Costs more than that just to support a single server. (Seriously, get a quote). Even SuSE isn't that cheap. $1200 for 3 x 2 socket servers 24/7 support is wildly cheap for a hypervisor (Note I will give credit to Redhat and SuSE is they will also provide support for Linux as an OS for VM's with their higher support bundles so that will get you some OS support which is damn nice, but even then more people run RedHat and SuSE on ESXi than KVM rather than pay the premium to the linux vendors.
Right, in that situation, you assume paying for support for the OS already. So those costs are already additive to VMware's costs in most cases.
It does require a higher level of support to get the hypervisor stuff (at least used to with RedHat) vs just basic instance based support. I think there's a Windows Datacenter like datacenter cross point they might just throw it in.
Again, most people who are paying for Redhat's premium licensing and running it at scale likely care very little about the cost of management/monitoring tools vs. solution stability/density/uptime etc.
Oh yes, not free. And maybe not VMware cheap. Just not as bad as that seemed
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@scottalanmiller - thanks for showing i'm not a total idiot.
Glad to see somebody else doesn't see what I was saying as crazy or 'wrong'. Found it very frustrating to be told 'hire me as a consultant to show you why you are wrong' and... 'go learn how to do it properly' etc.
2 x HA Proxy (free), sitting in front of two webservers (can be free), sitting in front of a clustered database (can be free), sitting with 50% on one node, local storage, and 50% on another node, local storage... can be entirely absolutely free using Hyper-V and NO NEED FOR VMWARE at all. That is also entirely Highly Available, for free. Don't know why I was insulted for saying so, when vMotion, the only aspect mentioned adds nothing at all to the capability of the FREE application level HA I said... To be told to 'go learn' very unprofessional.
As far as I understand, using VMWare provides only hardware level HA. Could be wrong, if so, yeah - point me out on that. As far as I see, if I have a VM on VMWare for webserver (which i'd only have one of as most so far have said two webservers is wrong), when the node crashes the other VMWare nodes would bring the VM back online from the cluster/shared storage... that isn't instant. With windows failover cluster (At least in 2008 r2, not sure since), the VM has to boot fresh on the second node... its not instant in memory failover. Why bother paying for VMWare to get that if you don't go the extra step and just build app level HA in too... clearly you do not need HA).
[Perhaps VM does instantly bring the VM up after a host has failed on another node from the shared storage with everything in memory and no need to boot]? - In which case, please tell me. But I know it didn't with a windows failover cluster.The reason why I use hardware HA and application HA is so that I can get away with doing maintenance on the hosts, and on the VMs, whenever I want - within reason. If I want to maintenance on webserver 1, switch HA proxy to webserver 2... no need for out of hours. Can just BAU get on with it.
If I need to do maintenance on node1, simple, move webserver 1 live to node2 etc and then also do the maintenance BAU... easy.
