When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?
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@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.
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@Jimmy9008 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@Jimmy9008 Application clusters require exponential more complexity in support, monitoring, and operations (patching, troubleshooting). I've seen SQL clusters cause more outages than they solved in many cases. Hypervisor HA is VERY simple in comparison. App HA in some cases (AAG, Oracle RAC) has a VERY steep entry price (quickly gets over 100K). If my operations teams are not trained/certified/skilled on these solutions I could be extending outages, or extending costs for basic tasks.
An aircraft carrier is a superior solution to a Catamaran except when you only have a 4 man crew who never were in the Navy...
While I love App HA, and many people need it. For some Hypervisor HA is a good middle ground.
I somewhat agree. It depends, as always. The example I was giving is not complex and should be a starting point if you are thinking of HA for IIS and SQL Server. Just jumping to hardware level HA using nodes with VMWare or nodes with HyperV or whatever is just lazy. Think about application level HA too as a start point.
It's not lazy it's considering licensing of application stuff, as well as operational costs. Back in the day Hypervisor HA was considered exotic and expensive (and it often was). Now it's mundane (tons of ops people know how to deploy/support it), and cheap (Compared to application HA clustering on licensing and opex). Now SOME app's are cheap (DHCP/AD being examples), so there is some thought I agree but it's not lazy for someone with a mixture of apps and things who wants to be able to do basic hardware lifecycle management without disruption and hypervisor patching (which is painful otherwise on a monthly basis) to go straight for Hypervisor HA then evaluate what next?
Past a dozen VM's rebooting EVERYTHING just to do a host patch gets REALLY annoying to fully validate everything.
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@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 ^_^
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@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
When is VMWare ever the recommended option for a new setup?? Is it ever?
I'm not considering it or anything, I'm just curious.
I'm like almost 100 posts late on this one, had to sleep. So I've not seen anything else posted yet...
VMware has loads of good use cases, it's the best technology stack in virtualization. But it comes with high price tag and the overhead of cumbersome licenses.
VMware's primary value is in support. No one offers support like VMware. Not that RH and others are bad, but VMware really shines in this area. RH is certainly the next tier competitor, then Citrix, then I guess you can say that MS offers support, sort of.
Once you are into the fully supported range, VMware can make sense. Typically it doesn't make sense until you are past the entry threshold, but if you are going to pay for support, it comes down to a cost analysis of the features and support benefits versus the features and flexibility and support offerings for the other products that you are considering.
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@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
That's what I thought... I was just reading SW - Options in virtualization Setup and the last reply was recommending Hyper-V or VMWare (which is obviously bad advice). It amazes me how frequently it's recommended, when upon any research it's a no-brainer that the free ones are the way to go.
That's what gives VMware ESXi a bad name, loads and loads of reckless, careless recommendations on places like SW who never ask if it fits the scale, technical needs or budget of the customer. They almost always recommend the Free or paid unsupported versions which, to me, are the "nevers". If you aren't paying for VMware, it makes no sense.
In most of the SMB, a single VMware cost might be larger than their entire IT budget! So in the SMB, Vmware almost never applies.
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@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Though I only have extremely limited IT experience, so I didn't know if there were ever cases where it becomes the correct choice.
Absolutely. But it is not scale or size or speed, it's tech and support needs. So in the enterprise it is super common, because they get deals at scale and almost always pay for vendor support regardless. So Vmware becomes a really obvious choice there.
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@bnrstnr said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
When is VMWare ever the recommended option for a new setup?? Is it ever?
I'm not considering it or anything, I'm just curious.
if free = free of charge. The only reason is: your are asking a supplier to keep care of your virtualization and they have no skilled people on other than esx. Better to change supplier if you can.
In that case, you should fire that vendor. That's too little skill for anyone you depend on to be limited to.
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
Fault Tolerance with vendor support for it. Technically not limited to Vmware, but essentially limited to it. I believe Suse with Xen is the only other vendor who offers OEM vendor support for that.
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@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?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
"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 not a selling point of VMware, everyone has that.
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@scottalanmiller 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?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
"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 not a selling point of VMware, everyone has that.
I used vMotion has the most basic example (don't filet me for it)
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@scottalanmiller 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?:
The cost of the solution isn't expensive if your business requires those features.
example?
Fault Tolerance with vendor support for it. Technically not limited to Vmware, but essentially limited to it. I believe Suse with Xen is the only other vendor who offers OEM vendor support for that.
Agree 100%. It is one of the cheapest supported solutions. Issue is if you can afford it! Usually not here.
Of course exceptions can be around. But are exceptions imho in the small business. -
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
VMware does have a specific set of features that may be a requirement for a lot of businesses. But many businesses simply mis-evaluate what they actually require.
So they buy when they shouldn't buy.
Sure they get support from VMware in those cases, but the money was incorrectly spent.
Many buy, most in fact, and don't get support. The most common SMB package doesn't include support.
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
vMotion is live migration + HA?
vMotion has no tie to HA. vMotion is moving a live VM between hosts with shared storage.
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@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
VMware does have a specific set of features that may be a requirement for a lot of businesses. But many businesses simply mis-evaluate what they actually require.
So they buy when they shouldn't buy.
Sure they get support from VMware in those cases, but the money was incorrectly spent.
Many buy, most in fact, and don't get support. The most common SMB package doesn't include support.
True, they have a buy only option. Totally forgot about it.
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@matteo-nunziati said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
VMware does have a specific set of features that may be a requirement for a lot of businesses. But many businesses simply mis-evaluate what they actually require.
So they buy when they shouldn't buy.
Sure they get support from VMware in those cases, but the money was incorrectly spent.
If you are talking about HA: 100% uptime , istantaneous RTO and RPO yes: usually you can to without.
No, HA is never unique. Every hypervisor offers HA. that's never a selling point on VMware.
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@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.
No, that is not what vMotion is at all. It's literally impossible to do HA without HA storage, just think about it, literally impossible. No technology can ever overcome that.
vMotion isn't just not that, it's not even HA. It's just moving things around when everything is running okay. It's a trivial feature that everyone has.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
@bnrstnr 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."
I interpreted this as something somebody might say to justify using VMware, though it may be the incorrect decision... Maybe that's not what @DustinB3403 meant by it at all
It was an ad-hib attempt as to what a business evaluation of their needs are. Where literally the business cannot have downtime for even a few seconds.
VMware has this kind of capability, it just cost money to get it.
But their competitors all offer it for free. So it's literally a feature that pulls you away from VMware, rather than towards it.
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@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?:
@bnrstnr 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."
I interpreted this as something somebody might say to justify using VMware, though it may be the incorrect decision... Maybe that's not what @DustinB3403 meant by it at all
It was an ad-hib attempt as to what a business evaluation of their needs are. Where literally the business cannot have downtime for even a few seconds.
VMware has this kind of capability, it just cost money to get it.
And 99.999% of businesses don't require these kinds of features.
But hyper-v can also do this...
Its more design than buying VMWare.Hyper-V can't do it without 3rd party software and solutions. The difference with ESXi is you'd have a single point of contact for everything (ESXi). If you wanted these kinds of features in Hyper-V you'd be looking at StarWinds and they'd be your point of contact, assuming you were using the software and not their appliance.
Same, with ESXi you need Starwind, too. And only with paid ESXi, instead of free Xen, KVM or Hyper-V.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
There are other features as well, but that is the most common feature that many businesses say they need. Literally 0 downtime systems.
As if they are wall street stock exchange
I've never seen Wall St. use VMware for that, they do it at the app level 99% of the time. Since Wall St. apps are all custom and have latency requirements and are often old, this is all already in place. And often run on big boxes that VMware can't run on.
VMware and Xen do this, though, and it's used for things like nuclear reactors, big financial systems, hospitals and so forth. It's very useful when you can afford it, requires loads of extra hardware, though.
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@DustinB3403 said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:
Which 3rd party solutions adds complexity, and can lead the the blame game.
There is value in ESXi, but it's not something easily justified for a lot of businesses.
That's kind of true, but VMware actually needs more third party than many. You CAN get VSAN from VMware, but it's not part of ESXi, so it is a little like third party. it's a separate purchase in most cases. ESXi doesn't include what Hyper-V, Xen and KVM all include without third party parts. It's the opposite of what you are thinking here, if you want a single product that does vMotion and HA (separate things) all in a single product, VMware ESXi is the ONLY one that lacks this, rather than the only one that provides it.
