XenServer vs ESXi
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@DustinB3403 said:
I was asked to make a compelling case.
That to me means I should care.
But to what level. . .
You were asked by someone who was willing to also make a compelling case for VMware? Given that there is no known advantage to the VMware route, it is hard to know what constitutes a compelling case. XenServer is known to work, known to be easy, already in the shop... to me that's a slam dunk right there in the light of "no advantages to switching."
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@Carnival-Boy said:
What do you mean by "installed processing onto a DC"? I know little about Hyper-V, but we used our existing DC for our ESXi host and it went fine. Isn't this the same?
That would be the same, and it would be a terrible practice, and it consumes one of your licenses and/or it is a license violation. HyperV is never meant to be used that way and is licensed in such a way that you would never have to. Can you? Sure. Should you, definitely not. The "host" is supposed to do nothing but managed HyperV. If you use your "two VMs" licenses from Windows, then you aren't allowed to have the DC on the host at all, that's another use license.
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Unless by "used an existing DC as the host" you mean that you removed the DC, made the system into a host instead of doing a clean install first, and then installed the DC into one of the guest VMs. That would be "fine", but you should always clean install before making something into the HyperV host, it only takes a few minutes and ensures that you have a pristine host platform.
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Nope. . . Hyper-V was installed directly into the existing DC02, and VM's setup while the system was functioning.
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This is not a practice that revolves around HyperV, it is just HyperV where it tends to be a problem. Likewise you would never install applications into the Xen Dom0 or directly onto ESXi or into the root of KVM. In the later three cases, licensing doesn't restrict you from doing this but good practice does. In the case of HyperV, it is actually licensing restricted.
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I'm not following you, I'm afraid. I assume the OP has the correct licences? I thought that when you install HyperV it kind of inserts the hypervisor underneath the existing Windows installation, so you end with a hypervisor and the existing Windows install running as a VM? So the physical DC becomes a virtual DC? Is that not how it works?
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@DustinB3403 said:
Nope. . . Hyper-V was installed directly into the existing DC02, and VM's setup while the system was functioning.
So they violated the licensing and the machine isn't legit? Or they bought extra licenses to make this okay and just screwed the pooch on design?
This is a pretty major misstep for an MSP. This is Virtualization 101 kind of stuff. Even just understanding what HyperV is, without studying specific best practices, should make it clear to them that this isn't a good thing to do.
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I can only assumed that they sold us the licensing for it, as they are pretty good with keeping microsoft at bay (I've never heard of any licensing issues with regards to that)
But the implementation is just ass backwards. Export the DC02 functions if you must (build a new VM really) and perform a clean install is how it should've been done.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm not following you, I'm afraid. I assume the OP has the correct licences? I thought that when you install HyperV it kind of inserts the hypervisor underneath the existing Windows installation, so you end with a hypervisor and the existing Windows install running as a VM? So the physical DC becomes a virtual DC? Is that not how it works?
Well yes and no. You are totally correct at the technology level. You install HyperV (role) and it inserts HyperV underneath the running OS as a shim (it actually reboots before this takes effect, for obvious reasons.) So it reboots to running HyperV on the bare metal and the previously bare metal OS of Windows because a VM known as the "host" VM or Microsoft confusing calls it the Physical VM (um what?!?)
You can two licenses of Windows with each Windows 2012 Standard install. Two VMs on the same box, that is, plus one "physical" license for the host VM. The Host VM only qualifies for this license if it runs nothing except the HyperV management, any use of it for anything like DC, IIS, SQL Server, File Server, Spiceworks or any other application or role violates the licenses.
So you have two choices when using it this way. Either you move the services off of the Host VM and put them on one of the two Guest VMs. Or you consume one of your Guest VM licenses to make the running of services on the Host VM allowed.
At the end of the day, you get no freebies from using HyperV compared to other hypervisors but you get no penalties either. Because it needs Windows to manage it, they give you a special management only license for that one use case.
So there is a way to do what you are describing but it doesn't work out super well for you (but works) but generally people mess it up and end up not being properly licensed and overusing what they have.
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Trust me, I really hate the MS terminology on this stuff because it is designed to be confusing in a weird way with a weird hope that it would make the system "easy" for non-technical people. Sadly, you can't do that with virtualization and they made it so confusing that even IT Pros can't navigate the licensing.
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@DustinB3403 said:
I can only assumed that they sold us the licensing for it, as they are pretty good with keeping microsoft at bay (I've never heard of any licensing issues with regards to that)
Nothing like double selling licensing.... be a little lazy, do less work, make extra money off of the customer for no effort. Slick.
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That they are the ones selling you the licenses explains the behaviour. I'm assuming that they are the ones selling the ESXi too. Which explains pretty much all of the behaviour.
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Don't know if anything in here helps, but it might:
http://mangolassi.it/topic/5272/somethings-you-need-to-know-about-hyperv
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So back to the case at hand:
XenServer has many advantages...
- You already know it.
- It is incredibly easy to use.
- It is very performant and this has been shown.
- The devil that you know.
- Zero cost for everything, totally zero.
- Full Paravirtualization Option for Linux workloads.
- Updates are also free.
- No overhead cost for license management.
- No salesman providing guidance.
- Backups are possible for free.
- Far greater feature set than any possible VMware option.
- HA is free
- vMotion is free
- Storage vMotion is free
- Many more free features
- No scale limitations (within reason)
- Local support available
- Minimal technical debt incurred.
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@Carnival-Boy if you are using Windows Server Datacenter licensing then you are completely free to utilize the physical VM for anything that you want as you have licensed the entire machine. There is no overuse possible in that case. But in the case where you have the DC license, there is no incentive to trying to use the Physical / Host VM for anything extra since you can always make another VM for whatever workload you were thinking of running there.
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@DustinB3403 said:
The trouble as far as I can tell with the Hyper-V setup is that our MSP sold it just to sell it, rather than "Oh hey spend X and build a proper Hypervisor, we'll just use your secondary DC to run these machines"
Which "OK" it works but one of these VM's runs a CPU intensive process, and in only able to use 4CPU's because of the limitations of the host hardware.
If I moved this to "my" (and I use my liberally) XenServer I could allocate 12 cores to it, and 32GB of memory (if we bought more to add into the host) and the team that uses it would never have a complaint.
Its the poor proposals after another that are getting to me. It's just not my place to start looking for another MSP... even though I've considered it.
It is your place to point out poor decision making and poor proposals of the MSP though. If this were happening to my company I would bring this up to my boss (and his boss) almost immediately. Especially if they are going to spend money on a product that has no intrinsic benefit over what you are currently using. Especially since you already have that solution running and proven in house.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Nope. . . Hyper-V was installed directly into the existing DC02, and VM's setup while the system was functioning.
Talk about red flags... not only does this VAR/MSP not understand how Hyper-V, a product they had proposed, works but they don't understand the licensing limitation/expectation of it...
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Its the poor proposals after another that are getting to me. It's just not my place to start looking for another MSP... even though I've considered it.
Here is the big question... is it your job to care about the company or not to care? It's an honest question. Lots of companies would say that it is not your job to be involved. Others would be furious to find out that you knew an MSP was screwing them over and that a manager was letting it happen and not even pushing back for reasonable solutions and you didn't go up the chain to let someone know. Figuring out what your role in is key.
Boy this is something I feel completely undefined on.
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@Dashrender said:
Boy this is something I feel completely undefined on.
It sounds pretty obvious, right? But when you actually stop and ask the question, often it isn't really clear if you are supposed to care or not! It's one of those places where everyone thinks that they would have a clear answer until really pushed on it. And in reality, lots of companies don't want you to care. It's actually quite common.
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@coliver said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Nope. . . Hyper-V was installed directly into the existing DC02, and VM's setup while the system was functioning.
Talk about red flags... not only does this VAR/MSP not understand how Hyper-V, a product they had proposed, works but they don't understand the licensing limitation/expectation of it...
Or worse, they DO understand the licensing! Which is worse, being clueless on the basics or being aware of what they were doing and still doing it?
