@scottalanmiller Starwind on vSphere requires a VM (Linux or Windows). vSAN is the only fully in kernel SDS option on vSphere. (ScaleIO has a VIB for the client side, but not the target side code which still runs in Linux).

@scottalanmiller They have a different compensation plan (although it changed as we are now in FY18 for Dell's calendar year) so you'll see different behaviors in their sales force from different people.

@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.

Also that cost study on vSAN is funky. The costs don't make sense to me based on quotes I've seen (I suspect no one actually was trying to get a discounted quote, and put 5 years or support or something on it). It also uses SATA drives (not certified for vSAN) for capacity instead of NL-SAS drives, and looks to be using a non-certified cache tier drive.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware VSAN:

VMware VSAN Support Cost: $25,440 ($1060 per CPU for each year after the first)

Wow - why even sell VSAN at that point - why don't they just do subscription and get over with it - wow that seems expensive. Is this in line with support contracts for other SAN products? I know it's hard to judge that because this is based on CPU (luckily not cores) where I'm assuming typical SAN support is more based upon capacity.

Because that's not what vSAN costs for a 3 node cluster. The capital cost is 15K List for a 3 node cluster. I'm guessing he's bundling the first 3 years of support in or something and putting zero discounting on the cost.

This cost study is also using 4TB SATA drives which vSAN doesn't certify. Also the only 1.9TB drive I"m familiar with that Dell sells (this could have changed) is a PM863 that gets awful write latency consistency and is only certified for capacity usage not write cache. Beyond that you would be better served by 2 smaller write intensive SSD's. This cost study ignores the HCL, the design and sizing guide.

@scottalanmiller said in What Avaya Has to Teach Us About Closed Source:

The issue now with Avaya is that we can no longer have confidence that they will be able to survive to continue to support their products. An investment like this in something like storage often requires a five to ten year confidence window, with a PBX this is generally more like ten to twenty years.

This isn't quite true. They filed Chapt 11, not 7. They had too much debt from previous acquisitions. Given the real money in PBX"s is milking support renewals and phone replacements they can EASILY zombie on for another 10 years. Hell while eON did this for a good 10 of it's 20 years someone still bought them (Professional Teledata) and will swap parts and deal with phone replacements still even after their death. There is just too much money charging crazy uplifts on ancient phone systems. Avaya had the best contact center platform in the industry and that gold mine of high dollar per user systems will attract a buyer to secure. That said it's not a growing market.

I'll agree that I wouldn't choose them for my primary phone system if doing a greenfield deployment.

For regular corporate users anyone of any size has a Microsoft ELA, and likely is going to get Lync/S4B wether they want it or not. Given that Microsoft is the worlds largest phone company (Skype terminates more PSTN than anyone) and it's almost inevitable that they end up handling 1/2 this market.

For small shops, they are going to buy generic SIP phones and 1-2 of many incredibly cheap systems. Open source or not you can throw a rock and hit something cheap (CudaTel I was fairly impressed with).

The death of the PBX industry is being driven partly by open systems replacing proprietary, and maybe by open source, but there are far bigger threats.

1. Cell phones. We are past "peak" landline call volume. People would rather have 1 number and carry it with them. Unlimited calling plans do quite a bit here and a lot of us don't need to transfer calls to anyone ever. This impact is SLIGHTLY blunted in the US (We have incredibly high mobile costs)

2. Non-voice communication. Slack, email, txt, hangouts, and a bazillion other means of communicating without vice have taken over. A lot of calls done for ordering are now done by app or website. When was the last time you called Amazon about something?

I would argue that even VOIP at this point is comparable with being a voice mail programming guy (I learned VMIII sadly at one point). It's a dying industry and not worth time investing your skills in.

@DustinB3403 Personally I prefer robocopy. Hell of a lot faster, and you can make sure it will copy exactly how you want....

Robocopy <Source> <Destination> /copyall /xo /w:0 /r:0 /log:Logfile.txt

Tail the log file (Wintail is handy for this) as having it log to the console slows down copy's.

@IRJ said in Why IT Builds a House of Cards:

The moral of the story here is you get what you pay for. Every once in awhile you can get a rockstar IT person at $40K a year, but it doesn't really happen very often. Sure, many IT people go start out a $20k and work their way up ( I did), but they are going to view that $40K a year salary as a stepping stone with limited growth. Give them limited support (money and verbal) and the chances of having a dank network get even lower.

$10 an hour to hire IT?!? You can make more waiting tables, or at a gas station. 40K isn't much better (Bartenders make more than this).

@Carnival-Boy said in The MSP Model fails more often than not.:

I'd argue that the more complex it is, the more having good structure and support is important.

I agree and that's where I think internal IT wins. MSPs tend to be very good at IT, but lack the business understanding, because they don't work in the business, they work in IT. Good internal IT staff have both IT and business expertise.

Depends on the MSP If it's one that specializes in a given field (Say Education) they might know how other companies in the same vertical solve a problem.

@scottalanmiller said in Free bare metal virtualization, HyperV free or VMware ESXi 6 free or else ?:

Right now the backup capabilities of XO are pretty basic. It's image based backups like Veeam or Unitrends do, but it does not have the additional technology to open up the backups and pull out individual files. To do that you need to mount the snaps yourself and go through them to grab individual files. In some cases you might need additional tooling from a third party if you want to extract emails from an Exchange database, for example.
But that kind of stuff XO is working on and maybe we will see that included in the future as well, a la Veeam.

They have Deduplication/compression yet?

@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@travisdh1 To be clear, VMware (and Microsoft, and RedHat) don't want to shut you down.
They want.... Your money. That's it really. If they shut you down then they can't get your money.

Now if you receive a fake warrant you need to call the FBI or U.S Marshals as they will very much arrest whoever sent you a fake warrant (Got a friend who's an FBI agent, who would love to do nothing more than throw someone in jail who does this). Now if the federal GOVERNMENT is presenting fake warrants, you need to file suit in federal court against them (and go to the press).

What's sad is I think you actually believe that. The U.S. Marshals were along with them for "security". Lawyers have been involved. A federal court case is a measly $300+million, because it would go to the supreme court. The FBI doesn't want to get involved. Seriously, what country do you think we live in? A free on? Give me a break. China's more capitalistic and free than the U.S. today, just because you don't see this stuff doesn't mean it's not happening.

Actually I just got back from a roadshow tour in Asia (A bit jet lagged). I'm quite aware of China's government, and economic policies. They are extremely protectionist (Artificially keeping their currency pegged down, requiring foreign direct investment not exceed 49% of various companies, being the LAST regulatory environment to prove the Dell-EMC deal). The internet is filtered, and freedom of speech or even complaints against government censorship. When my wife was there just saying the word "Tibet" on a phone call resulted in a "click" and her SIM being blacklisted for the rest of her trip.

In the event your in the 'Herb" business they have laws that make it illegal (and throw people in Jail for years for dealing). It's still better than Thailand where you can get the death penalty, or Manilla where they've killed a few thousand "drug dealers" this year. Asia in general isn't a safe place to be for that kind of business.

If your in a line of a business that's against federal law I'd expect to get shake downs from the federal government.....

@scottalanmiller said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@Dashrender said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

Wow.. that maintenance costs seems a bit high, but I guess it's only $311 per processor. I'll have to lookup what my customer just paid for their maintenance.

When its 3AM and you have to restore something and need help you don't question what you paid for backup vendor support. It's one of those things I couldn't imagine going without.

Years ago, I had a DRDB cluster go split brain on me, and not having real enterprise support to deal with the issue (and mess of sorting the data back together) made me realize why storage/backups are normally something you normally have enterprise support vs. build your own. I lost 3 days of my life to that mess and still want it back...

Just in case anyone missed this.... DRBD certainly has enterprise support options. Linbit does this exclusively. John didn't have that support package, but it is available out there.

I don't think they existed back then. That said, One of the benefits of a modern HCI system (Like Scale Computing, VxRAIL, etc) is reducing the number of people you have to call. If you have an outage if you have 3 vendors that gets fun (and why your better off being fronted by a 3rd party IT service provider who's fronting all this stuff) or even better just putting your stuff on a hosting provider's cloud who takes care of all this for you (Where a LOT of Xen/XenServer adoption is).

@travisdh1 To be clear, VMware (and Microsoft, and RedHat) don't want to shut you down.
They want.... Your money. That's it really. If they shut you down then they can't get your money.

Now if you receive a fake warrant you need to call the FBI or U.S Marshals as they will very much arrest whoever sent you a fake warrant (Got a friend who's an FBI agent, who would love to do nothing more than throw someone in jail who does this). Now if the federal GOVERNMENT is presenting fake warrants, you need to file suit in federal court against them (and go to the press).

Just to be clear, your not doing business with Sudan, Iran, North Korea or Cuba by any chance....

@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@marcinozga

At this small of scale what's wrong with agents? Any decent backup product using Windows 2008 On VM's can do image level, bare metal restore (or V2P, P2V etc). Symantec had this 3 years ago even.

@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?

Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....

Yeah, and the people over on the Spiceworks community went ape**** when they saw what it was pulling, for good reason if I remember correctly. Why do you need full workstation information for a virtual server infrastructure? Even Microsoft doesn't do this, and I think we all know how well that process is viewed in the IT community.

Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right

I actually know the guys that wrote BIOS code. Hope you enjoy assembly language

I hated that class!

BTW, out of curiosity i looked it up. Redhat does licensing audits too.

@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

So... you're asking people to run unknown software on their network, and nobody will even know what it actually does. You see no problem here?

Asking Enterprises who sign an agreement to run a discovery tool that they can look at (and even run it themselves, as well as look at the output file?). If you want to see what it actually does, you can just proxy it through ONYX (API proxy that logs all commands) as well as run it when read only permissions....

Soooooooo Just to be clear. You write your own BIOS code right? Your browsing this site in Lynx, and are hand inspecting all javascript right

Also can you please PM me any ethics violations your seeing from our field or auditors? I didn't get it.

@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson That's what we are doing on XenServer market (for a lot of reasons, especially the API itself is good enough to stay agent less on our side)

We've gotten rather militant with API's (You can't ship a VMware feature without a public API for it). This is part of why it's taken so long to get to the point of replacing the C# and Flex client, was the amount of stuff managed by the evil kludge (known as the inventory service). Everyone thought it was flash that was the speed problem...
I used to not think API's where that important but then I saw the error of my ways....
I used to not think API's where that important but then I saw the error of my ways....

@travisdh1 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

Have you actually read the license contract? It's so horrendous I wonder how anyone actually uses VMware for anything. When an audit happen, it's crazy town time, and we all know audits happen.

I've never seen/heard anyone not under an ELA audited by VMware. (ELA's are a $250K minimum). VMware audits are conducted by a 3rd party professional auditing company (It's one of the big 4 firms IT auditing wing if I'm not mistaken). They work with your IT team to run a quick discovery tool then get out of your hair. It's painless, and given a lot of ELA's are on weird burn down/token/consumption type agreements it is actually helpful to the customer to know where they stand against their ELA.

If you have any examples of VMware staff or auditors abusing customers on this, or maliciously lying please PM me the details so I can report them to our Ethics team.

@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson I'm not here to attack the product at all (I don't even know what half of the acronyms meant). I'm not building an hypervisor.

I'm just here to try to survive with the crumbs left from server virt market, without leaving my philosophy (making Free software).

There's a lot of crumbs (maybe even spare slices of bread) in the hypervisor market (especially Xen) for easier to use management stacks and tool chains. Look at what Scale Computing is doing in going after the SMB market. There's a lot of people with 2-12VM's 1-2 IT guys, and they are not going to the cloud.

@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

Anyway, my point was:

• Free software is great and powerful, you just trade this against time to understand how it works (or cross your fingers, but it's not acceptable in production). Note that you could mitigate the risk in different ways but you should understand most of your infrastructure.

• Support/Service on proprietary software can be useful if you have money and you don't care about what's happening here (ie not your core business)

• Support/Service on Open Source software is a kind of best of both worlds.

But that's my opinion

One of the benefit of open source is that there are multiple parties contributing to it that you are not having to pay. (The challenge is their needs may not align with yours, although this happens with commercial software also). The SMB is perpetually in an awkward drafting of larger enterprises hoping for lower cost solutions that solve their problems to fall off the truck. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When I worked for a SMB I'd always grown when I saw new versions come out that supported 10K VM's instead of 5000VMs and so forth...

The VMware VCSA uses Postgres, Photon Linux (you can find on GitHub). The major proprietary "Secret sauce" is the 150MB worth of proprietary VIB's on a host and the ESXi kernel itself. If you include GPL drivers, BusyBox, Linux, Tomcat/Apache, I think your typical vSphere deployment actually has more "Free" code on a per MB basis than not...

@olivier said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@John-Nicholson I think indeed you are not yet leading the licensing FUD, Oracle seems always better than anyone else on earth.

I've never met anyone at VMware ACTIVELY try to over license people with threats of lawsuits or breach notices (and If you do run into them, please report them as that's not the culture and I can see Pat personally firing anyone who tries that). You can not be "cheap" without being an asshole who's shaking down clients to pay for a new Yauht.

Most of the products are inexpensive IF you are using the functionality. The alternative to NSX is physically attaching a Layer 4 firewall like a ASA to every NIC port coming out of a ESXi Host, Buying Nexus 7K's with OTV licenses to do Layer 2 encapsulation over the WAN, and having to increase the size of your IDS/F5's/PaloAlto's by 20x. Does NSX SOUND expensive at first? Sure. The alternative though so laughable expensive that you historically had to leave gaps in your security strategy for east/west traffic or expect it to take weeks/months to move a VM between data centers vs. seconds...