31–40 of 93 posts
Red Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days. I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hob…
Would open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a f…
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
I'm sorry, but having regularly been in a situation where I'm trying to get sign-off on large tech project the first question is "what is the support package like" and the question never asked because caring about that kind of thing is below their pay grade is "but is this software free and open?"
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
I have two iSCSI Targets. I want to pull a LUN from each, and mirror on the KVM Host system, exposing the mirrored disks for my guests. Compared to using ZFS on OpenSolaris with Xen 3.1, this process is incredibly cumbersome and unreliable. Plus I just don't get the need for libvirt. It seems an incredibly complex and useless abstraction over a simply documented configuration file for Guests, and a tool to start/stop…
Update: Here's a blog related to your very question that was written just a few days ago: http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libv...
They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this game too..
Red Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
On the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that? Example: a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses -or- b) N x Small Servers If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...
One of the key advantages of VMWare from a operational point of view is the management capability, which is either much better than what most people have for physical hardware or much cheaper. Even with this new licensing model, VMWare still offers a positive ROI for a large customer, since that customer would also need to buy more licenses for products like IBM/Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC, etc. Those products are mega-buck, and enterprise customers are/were realizing cost savings by getting rid of them.
It's hard to see this from a small/mid-size enterprise perspective. Imagine $2M in recurring licensing charges and $750k in annual consulting expenses for a product functionally similar or inferior to Nagios. Or spending $20M annually on maintenance on software that you don't use. This happens every day in the Fortune 500 and government spaces.
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
"why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important" I'm sorry, but having regularly been in a situation where I'm trying to get sign-off on large tech project the first question is "what is the support package like" and the question never asked because caring about that kind of thing is below their pay grade is "but is this software free and open?"
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
"why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important" I'm sorry, but having regularly been in a situation where I'm trying to get sign-off on large tech project the first question is "what is the support package like" and the question never asked because caring about that kind of thing is below their pay grade is "but is this software free and open?"
If you use open-source software, you don't need to procure anything, right? At one level, that's great, but to people who run the contracts unit or procurement team, that doesn't compute. In their world, you hassle people for a discount and fight over contract terms.
Why do you think that Red Hat sells support contracts in the guise of a software license?
Answer: Because the processes that enable big companies/government to spend money on services are vastly different than software. On a services contract, you need to negotiate statements of work, etc. For a software contract, you just need to buy a software SKU and a maintenance/support SKU.