VMWare Screw Customers • Hacker News Board

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#41

Post by Duff » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:13 PM UTC

wilhil wrote: post #6

jjm wrote: post #2

This is a mean price increase.

Agreed... Only real enterprise alternative is Hyper-V - I have used it quite a bit and do like it, but, I just don't feel as happy using it as I am ESX. Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs. Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.

Microsoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time.

In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with their Unix workstations. Windows NT in comparison kind of sucked -- but over time the suckage was not enough to justify paying $20,000 for a workstation versus $8k for a NT Workstation.

Ditto SQL Server. Back when I was a newbie Informix DBA, my older colleagues laughed at people messing around with SQL Server. Informix was an awesome product in many ways, but cost like $40,000/cpu when SQL Server cost alot less. Who's laughing now?

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#42

Post by zacgarrett » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:21 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #29

aliguori wrote: post #27

This is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software. No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project (Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going (LibreOffice). Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that happens to be free, but it's fu…

There's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.

XenServer is actually the product name from Citrix. Xen is the open source project that is Open Source.

I know its being a stickler for the tiny facts, but when you are a XenServer admin find the differences rather quickly.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#43

Post by known » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:29 PM UTC

Companies care about Profits. Everything else is secondary for them.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#44

Post by glhaynes » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

hvs wrote: post #32

glhaynes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.

Agreed - though, if open source is gonna kill the golden goose regardless... maybe might as well kill it first, get all the eggs.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#45

Post by SnowLprd » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:43 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #23

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.

We were faced with a very similar dilemma when we set up our virtualized cluster... Do we go with a free open-source solution like KVM, forgoing an easy-to-use GUI, or do we go with a more expensive solution such as VMware?

We eventually decided to build a KVM-based cluster, and while we were already extremely glad we did before the vSphere 5 licensing change, this latest development only serves to confirm the wisdom of our choice. We have enterprise-level support if we need it, the virsh command-line interface is very straightforward and easy to pick up, and we have not shackled our fates to an organization that can yank the rug out from under us whenever they like. Moreover, for Linux-based folks who find themselves pondering their options, consider that VMware requires that you run Windows in your cluster if you want the full advantages of vSphere (e.g., live migration). Because of the added maintenance and security concerns, we were quite loathe to introduce any Windows operating systems into our cluster environment, and the unfortunate state of the VMware world is that it's extremely Windows-centric.

The best part? Not only do we have a fast, rock-solid virtualization solution in place, but the easy-to-use GUI we wanted is also on the horizon. Take one look at the Archipel Project at http://archipelproject.org/, and I think you'll agree its interface puts vSphere to shame. Archipel is not yet ready for critical production environments and (last I checked) currently lacks full support for libvirt-based storage APIs (e.g., for LVM-backed virtual storage pools), but development is progressing steadily. I, for one, am looking forward to getting the best of both worlds (liberated + easy-to-administer software) in our data center when the time is right. If that interests you, head on over to https://github.com/primalmotion/archipel and fork away!

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#46

Post by rfreytag » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:48 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #15

Having worked with VMware in the past and spent literally millions of dollars in licenses, I had the opportunity to meet lots of VMware employees. My observations is that the company had some very technically brilliant people, but also a lot of people that epitomize the super smart MBA that but naïve MBA that can understand high level business models and financial cleverness, but that are terrible business people bec…

VMware has had some significant management changes: http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-t... so you are maybe right about the MBA, non-founder thinking at the C-level there.

Compare VMware's 20110331 net income to 20101231 net income: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii - note how it has flattened.

Since VMware is public quarterly results are vital to the naive MBA. Said MBA might decide to improve profitability by pushing small customers to cloud services (Amazon) who are already customers of VMware.

This also has the advantage eliminating VMware as a competitor to some of VMware's largest customers.

ESXi is already free with limitations. This will definitely be the reasoning if we see VMware make workstation free thereby bring even more potential users in.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#47

Post by SnowLprd » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:52 PM UTC

SRSimko wrote: post #18

justincormack wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the new wave of public cloud computing is not generally running VMWare's product, as it is too expensive; eg EC2 runs on Xen... they are doing better from the private cloud people who are less concerned about using commodity open source software.

Your assertion that VMware is too expensive is just plain false. The company I work for (Virtacore) offers vCloud Express and we have come to great terms with VMware and our pricing reflects that. While we don't have all the features EC2 offers (because we are only a couple months old and still building out the product) we feel they are extremely expensive. IMO they like to nickel and dime users while we keep it very…

In our experience, vSphere is indeed too expensive relative to the value it provides. We ended up much better off implementing a KVM-virtualized cluster that cost us nothing in licensing, allows us to keep Windows out of our cluster entirely, and frees us from fiscally onerous license changes such as the sudden vSphere 5 price increase that spawned this thread.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#48

Post by slowpoke » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 4:54 PM UTC

monochromatic wrote: post #26

wazoox wrote: post #23

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 know this is getting old Yes, it is.

Still doesn't make it less right.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#49

Post by eru » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 5:00 PM UTC

zacgarrett wrote: post #42

eru wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.

XenServer is actually the product name from Citrix. Xen is the open source project that is Open Source. I know its being a stickler for the tiny facts, but when you are a XenServer admin find the differences rather quickly.

Xen is a hypervisor. XenServer is the product name from Citrix which uses Xen underneath. Xen Cloud Platform is actually the name of opensource xenserver.

You wouldn't use just Xen as a hypervisor, in most cases. Amazon uses Xen plus their own stuff on top.

To make it more complicated, there's also XenClient, which also builds on Xen. It's also mostly open source.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#50

Post by dholowiski » Wed, Jul 13, 2011, 5:31 PM UTC

Duff wrote: post #38

bshep wrote: post #7

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...

Many large enterprises are exceptionally bad at managing physical hardware. And if they are ok at it, they spend obscene amounts of money to do so. 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 la…

Agreed. I work at a small company and IT is just me and another guy. We have 2 physical servers, but probably 6, and growing, virtual servers. If we had 6 physical servers, even if it was cheaper, we'd need to hire another 'guy' to manage them. A 'guy' costs the same as 5-10 physical servers, per year...