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VMWare Screw Customers

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51–60 of 93 posts

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#51

Post by CrLf »

i2o wrote: post #11
jjm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.

Those "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see what pain is).

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#52

Post by gaius »

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...

The constraints on operating a large datacentre are a) power b) cooling c) floor loading (really!)

If you run out of one of these your choices are a) consolidate (which may imply virtualization) or b) relocate (which is astronomically expensive to do with no downtime).

That's why people will spend money on VMware.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#53

Post by gaius »

dholowiski wrote: post #50
Duff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm sorry to be blunt but a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins:servers means you are doing it very, very wrong. 1:300 is not uncommon these days with the right tools.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#54

Post by lhnn »

SnowLprd wrote: post #45
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…

If you have a blog, would you write something up about Archipel? That looks pretty damned nice, and I'd like to hear the perspective of an implementer (alongside reading docs).

I'm all about getting FOSS some visibility in my company.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#55

Post by chrisbolt »

rfreytag wrote: post #46
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 mig…

Amazon uses Xen, they probably don't pay VMware or Citrix for any licensing.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#56

Post by gaius »

jjm wrote: post #4
Andys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

You can buy a 24G PC from Dell's website now, it's nothing exotic anymore.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#57

Post by mst »

gaius wrote: post #53
dholowiski wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm sorry to be blunt but a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins:servers means you are doing it very, very wrong. 1:300 is not uncommon these days with the right tools.

That really depends how much of the additional "IT guy" hours are going into desktop support of the (presumably) more complex configuration.

I'd say a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins to servers is actually pretty common -if- the sysadmins also do desktop support for the organization. At one of my ISP jobs the customer/production servers had a 1:50 or so ratio (but a lot of time was spent on new products/features, maintenance could easily have been 1:200 and our automation was mediocre) but the internal IT dept was around the 1:3 mark.

And he said "IT is just me and another guy", not "systems is just me and another guy", so I suspect that's the case for him.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#58

Post by hillad »

VMware Customer here.

Lots of FUD coming from the community- at first glance it sounds bad, but a lot of us should do the math before getting the pitchfork ready. ( Script to help "do the math" http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/ )

We will actually be saving money with the vRAM licensing changes.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#59

Post by SnowLprd »

lhnn wrote: post #54
SnowLprd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you have a blog, would you write something up about Archipel? That looks pretty damned nice, and I'd like to hear the perspective of an implementer (alongside reading docs). I'm all about getting FOSS some visibility in my company.

Absolutely. I'm already half-way done writing an article on Archipel, and I'll be sure it gets posted to HN when it's ready.

As an aside, Antoine (the author of Archipel) just told me that beta 3 will be released next week, after which he'll be focusing on expanding the VM storage options.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#60

Post by IamBren »

i2o wrote: post #11
jjm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.

Yep - we just bought 54 x 8GB DDR3-1333 Registered DIMMs for about 10K, and we can sell the 54 x 4GB modules we are replacing for about 2-3K on eBay. But since this is a VMware cluster, now I have to scramble to see what this is going to cost me in additional licensing before I upgrade. :(
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