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VMWare Screw Customers

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Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#61

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#62

Post by yuhong »

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…

Yea, I think the founder got pushed out by EMC.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#63

Post by lsc »

rednaught wrote: post #34
ssmoot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Libvirt is not needed to use KVM but the purpose has been to provide stability (and an abstraction as you mentioned) over the changes QEMU has had in various releases. 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...

now, the version of KVM I'm using is really, really old, but as far as I can tell, KVM, by itself, does not do any locking. It's pretty easy to start a single guest twice when using kvm by itself, which will irreparably corrupt your instance.

So yeah, I'd strongly recommend that you use libvirt (or some other wrapper that handles things like locking the block devices) if you use KVM.

With xen, on the other hand, it handles that level locking for you out of box, so personally I see no reason to use libvirt. The libvirt devs seem pretty focused on KVM anyhow; Xen support, at least in the past, was pretty poor, so personally, I use the native xen tools for xen.

(I'm not saying this is a reason to use xen instead of KVM; I'm just saying that if you do use KVM, you should also use libvirt.)

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#64

Post by IamBren »

westajay wrote: post #35

I think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt. 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…

Their marketing materials say this is much easier but it doesn't seem easier to me. Right now, we have a three node Enterprise Plus, six CPU cluster. This is six licenses period.

Now, I have to track vRAM usage and decide to purchase EP licenses for all available RAM or just go with usage + growth for the year...or something. I'm not sure how that's easier.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#65

Post by lsc »

mst wrote: post #57
gaius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah, but the point is that the marginal extra work going from, say, 2 physical servers to 6 physical servers is not very many hours at all. Sure, supporting the users on those other servers will be substantial; but the hardware itself? not a big difference.

I mean, going from 0 physical servers to 1 physical server is a pretty big marginal jump; you need someone who knows how to replace drives and deal with other hardware problems, and you need that person on pager.

But that person is going to spend a few days getting the thing set up, then maybe they will touch the hardware once a year ongoing. (as you scale up you can lower the setup time to a few minutes per server by using cobbler or another auto-provisioning setup, which is probably going to take a few days to set up in and of itself. After that, you can bank on spending some significant time every time you buy a different hardware configuration, but either way, most of the time spent on hardware will be when setting up.)

Adding more servers just means you have to run down and replace those drives more often; but like I said, if you have to physically touch each server more than once a year or so, something is seriously wrong.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#66

Post by travem »

glhaynes wrote: post #44
hvs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The other scenario is that keeping prices reasonable means there isn't as much demand for an open source version. Developers who balked at paying $150 a seat wouldn't be sufficiently motivated if the cost was a more "reasonable" $20 say.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#67

Post by zem »

wmf wrote: post #30
chaostheory wrote: post #20

A strong open source alternative is sure to come now.

Red Hat's been working on it for years and they're still years behind VMware. I don't think they could go any faster.

they might get a new influx of corporate code contributors thanks to this

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#68

Post by cultureulterior »

mst wrote: post #57
gaius wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depends on how large that organization is, and how much IT junk, like mail, etc.. is outsourced.

(I'm sole sysadmin for a search engine, and I handle 200 servers.)

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#69

Post by wmf »

Despite wrote: post #17
spydum wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host…

To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores. But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.

is 24GB vRAM per license low?

Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#70

Post by justincormack »

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.

Sure thats true, but small companies dont have 300 servers but still need a sysadmin. Thats why platform services that dont require sysadmins like infrastructure services are so compelling and seeing so much innovation. There is a huge value there.
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