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VMware outsourcing their support

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Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#51

What tools do Google, Amazon or Microsoft use? They are running millions of VMs, Presumably its proprietary?

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years. Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked. From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible. Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM,…

Google contributes KVM patches upstream. See https://www.phoronix.com/news/KVM-CPUFreq-RFC-Patches , https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-New-ASI-KVM-2022, https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-me...

Regarding AWS, I would also add Firecracker for AWS Lambda, which uses KVM.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years. Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked. From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible. Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM,…

Amazon left Xen years ago and now uses heavily customized derivative of KVM called Nitro.

Thanks, I missed that.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years. Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked. From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible. Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM,…

What else would MS use? HyperV is very flexible. Even Xbox games are packaged up as HyperV VMs and are run in a specialised version.

For some reasons I thought they were using Linux for their hypervisor layer so Xen/KVM. Yes I think hyper-v is fine.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#54
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are used to and like VMwares toolset you wont like Proxmox. I would not switch an enterprise from VMWare -> Proxmox without a really thorough analysis of what that will mean. That said the future of VMware is certainly in question.

Check out xen

If you want to run Windows VMs with all the security features enabled, xcp-ng / xen is a non-starter as it's been completely broken for years with no fix in sight:

https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/105

Proxmox / KVM is the only alternative to ESXi that can support all of Windows security mitigations such as Core Isolation, which requires nested virtualization.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years. Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked. From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible. Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM,…

Amazon left Xen years ago and now uses heavily customized derivative of KVM called Nitro.

Are they contributing code back to the project?

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#56

What tools do Google, Amazon or Microsoft use? They are running millions of VMs, Presumably its proprietary?

Amazon uses Xen which they call "Xen 2" I think because they've made tons of improvements and optimizations over the years. Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked. From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible. Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM,…

I mostly agree with you. Its the "fabric" and tools that matter. In so far as this thread matters, I meant to say that VMware has a lot of great tools surrounding ESXi (which at least used to be the core of running VMs, may have changed)

In my opinion Proxmox does not have tooling like that.

So if I had written my comment better it would be what tooling and fabric these giants use and to what extent they share the tools and upgrades back to open source projects.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#57
post #20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by shareholders, and the most important shareholders are usually the owners and corporate officers. Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I don't measure things in just shareholder returns.

Nor do I, just saying "idiotic" is the wrong pejorative here. He's doing what he's being paid to do and doing it competently and successfully.

People like to do business with people they like, and the Juniors of today are the future CFO, CEO and CTO's. Also IT people have a very, very long memory, and aiming to become the next Oracle is not an advisable strategy.

Being the optimizer of local minima, is bad business strategy, and smart shareholders should plug for a better optimizer.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our VMWare bill went from $66 to $3600 this year (just a dozen VMs). Next year we will be using ProxMox.

It must be possible to milk this "dumb" investor money - which directly destroys the bought goods in the long run. Basically you create two teams. Team A develops a business version of a open source-good. Team B works on that open Source good. Team A gets acquired. The product destroyed. Team B now founds a company becoming Team A, while Team A forks the open source product and keeps the game going. Its a ton of migr…

This is how Silicon Valley works in a nutshell.

There is legacy technology corporation A - with a bunch of enterprise customers, eventually they: - reach a plateau of sales /growth - feature development slows down - cost getting cut across the board

The core product team eventually just leaves the company to use all their internal knowledge to create a startup B that competes with A and delivers next-gen technology in the same space. They get traction, and funding and outgrow company A eventually.

Re: VMware outsourcing their support

#60
post #39
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out xen

Or KVM. Probably no enterprise type solution like something kubevirt-based really makes sense at that scale.

We run a few tens of thousands of VMs on kubevirt, it’s quite fantastic.
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