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Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

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Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#241

Post by IshKebab »

SCdF wrote: post #159
sandworm101 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america. I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.

Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them. Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.

I wouldn't say they are sad. They're a handy option when you're in a pinch. Sad if you're having a meal deal every day of course.

I imagine the positive reception is because the US doesn't have them so it's kind of novel.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#242

Post by IshKebab »

nasretdinov wrote: post #173
cryo32 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.

Local food markets offer much better options than Pret to be fair

A great Pret baguette is like £5. Food from a food market is £10 or more these days. They massively increased in price after covid.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#243

Post by illwrks »

rwmj wrote: post #86
lmm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.

The fifth largest (Morrisons) was also sold to PE with predictable results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrisons#CD&R_takeover

Was Morrisons ever any good?

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#244

Post by thenewnewguy »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #143
m463 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like proxmox has well-fleshed-out documentation for migrating from vmware: "Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well." https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE

Ugh. ProxMox breaks my heart. Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs. They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV. I want an MSP that isn’…

Doesn't the company behind ProxMox sell enterprise support?

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#245

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

thenewnewguy wrote: post #244
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. ProxMox breaks my heart. Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs. They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV. I want an MSP that isn’…

Doesn't the company behind ProxMox sell enterprise support?

Apparently not enough for my lazy MSP to be confident in their service level agreements.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#246

Post by vel0city »

nixgeek wrote: post #122
pdpi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so unbelievable about meal deals? It seems like a really straightforward bundle purchase.

A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

A sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a drink at the grocer near me is $8. I don't exactly live in a super low cost of living area, nor is it one of the most expensive in the US.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#247

Post by vel0city »

whatever1 wrote: post #133

Why a retailer needs 40k servers? What are they serving? To whom? What is wrong with system designers these days? Are they designing or just selling?

They've got a little over 5,000 stores. Probably a few different offices. Each store probably has several VMs or so so they can continue to run isolated if their connectivity to the mothership disappears briefly. You'll probably want the basics of running some kind of local auth service (maybe AD, maybe something else), your system running the POS platform which might even be an app server and a database server as separate VMs, probably some VM running various building management stuff, a VM to run the security camera platform, I dunno what else.

That's just for the operations of the local stores and we're now at probably >25,000 VMs and we've only touched the retail locations. We still haven't addressed logistics locations, corporate offices, stuff to manage their customer-facing applications and websites, etc.

When I first saw 40,000 VMs I too thought it was a bit excessive, but when you're an org wit several thousand locations that you want to be somewhat self-sufficient things add up quickly!

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#248

Post by zelon88 »

warunsl wrote: post #125
zelon88 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 40k servers are probably made up of multiple redundant vSphere clusters with failover. You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. Then the other half. Then duplicate that process. As you build more compute in the new stack, you can decomission more and more of the old stack and convert it. The transition would progress like a cascade, with larger and larger groups of clusters…

> You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. For that half you are migrating, you are essentially operating without redundancy. If these are serious production workloads, the tradeoff is not as simple as you make it seem.

The way a cluster works is you have a giant pool of resources. Say, 33 - 50% larger than the workload. The workload is a dozen VMs. The cluster is 8 giant compute servers and two giant storage servers acting as one giant compute and storage unit. For redundancy you have extra clusters laying around with no workload, but they are added as failovers.

Normally, if one server on a production cluster goes down, the other members of that cluster seamlessly will take over. This is where the extra capacity comes in. You don't migrate the workload to another cluster. You just lose overhead capacity. If you lose too much then you start migrating parts of the workload to the failover. Not the entire thing.

You usually don't have to use your redundant cluster at all until it's time to rebuild the failed cluster. You might pick one of these spare clusters you keep around for redundancy to migrate all or part of the production workload to while you fix the production cluster.

When doing a big migration you take a percentage of your redundancy and convert it to the new environment. This is your staging environment. Once it is capable of doing work, you slowly grow it out and shrink the old environment at the same time.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#249

Post by bigfatkitten »

fsuts wrote: post #234
malfist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a hell of a difference between "court filings are secrete and the media is censored to not talk about that" and "there's a process, but I personally don't know how to follow it"

The takeaway is the appearance of justice has been carefully maintained over decades.

You can go to the court house, sit in the gallery during a trial and literally watch justice being done, anytime you like.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#250

Post by majewsky »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #60

At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.

Go and try to create 40000 VMs on Hetzner. The cloud may look infinitely big, until it suddenly isn't.
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