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Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

forbes.com

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#21
So they're going to move to OpenStack Compute but... which supervisor are they going to use? I guess is not VMware (KVM? Xen?), but I still find the article a little bit confusing.

Besides the quotes suck ("OpenStack is not really free"; well, if you don't know how things work you'll have to pay who knows), so I'm not sure if I can trust that information.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#22

What's wrong with VMware? Why would someone not choose VWware over something else?

In my experience, VMWare is great and has a nice GUI, which lead to early adoption. BUT: it has licensing fees for each copy. This can be a big bummer for companies like PayPal that have a fleet of servers - much easier to replace to replace all the VMWare installs and get rid of licensing costs to switch to an open-source VM solution.

At the same time, I could be that OpenStack's API is superior to VMWare's. With a fleet of servers, you want to automate as much as possible - meaning that at the end of the day, API trumps GUI.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#25
I hate cloud headlines. What's the hypervisor? VMWare is a hypervisor (ESX) and management applications (vCenter/vSphere, vCloud Director, etc). Openstack is only the management applications. And VMWare contributes the most interesting part of OpenStack, anyway, which is the virtual networking based on Nicira's OpenFlow.

My personal experience with OpenStack (admittedly late Diablo release timeframe) was that it was borderline unusable outside of the developer setup of a standalone node on Ubuntu 11.4 backed with KVM (edit: and that was only Nova/Compute, not even including Swift/Storage).

Anyway, very interested to see if this is KVM, Xen, or something else backed. Also very interested to see when they reverse their decision (probably after VMWare comes down on pricing by 10-20 percent).

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#26
I think this only solves the cost problem. VMware is damn expensive for what it is.

I'm not really a fan of virtualization myself. We canned it at our organisation a couple of years ago. We had 30 ESX/vSphere managed hosts across 3 data centers which hosted app servers, web front end servers, virtual load balancers and some other minor infrastructure. The final straw was the upgrade costs. Not only that we had problems with volume size limits on our SAN which would require more expense and hackery to work around. Also, we couldn't host our database servers on top of it due to performance problems so we had to have dedicated machines there anyway.

The whole thing at the end of the day just added complexity, expense and didn't improve reliability, security or load distribution as our architecture was sound on that front already.

We've gone back to the original virtualization system: processes and sensible distribution of them across multiple machines. Performance, cost and sanity have improved.

I can understand that virtualization is useful when your resource requirement is less than one machine but above that, I doubt there are any real benefits. It's snake oil.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#28
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here.

More than being wrong, the description is almost entirely without content. "Open source": true. "middleware-type": true, but doesn't mean much. "application deployment": not right, but also pretty vague itself. The text straight from the results page tells an interested party that it's an "enterprise messaging system", which should be good enough for any blog on forbes.com. I really have no idea where they got the go…

Unless you're a developer, you'd probably think "enterprise messaging" has something to do with IM or email.

Something like "middleware that connects applications" would perhaps be clearer.

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#29
Slightly relevant:

If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them.

The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes).

Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably running Ubuntu or Fedora), in order to avoid polluting your current system.

[1]: http://devstack.org/

Re: Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

#30
"UPDATE: We have heard from Adrian Ionel, the CEO of Renski's company Mirantis, who says that Renski is "exaggerating the use case" of OpenStack at PayPal and that Renski's "knowledge of the project is second hand and therefore limited." Renski's title at Mirantis is executive vice president."

It looks like they are adding OpenStack to the suite of tools they use at PayPal and not replacing anything(at least, not yet). Sounds like Renski is just a little over-excited when commenting about a platform he believes in.

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