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

forbes.com

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

#51

Post by insaneirish »

3am wrote: post #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…

> And VMWare contributes the most interesting part of OpenStack, anyway, which is the virtual networking based on Nicira's OpenFlow.

Agree with you about the headline. However, VMWare is not contributing Nicira for free. There just happens to be a Quantum plugin for Nicira (as there is for pretty much everything else).

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

#52

Post by hhw »

hp50g wrote: post #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 proble…

Exactly. Virtualization/Cloud are only good for scaling down, not scaling up. The 20-30% hit to IO, additional latency of SAN vs local storage, management overhead, and added complexity to infrastructure more than negate any potential benefits of improved load distribution when you're dealing with applications that use anywhere near the capacity of physical servers.

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

#54

Post by druiid »

hhw wrote: post #52
hp50g wrote: post #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 proble…

Exactly. Virtualization/Cloud are only good for scaling down, not scaling up. The 20-30% hit to IO, additional latency of SAN vs local storage, management overhead, and added complexity to infrastructure more than negate any potential benefits of improved load distribution when you're dealing with applications that use anywhere near the capacity of physical servers.

20-30% hit in IO? It hasn't been at that level for a long time. With new KVM versions and good Intel processors there is a performance hit of as low as 5% these days. That's not to necessarily say your particular workload will see that, but 10% is generally an 'at-worst' level at this point.

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

#55

Post by incision »

daigoba66 wrote: post #18

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

Price most often.

Licenses for the top-end ESXi run $1000 - $3500 list per socket [1]. If you have a large deployment you're going to be inclined to go for the top-end license in order to support distributed switching and granular control over storage/network traffic.

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

#56

Post by druiid »

daigoba66 wrote: post #18

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

Well nothing specifically is 'wrong' with VMWare, except for their notoriously terrible pricing... as in you might want to do the math and just buy more physical hardware and not virtualize anything unless you can get 10:1 or higher instance scaling out of the VM servers.

At one point VMWare was actually pricing things by memory used, not processor core counts.

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

#58

Post by mindjiver »

mullr wrote: post #17
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RabbitMQ is a messaging queue, Erlang based, not sure if it is owned by VMWare. I get the idea that either it is not owned by them, or the description is wrong enough Oddly quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems - beats make and jenkins it seems

> quite a few build systems are now turning to MQ's for build systems References? I'm curious as to who's doing this and why. I'm trying to think of a reason and not coming up with much.

We have started using a MQ to send messages between different Jenkins instances. For example to have long running test executions on a dedicated jenkins-instance so the main build-jenkins can be restarted without affecting the tests.

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

#59

Post by incision »

hp50g wrote: post #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 proble…

>It's snake oil.

As opposed to a miracle elixir that cures all ills?

It's a tool.

Like most tools, it's best used when you thoroughly understand the challenge and how/why to apply that tool to it.

The problems you've noted here seem more indicative of poor planning and understanding of the solution than any intrinsic deficiency of virtualization.

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

#60

Post by easytiger »

sc68cal wrote: post #37
3am wrote: post #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…

>What's the hypervisor? OpenStack supports multiple hypervisors. They are implemented as drivers - and are in this part of the OpenStack codebase: https://github.com/openstack/nova/tree/master/nova/virt/ See my slides from a talk I did yesterday. https://github.com/sc68cal/openstack-theory-and-practice-pre...

Then they should say that. Reading their website tells me their are doing that bullshit thing were they divorce the tech from the marketing completely.

> OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

Should it (??) really say :

> Openstack is a ton of scripts and tools and things which pull lots of various bits of software together and allow you to have redeployable virtual machines all over the place

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