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

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

#111
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Switch to virtualbox ... Nice gui, better features, open source, no licencing per copy.

Not really the same thing.

they would be talking about vmware ESX\vsphere not workstation.

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

#112
post #93
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Tell that to Netflix - or any of AWS' customers, really.

AWS is a prime example. EC2 unreliable, doesn't perform well and is expensive (and fairly weather dependent by the looks too). If you want anything that can actually shift anything, dedicated servers are cheaper (but you might actually have to commit - oh dear if your margin is that tight, you don't have a product worth it). The only use case I can see for it really is rapid scaling but that seems only viable for con…

Take a deep breath, relax, and realise that plenty of people have use cases that are different to yours.

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

#113
post #20
post #14

If I'm correct, Openstack is different from Openshift and Openshift actually runs on top of Openstack, right? It's more like an appserver that can run Ruby on Rails, Play framework, etc., right? Because very often I tend to get confused between the two..because of the vague similarity in their names..

OpenShift ( https://www.openshift.com/ ) is a PaaS, made by RedHat. OpenStack ( http://www.openstack.org/ ) is an IaaS cloud platform, maintained as an open source offering by Rackspace, and originally created by a partnership between NASA and Rackspace. OpenShift could theoretically run in an OpenStack cloud, as just about anything could, but the two products are in no way related to my knowledge.

Thank you!

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

#114
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Curious how you've set this up. What role does the MQ play? Does it ship results to the mother ship or a console? Or are you sending notices of changes to the test machine? etc. TIA

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

#115
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says 10,000 servers, so maybe there's an 8:1 ratio

Unless I read it wrong the article says 10,000 servers going live this summer with the plan being to replace all 80,000 servers in total. edit: just noticed they sneak "and eBay" into the 80,000 total server count. Makes a little more sense now :)

eBay doesn't have anything close to 80,000 servers.

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

#116

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 runni…

> If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack

You really shouldn't, unless you're interested in doing development work on the bleeding edge code in Git. Devstack is a development tool, not a deployment tool.

If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you would be much better off installing released, tested packages provided by your Linux distribution. It's true that there is still some setup work required, but there are many, many people working on tools to help with this:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Get_OpenStack

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

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rackspace Cloud Servers runs on OpenStack. It seems to work pretty well for them.

I would expect that it maybe heavily custom/staffed-up-to-be-configured-for-their-infra I.E. - it likely didn't just work pretty well for them out of the box. There is a difference between using a base technology which requires you have FTEs on staff to maintain it and grabbing an off-the-shelf app to help run your systems.

Isn't the idea of Open Source technologies? Customizing software for your particular use?

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Curious how you've set this up. What role does the MQ play? Does it ship results to the mother ship or a console? Or are you sending notices of changes to the test machine? etc. TIA

We have custom plugin to send message to the MQ. Other Jenkins-instances running the same plugin will receive the message and can act on them according to the configuration.

Currently we mostly use this to send internal release notifications around, e.g. "foobar-1.0.0 released, find it here ". Kind of neat with a n * 1000 developer organization spread over the entire world.

Currently the plugin is not open source but hopefully it will be later on.

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

#119

I think VMWare is going to be in some trouble in the next few years. A lot of opensource projects are picking up speed. One of my favorites, oVirt ( http://www.ovirt.org ) especially. Red Hat mainly runs the project, and is pretty much the open source version of RHEV.

I don't think they are in that much trouble. They are just making a boatload of money while they can get away with it. But they are working on multiple tiers: free, starter, and "OMG, Money"! That last one might not be around for much longer.

If you look at their other offerings some of it is reasonable (VMWare Fusion) and others are set at whatever the market will bear (VMWare Workstation, vsphere Enterprise).

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

#120
post #91
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…

Almost definitely KVM. The Ubuntu/KVM/OpenStack combo is the bread-and-butter deployment scenario outside of a small number of folks (notably Rackspace, which is OpenStack on XenServer^TM). Also, Source: knowing these things is my job.

Hmm, eBay has worked extensively with rackspace for cloud-platforming though, so I think it's mostly Xen: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/case-study/an-open... http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/03/0219230/ebay-dep...
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