Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VMWare Screw Customers

communities.vmware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 93 posts

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#11

Post by i2o »

jjm wrote: post #4
Andys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#12

Post by spydum »

Despite wrote: post #8
jjm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

To me, 24GB per cpu seems very low for a VM host.

Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#13

Post by Despite »

nodata wrote: post #10
Despite wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, 24GB per cpu seems very low for a VM host.

Really? Per 10-core cpu or per core?

By my reading of this pdf, each physical CPU requires a license and each license allows for 24-48GB of guest ram. It seems they're specifically trying to limit licensing by vRAM, rather than CPU because there are more cores in CPU's now.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#14

Post by spydum »

bshep wrote: post #7

On the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that? Example: a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses -or- b) N x Small Servers If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...

Cheaper? Maybe -- but people like VMWare for the management interface and often the other addions like DRS/HA, vMotion, vStorage.

Certainly smaller hosts with DR capability can be done for lower capital spend, but you need more capable admins to manage it. VMWare does that for you out of the box.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#15

Post by malandrew »

Having worked with VMware in the past and spent literally millions of dollars in licenses, I had the opportunity to meet lots of VMware employees. My observations is that the company had some very technically brilliant people, but also a lot of people that epitomize the super smart MBA that but naïve MBA that can understand high level business models and financial cleverness, but that are terrible business people because they are completely oblivious to the skill that all great business people have and that is empathy for your customer. This is ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I am their customer anymore.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#16

Post by sc68cal »

Red Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#17

Post by Despite »

spydum wrote: post #12
Despite wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, 24GB per cpu seems very low for a VM host.

Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host…

To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores.

But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#18

Post by SRSimko »

justincormack wrote: post #5
Andys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

But the new wave of public cloud computing is not generally running VMWare's product, as it is too expensive; eg EC2 runs on Xen... they are doing better from the private cloud people who are less concerned about using commodity open source software.

Your assertion that VMware is too expensive is just plain false. The company I work for (Virtacore) offers vCloud Express and we have come to great terms with VMware and our pricing reflects that. While we don't have all the features EC2 offers (because we are only a couple months old and still building out the product) we feel they are extremely expensive. IMO they like to nickel and dime users while we keep it very simple.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#19

Post by pinko »

spydum wrote: post #14
bshep wrote: post #7

On the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that? Example: a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses -or- b) N x Small Servers If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...

Cheaper? Maybe -- but people like VMWare for the management interface and often the other addions like DRS/HA, vMotion, vStorage. Certainly smaller hosts with DR capability can be done for lower capital spend, but you need more capable admins to manage it. VMWare does that for you out of the box.

My experience with VMWare is that they do a very good job estimating the TCO of N physical servers and then they charge you such that it's ~90% of that cost to virtualize them.

I.e., VMWare is usually a better deal, but just barely. Drives me insane.

Post reply on HN