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

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 297 posts

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

#251

Post by Symbiote »

Thraway198 wrote: post #222
pjc50 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler. Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.

No, Konbini, and Japanese food in general, is much much healthier than the equivalents in the West. Especially the Anglo West.

Konbini have more unhealthy stuff than you'll find in the ready-to-eat section of Tesco, although the sushi is better in Japan.

Both are way ahead of the USA.

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

#252

Post by Symbiote »

ffsm8 wrote: post #126
nixgeek wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me

Can you give an example, as I'm not sure it's a fair comparison?

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/262308005

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

#253

Post by Symbiote »

mikestorrent wrote: post #142
ffsm8 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me

I don't think I could find a sandwich anywhere around here in Canada save maybe one of those awful gas station ones for under $6

The ones being discussed in the UK are in the triangular box like that, but there's so much competition between the shops that they're ok.

It's also a dense enough country that they will be at most a day or two old.

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

#254

Post by rwmj »

2b3a51 wrote: post #189
rwmj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4? (As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).

As I said in another thread, Win95 and RHEL 3 are the oldest we've come across recently. Guests of this sort are not converted, they're copied and run using emulated devices (IDE/SATA, e1000 network etc). We help customers as best we can but don't support these cases.

Usually the story is they're running something like CNC control which originally ran on baremetal, then got virtualized onto VMware when the hardware died (possibly using VDI to make it appear on a terminal close to the machien), and it's still doing the same thing effectively today.

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

#255

Post by rwmj »

sofixa wrote: post #210
rwmj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again. And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of tho…

People are still setting up machines by hand, then leaving companies without documenting what they did. The whole "infrastructure as code" is a fantasy at most real companies.

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

#256

Post by Symbiote »

whatever1 wrote: post #229
remus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.

You motivated why they need a big database. Still unclear to me why they need 40k VMs and not just 100. Its ok for Amazon to do it since they paid for the physical machines anyway and they want to dogfood their AWS services, it does not make sense for someone who rents compute and licenses.

They have over 3000 stores. Maybe each one has a handful of VMs.

Maybe each self-service checkout runs a VM, or each staffed checkout.

They wouldn't want to rely entirely on a remote database to be able to sell products.

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

#257

Post by rwmj »

twizod wrote: post #240
rwmj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move. It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v a…

I think your assessment is pie in the sky. I am moving hundreds of VM's per day and the amount of anchors attached to the source VM's is ridiculous. LB's that are mapped via VMware object, VLAN's extended for the migration but not working, SR-IOV enabled, etc etc....you may have the most perfect setup here but in real life I've never seen it that simple so I truly doubt what you're saying.

The software deals with all that. It's all open source, you can go & look for yourself! I don't have to prove anything.

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

#258

Post by rwmj »

illwrks wrote: post #243
rwmj wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Their fish & meat counters are much better than the other supermarkets. Better selection and much fresher.

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

#259

Post by Symbiote »

firesteelrain wrote: post #81

I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.

If much of this is to support their thousands of supermarkets, almost all of them are closed overnight, or at least overnight on Sundays.

Plenty of time to schedule a migration.

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

#260

Post by zeristor »

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.

Not M&S though
Post reply on HN