VMware, a Falling Giant? 417
New submitter Lashat writes "According to Ars Technica, 'A new survey seems to show that VMware's iron grip on the enterprise virtualization market is loosening, with 38 percent of businesses planning to switch vendors within the next year due to licensing models and the robustness of competing hypervisors.' What do IT-savvy Slashdotters have to say about moving away from one of the more stable and feature rich VM architectures available?"
Virtualbox was always my favorite (Score:0, Informative)
VMWare is in my opinion a good solution, but not the best.
If you want the more advanced features you have to get the most expensive package to get everything you would need.
Virtualbox has been very feature rich and very fast, so no loss for me!
Re:Microsoft Virtual PC (Score:4, Informative)
I ca see why (Score:5, Informative)
We use OpenNebula/KVM here.
Both are free as in speech, I can do live migration, it's easy to manage, etc.
I'm running the whole thing on an NFS share from an AoE storage backend.
100% libre software solution, and it kicks ass.
Good luck vmware.
Re:Oracle now... (Score:3, Informative)
Friends don't let friends rely on Oracle support.
Shame on you. Or maybe you don't know how useless it is.
Re:I ca see why (Score:4, Informative)
Damn, you're lazy, try http://http//opennebula.org/support:contracted [http] took me all of 30 seconds to find. Your argument is old and tired, most serious OSS solutions have options for commercial support.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that they VMWare is too expensive.
"Expensive" is relative to your needs. If you only need to host VMs on one or two hosts, don't need live guest migration, storage migration, high-availability, or the ability to manage a farm of VM hosts, then VMware's licensing will cost you exactly nothing.
Where you get into non-trivial costs is when you need guest-migration, HA, or some of their (quite awesome, by the way) power-saving features (i.e. DRS) because at that point you end up needing shared-storage and a license for vCenter and a license for vSphere (varies based on your needs.)
Dynamics on this are changing, though... Except for the recent price spike, the cost of storage has been on downward trend for some time. And the availability of tools like FreeNAS and OpenFiler mean even a small company can afford to stand up a relatively robust shared-storage platform for not a lot more than the cost of the hardware and the time required to set it up. If you married this, (or even a simple EqualLogics device, which are also darn competitive anymore) to VMware vSphere for Small Business, you're into a solution where you've spent under $1,000 to license everything you need from VMware, $0 to license the storage product, and your only other costs are hardware and licensing for Guest OS, which would also be $0 if you're running all Open Source.
Of course, there are exceptions... There are plenty of $100 million companies that are 24x7 operations and need a tighter RTO than VMware Small Biz can provide. For them a simple SAN unit without two, three or four-way mirroring is an unacceptable risk. But I've worked with companies at the $100 million level where they're so buried in server bloat and ad hoc purchasing that the thought of a VMware environment that lets the shut-off 80% of their hardware sounds fantastic.
Re:I ca see why (Score:5, Informative)
I'd imagine they could call anyone on our team, including myself. We know the code intimately at this point, and have put it through extensive testing.
This is more of a problem in the proprietary wold - there is a certain point that when something doesn't work you are forced to call for support because the logs only say so much. If you can trace the software and have access to the source, you honestly don't need to call anyone. At that point, it's just a matter of your own determination and the skill set of your team.
As an aside, we did not have to address P2V migration, because this was part of a new product offering. We are considering replacing our internal infrastructure with this, but that's probably going to happen gradually over time. We have very few windows servers left, and I'm frankly considering phasing them out so we don't have to go through the hassle of activation and the big problem Windows has with changing hardware.
VMWare needs no luck (Score:3, Informative)
VMWare supports live replication. Why just migrate when you can have automatic, near zero downtime fail over with live replication?
Good luck, VMWare? Hehe, you seriously overestimate the live migration feature. Or rather, it is no longer that special. Even HyperV has live migration. The difference is, VMWare does it VERY well. And I've yet to see anyone come close to the live replication that VMWare does.
Don't be offended by this post. I just don't think you're talking real business. Maybe it's "kick ass" for a home setup or a 3 person office.
Recent Experience
We tried Hyper-V for 6 months, and it was the most god awful unstable piece of crap I've ever worked with. A brand new IBM x3650 m3 running 12 cores crashed on a weekly basis and corrupted its main RAID running Windows Server 2008 R2. I think we can all agree that Microsoft virtualization, be it VirtualPC or HyperV is just absolute shit.
We've since switched to vSphere/ESXi, and haven't had a single crash. Everything is running fast and stable. I can live migrate any of the machines. Should a disaster happen, I can bring up another ESXi machine in on any other server or replacement hard drives (should our hot swap drives also fail) in about 5 minutes. Time is money on my network, and I don't have time to screw around. HyperV is not a 5 minute install, and I doubt your solution is either.
I can use VMPlayer instead of VirtualPC which is also free as in beer, not speech. ESXi is also free as in beer, though it is well worth the license for more features. And yes, it does live migrations. Unlike MS solutions, VMWare supports installs on Linux. I rather run Windows 7 in VMPlayer on Ubuntu, than run Ubuntu on Windows 7.
Being in a major production environment where every minute of downtime is a lost customer, I can't play around with anyone that doesn't have major support. That pretty much means Microsoft, Citrix, or VMWare. And of those three, I've had the best luck with VMWare. I've even heard Citrix is good, especially in VDI.
I don't think VMWare is in any need of luck. I know of no serious business looking for 4th party solutions for their major production servers. As someone else said, maybe for a VERY small shop, maybe for a dev box, but not for Enterprise.
Setup
What is your setup and why in Spagetti Monster's name are you running VM over NFS ethernet? Either go RAID or fiber to a SAN. That does not sound like a good Enterprise setup. Are we talking 10GB over a dedicated line (doable) or 1GB over switch (WTF)? If it's the latter, I bet you have a hell of a write to disk latency problem if you run more than 1 production VM. Personally, I'd go fiber SAN if RAID wasn't an option, but then again, I run 12 VMs on 2 64bit servers alongside a small array of dedicated servers. I'd laugh an AoE based VM proposal right out of my office.
I'm just taking a wild guess you aren't running a rack, or have network intensive users/applications. In my situation, I have to deal with about 80 workstations, a remote office, and 4 internet data connections on top of the servers themselves, including a 13TB file server and 20TB of backup storage. I can eat bandwidth with the best of them. When you can no longer count your routers and switches on your fingers, then I'd more willing to listen.
So, I don't know who you are posting to, because it's not really SMB or Enterprise.