What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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I saw you said in the thread about the niche stuff for really large scale deployments. Even Apple, who has a fairly large scale deployments decided it was too much. I'm pretty sure these are all people who have taken a computer science class and are now IT professionals. Or they made a website in 1995 and used tables to format everything, so now they are virtualization experts.
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I honestly believe VMware is paying (directly or in-directly) people to push it's product.
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@anonymous said:
I honestly believe VMware is paying (directly or in-directly) people to push it's product.
I would not be surprised. And I don't mean that in a "Vmware is evil" way. I totally think that they are a great company full of great staff. But they are a huge vendor (and part of Dell and EMC) with a massive ecosystem that has its fingers everywhere. Nearly every primary vendor, support vendor, MSP and VAR in the industry has money coming to it from VMware or VMware's ecosystem products. Everyone. The influence is incredible, even if very indirect. Anyone not on the customer side of the table has a financial incentive, to some degree, to push VMware.
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One of posters there was singing the praises of VMware up and down, and could not figure out why..... Then I found out his company "won" $100,000 from VMware.....
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@johnhooks said:
I saw you said in the thread about the niche stuff for really large scale deployments. Even Apple, who has a fairly large scale deployments decided it was too much. I'm pretty sure these are all people who have taken a computer science class and are now IT professionals. Or they made a website in 1995 and used tables to format everything, so now they are virtualization experts.
I don't feel VMware is as prevalent in the enterprise as people say, but it is very hard to know. KVM and Xen are often used with no one knowing it. Shadow IT, which runs a lot of enterprises including IBM, don't report to the business what products they use. So the CIO might report a 100% VMware shop, but in reality it's a fake environment for political reasons and the actual IT department can't get purchasing help so is forced to use Xen or KVM, for example.
Reporting of usage is always tough. By financial terms, VMware is the leader of course. By top level usage everyone knows that Xen is the leader, thanks to Amazon and its kin. Netflix is all Xen, for example, and no one has a bigger Internet presence. Google sure doesn't use VMware. Microsoft doesn't. Apple doesn't. IBM doesn't. Oracle doesn't. I've been in a lot of banks and the good ones don't, the bad ones with embarrassing IT departments did - the same ones running Windows 2003 and had never heard of RSAT in 2014 and had no idea how to use PowerShell and brought in paid consultants for even the simplest of tasks!
Who knows what real usage is, but as companies move to OpenStack, I find it hard to believe that they are choosing to pay for ESXi as the hypervisor underneath.
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@anonymous said:
One of posters there was singing the praises of VMware up and down, and could not figure out why..... Then I found out his company "won" $100,000 from VMware.....
Ding Ding Ding
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That wouldn't be JeffNew, perchance, the one that is always a bit belligerent about VMware?
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TBH my view on it is this-
ESXi = I know the product well so use it when I can
even the FREE version. Yes licensing is a cost and can be complex to understand.
(Can I win something from VMWare for this post )Hyper-V = I've installed Hyper-V in one place and yes it works great now running we had a few issues getting it running like the extra config to manage the server from a workstation (ok this might be me not knowing the ins and outs)
Xen - tried but never had the time to fully explore what it could do. Yes I would like to try again maybe when I get a free server to play with
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
I saw you said in the thread about the niche stuff for really large scale deployments. Even Apple, who has a fairly large scale deployments decided it was too much. I'm pretty sure these are all people who have taken a computer science class and are now IT professionals. Or they made a website in 1995 and used tables to format everything, so now they are virtualization experts.
I don't feel VMware is as prevalent in the enterprise as people say, but it is very hard to know. KVM and Xen are often used with no one knowing it. Shadow IT, which runs a lot of enterprises including IBM, don't report to the business what products they use. So the CIO might report a 100% VMware shop, but in reality it's a fake environment for political reasons and the actual IT department can't get purchasing help so is forced to use Xen or KVM, for example.
Reporting of usage is always tough. By financial terms, VMware is the leader of course. By top level usage everyone knows that Xen is the leader, thanks to Amazon and its kin. Netflix is all Xen, for example, and no one has a bigger Internet presence. Google sure doesn't use VMware. Microsoft doesn't. Apple doesn't. IBM doesn't. Oracle doesn't. I've been in a lot of banks and the good ones don't, the bad ones with embarrassing IT departments did - the same ones running Windows 2003 and had never heard of RSAT in 2014 and had no idea how to use PowerShell and brought in paid consultants for even the simplest of tasks!
Who knows what real usage is, but as companies move to OpenStack, I find it hard to believe that they are choosing to pay for ESXi as the hypervisor underneath.
Kind of like a bank I interviewed at that used VMware. They have a couple Red Hat servers, but when I asked if they had any others like CentOS or Ubuntu the lady said, "Oh no we don't use open source"........
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I was hoping that someone would have some insight into the upsides of VMware in a greenfield environment.
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@hobbit666 said:
Hyper-V = I've installed Hyper-V in one place and yes it works great now running we had a few issues getting it running like the extra config to manage the server from a workstation (ok this might be me not knowing the ins and outs)
My experience has definitely been that Hyper-V has a few extra technical hurtles. Nothing big, just not the dead simple VMware and XenServer installs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@hobbit666 said:
Hyper-V = I've installed Hyper-V in one place and yes it works great now running we had a few issues getting it running like the extra config to manage the server from a workstation (ok this might be me not knowing the ins and outs)
My experience has definitely been that Hyper-V has a few extra technical hurtles. Nothing big, just not the dead simple VMware and XenServer installs.
KVM is pretty easy too
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The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
Most MSPs don't support Linux solutions - at least from my experience, and reading threads on forums.
Management doesn't buy into support through forums - Forum support is the general belief by Management on how Linux is supported - be it right or wrong, it's what they believe, and belief is reality.
You mentioned that ESXi is easier than Hyper-v, well that might be worth $500 to someone.
These are all of course excuses, not real reasons to no use it.. but does give you a bit of insight.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@hobbit666 said:
Hyper-V = I've installed Hyper-V in one place and yes it works great now running we had a few issues getting it running like the extra config to manage the server from a workstation (ok this might be me not knowing the ins and outs)
My experience has definitely been that Hyper-V has a few extra technical hurtles. Nothing big, just not the dead simple VMware and XenServer installs.
Really? I've found Hyper-V to be super easy similar to installing XenServer. Especially if you just use the Hyper-V Server standalone software and not the one bundled with Windows.
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@Dashrender said:
The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
Yet the SMB all think that ESXi is Linux. It's a weird dichotomy of misinformation.
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@Dashrender said:
Most MSPs don't support Linux solutions - at least from my experience, and reading threads on forums.
That's true. And I think one of the biggest selling points. The last thing that you want is a solution that is tempting to be supported by the "MSP down the street."
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
Yet the SMB all think that ESXi is Linux. It's a weird dichotomy of misinformation.
oh - I guess I'm not reading the same posts as you (definitely not as many as you) I haven't seen them equate ESXi with Linux.
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I suspect that much of it comes down to things like ESXi being what they are used to, it's what they have always heard people using and discussing, they have never really evaluated the options or everyone they know uses it and they do not feel that they can say anything that would be perceived as not supportive.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
The SMB does not believe in Linux based anything - that fact alone kills XenServer unless the IT person in that spot at that time decides they want to do it themselves.
Yet the SMB all think that ESXi is Linux. It's a weird dichotomy of misinformation.
oh - I guess I'm not reading the same posts as you (definitely not as many as you) I haven't seen them equate ESXi with Linux.
I see it a lot. Partially it comes from RHEL 2.1 being a part of ESX through the end of the 4.x era. And a little comes from a German lawsuit where a Linux developer claims that codes was stolen (he claims like one tiny bit and people run with it to say that one line of code means that the whole thing is a Linux OS). But mostly it comes from people confusing all command lines as being Linux, I've even heard people say that! In the same way that people used to think all command lines were DOS.
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Something else that goes along the same lines is many SMBs saying they have to use Windows because of some software. This just happened to me when I had that interview the other day. They are mostly a Windows shop because they need to use Microsoft Dynamics. The reasoning was that it was "the only ERP system that would work with food companies." The company makes spices for meat processing, and just normal spices. Grocery stores take their spices and put their names on them as the "generic" spices.
I'd be willing to bet that if you took the cost of licensing every Windows desktop,laptop, and server that they have, you could have paid for a decent ERP system that would not lock you in to a certain platform. I don't really believe Dynamics was the only one that would work, but I haven't done research on it.
Even a custom solution that costs 75-100K would most likely be cheaper in the long run.
