5 ms·

I wonder how many sales they miss out on because you can't mix AMD and Intel in VMware clusters.

by bluedino 7y ago

overcast 7y ago
How long before VMWare supports that?
- hitpointdrew 7y ago
  Likely never. They don't even recommend having a cluster with varying Intel processors. Ideally with Vmware every machine in the cluster has the exact same model processor. Want to upgrade to a new processor? Start a new cluster.
  - kazen44 7y ago
    there is good reason for this though. Mixing different generations of cpu's makes it very hard to allow live migrations/failover of certain workloads if they depend on instructions or features that are present in some CPU generations and not in others. this gets even more confusing if you look at the product segmentation intel does on it's cpu's. Newer CPU's might not support all features older cpu's do for instance.
    - hitpointdrew 7y ago
      > there is good reason for this though I don't disagree. I was just trying to point out that it is pipe dream to think that VMWare would ever support clustering Intel and AMD together when you can't even cluster differing Intel models together.
erik_seaberg 7y ago
Is this because runtimes optimize for the CPU stepping during startup? How many people actually rely on moving workloads around as live processes without restarting? I thought the industry had settled on "cattle, not pets" and letting instances appear and die as long as a quorum is maintained.
- AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
  > cattle, not pets People running VMWare don't even consider that. Most people have that as a goal which they aren't achieving (and that's fine). I would doubt there's any company in existence actually attaining that goal.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    I admit I haven't had occasion to use VMware for a decade. Different world, I guess.
    - AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
      I don't use it either, but, it's The Thing in some IT departments. It does offer some amazing capabilities for making old legacy applications that were never designed to have any semblance of failover or redundancy or disaster recovery operate in impressively resilient ways. You also pay for the privilege.
- kazen44 7y ago
  the main reason you cannot mix CPU architectures in VMware systems is because doing a vmotion with zero downtime is impossible without major performance hits. having clusters with the same configuration is useful because it allows vcenter to migrate virtual machines to another hardware host without any downtime on the VM's part. you can read more about this here: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/07/the-vmotion-process-under-the-hood.html https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/07/the-vmotion-process...
- kortilla 7y ago
  The people following the latest hype have definitely settled on that. The 95% of the tech world outside of the bubble just barely got comfortable with virtualizing everything in VMs about 5 years ago. The people that wrote the software enterprises are using absolutely did not design in scenarios where you can lose nodes arbitrarily without interruption.

I wonder how many sales they miss out on because you can't mix AMD and Intel in VMware clusters.

overcast 7y ago

How long before VMWare supports that?

hitpointdrew 7y ago
Likely never. They don't even recommend having a cluster with varying Intel processors. Ideally with Vmware every machine in the cluster has the exact same model processor. Want to upgrade to a new processor? Start a new cluster.
- kazen44 7y ago
  there is good reason for this though. Mixing different generations of cpu's makes it very hard to allow live migrations/failover of certain workloads if they depend on instructions or features that are present in some CPU generations and not in others. this gets even more confusing if you look at the product segmentation intel does on it's cpu's. Newer CPU's might not support all features older cpu's do for instance.
  - hitpointdrew 7y ago
    > there is good reason for this though I don't disagree. I was just trying to point out that it is pipe dream to think that VMWare would ever support clustering Intel and AMD together when you can't even cluster differing Intel models together.

erik_seaberg 7y ago

Is this because runtimes optimize for the CPU stepping during startup? How many people actually rely on moving workloads around as live processes without restarting? I thought the industry had settled on "cattle, not pets" and letting instances appear and die as long as a quorum is maintained.

AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
> cattle, not pets People running VMWare don't even consider that. Most people have that as a goal which they aren't achieving (and that's fine). I would doubt there's any company in existence actually attaining that goal.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  I admit I haven't had occasion to use VMware for a decade. Different world, I guess.
  - AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
    I don't use it either, but, it's The Thing in some IT departments. It does offer some amazing capabilities for making old legacy applications that were never designed to have any semblance of failover or redundancy or disaster recovery operate in impressively resilient ways. You also pay for the privilege.
kazen44 7y ago
the main reason you cannot mix CPU architectures in VMware systems is because doing a vmotion with zero downtime is impossible without major performance hits. having clusters with the same configuration is useful because it allows vcenter to migrate virtual machines to another hardware host without any downtime on the VM's part. you can read more about this here: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/07/the-vmotion-process-under-the-hood.html https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/07/the-vmotion-process...
kortilla 7y ago
The people following the latest hype have definitely settled on that. The 95% of the tech world outside of the bubble just barely got comfortable with virtualizing everything in VMs about 5 years ago. The people that wrote the software enterprises are using absolutely did not design in scenarios where you can lose nodes arbitrarily without interruption.