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I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?

sithadmin 4y ago
VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.
- caymanjim 4y ago
  Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.
jodrellblank 4y ago
You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it. With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills. And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc. I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.

VMware has the largest on-premises hypervisor footprint by a large margin and sells a zillion other software products to layer on top. Pretty much every large public company has a VMware footprint in their data center, and frequently have their entire on-prem infrastructure built on top of vSphere.

caymanjim 4y ago
Fair enough. I could have googled it. I live in a bubble of Linux and AWS/other cloud services, so this sort of thing isn't part of my world.

jodrellblank 4y ago

You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it. With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills. And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc. I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.