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The phrase "homebrew KVM platform" made me chuckle. All of the hyperscalers have a homebrew, aka proprietary platform using a hypervisor. AWS has Nitro which s

The phrase "homebrew KVM platform" made me chuckle. All of the hyperscalers have a homebrew, aka proprietary platform using a hypervisor. AWS has Nitro which seems to have been based on KVM but likely quite different by now. If you are selling VMs to customers, I can't understand a good reason to use VMWare. The only reason would be if you are selling VMWare as a service.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
If you’re providing application services to customers who need to use an application that the vendor only supports in VMware, then you don’t have a choice. Well, I suppose you do. But an EMR/EHR for instance is going to _need_ vendor support, which means requiring VMware even if you’re not selling VMware itself as a service.
- rcleveng 2y ago
  Absolutely - in enterprise software, it's the certified configurations that are not something you can mess around with, if you like support. I'd still consider this VMware as a service, although not full VMware, but just enough for the checkboxes. Maybe you don't get API access, console access, etc, but the main thing you are selling is vmware (to check the certification boxes), and not a generic VM.
monocasa 2y ago
> AWS has Nitro which seems to have been based on KVM but likely quite different by now. It still is relatively stock KVM on the CPU side of things. They've been upstreaming changes they need like lower overhead for emulating Xen's hypercall interface. Most of their special sauce is in the devices though, as those natively provide VM boundaries leaving the hypervisor to not have to manage all that much at runtime.
dilyevsky 2y ago
The challenging bits are all outside of the KVM like the VPC networking that has to be implemented using some SDN (e.g OpenVSwitch), block devices, etc VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support. Not using their hypervisors you have to manage a huge pile of OSS+proprietary integrations and actually have staff who truly understand how everything works down to the lowest level. Doable but probably above the pay grade for most
- sofixa 2y ago
  > VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support VMware support had always been a crapshoot. Now under Broadcom it's even worse. So having support that may or may not be useless isn't a big advantage, really. Not everyone needs an SDN, depending on their networking requirements or topology. Storage is also not a very complicated problem if you already have a SAN. Solutions like Proxmox come with everything included too, so you don't have to build everything from scratch.

TheNewsIsHere 2y ago

If you’re providing application services to customers who need to use an application that the vendor only supports in VMware, then you don’t have a choice. Well, I suppose you do. But an EMR/EHR for instance is going to _need_ vendor support, which means requiring VMware even if you’re not selling VMware itself as a service.

rcleveng 2y ago
Absolutely - in enterprise software, it's the certified configurations that are not something you can mess around with, if you like support. I'd still consider this VMware as a service, although not full VMware, but just enough for the checkboxes. Maybe you don't get API access, console access, etc, but the main thing you are selling is vmware (to check the certification boxes), and not a generic VM.

monocasa 2y ago

> AWS has Nitro which seems to have been based on KVM but likely quite different by now. It still is relatively stock KVM on the CPU side of things. They've been upstreaming changes they need like lower overhead for emulating Xen's hypercall interface. Most of their special sauce is in the devices though, as those natively provide VM boundaries leaving the hypervisor to not have to manage all that much at runtime.

dilyevsky 2y ago

The challenging bits are all outside of the KVM like the VPC networking that has to be implemented using some SDN (e.g OpenVSwitch), block devices, etc VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support. Not using their hypervisors you have to manage a huge pile of OSS+proprietary integrations and actually have staff who truly understand how everything works down to the lowest level. Doable but probably above the pay grade for most

sofixa 2y ago
> VMware had a solution for all of these natively and with support VMware support had always been a crapshoot. Now under Broadcom it's even worse. So having support that may or may not be useless isn't a big advantage, really. Not everyone needs an SDN, depending on their networking requirements or topology. Storage is also not a very complicated problem if you already have a SAN. Solutions like Proxmox come with everything included too, so you don't have to build everything from scratch.