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As a VMWare customer, this makes me consider their ethics. If they're unethical, shouldn't we look into switching away from their product? I'm not aware of man

As a VMWare customer, this makes me consider their ethics. If they're unethical, shouldn't we look into switching away from their product? I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space - Hyper-V certainly, but that's less of an option for some. Short of rearchitecting our service as a series of containers, what action can conscientious corporate leaders take?

tw04 12y ago
Well, the go-to is generally considered Redhat with their RHEV product line. There are a plethora of other options out there, but if you're looking for an open source path with enterprise support they are generally candidate #1. Oracle has an option but... ya. Citrix Xenserver would be the other major player.
- raincom 12y ago
  VMWare has more than just ESXi: managing ESXi, HA and DRS, vmotion, etc. Open source lacks what VMWare offers to enterprise customers. Not every company can develop tools to manage hypervisors (say, kvm) like Google does. Openstack is trying to solve this problem; but so far, openstack seems to be more of marketing, less of success stories.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    > managing ESXi, HA and DRS, vmotion, etc. These are all part of oVirt/RHEV.
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  Disclaimer; I'm not a sysadmin. Data point below is second hand knowledge from helping to track down issues with the ops team. Our company started with RHEV and ran into lots and lots of issues with it. There were compatibility issues between our VM infrastructure and SAN (firmware problems on one side, I forget which). Guests would just lock up all the time. There were other problems, but I'm not familiar with them. We've had little to no problem since migrating to VMWare.
  - dijit 12y ago
    Controversial opinion here probably, but vmware has been doing virt for a long time, so it makes sense that it's rather polished if you fit there eco-system. however qemu-kvm hasn't been around so long, it's still not anywhere near the adoption numbers such as Xen, however I've used it in production in three different large companies with great success.. the beauty is that more people who use it means more eyes on fixing it. so for small things especially I'd really recommend it, and honestly I like it anyway, it feels very freeing to use libvirt/kvm- you have much finer grained controls than what vmware gives even in it's expensive offerings, and the best bit is that it's free as in beer- you can use all it's features without being in any kind of violation with licenses. the tools to administer it are ssh if you're familiar with unix or a GUI python program which gives you good control and graphs (works over ssh tooo, so encryption goodness) and works cross platform (last time I checked) contrasting to when I last used vmware:- you had to use there vsphere client which isn't ported to OSX or Linux. I use Windows at work so it's not a problem, but I would prefer to run linux so I can actually use decent virtualisation solutions for small test labs, my company baulks at the cost of vmware workstation, and if I run linux for kvm then I cannot administer our massive ESX clusters..
higherpurpose 12y ago
Oracle's Virtualbox? Oh, you said ethics...nevermind.
- vetinari 12y ago
  Abstracting from ethics, Virtualbox is probably not a suitable replacement for ESXi. Oracle VM Server might be. But then, you could use Xen directly.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    XenServer seems a more apt replacement for ESXi. They are both tier 1 hypervisors and come with comparable features and management options, and both install from an ISO with easy setup. XenServer is also 100% open sourced now by Citrix. It's a completely free product with all the features, but you can pay Citrix for enterprise support if you want/need it.
    - vetinari 12y ago
      Oracle VM Server is Xen under the hood, just with different management tools (and comes with fees and occasionally, support too ;) ).
jpgvm 12y ago
Hyper-V is great, also System Center Virtual Machine manager kicks the pants out of VCloud Director and friends. If you prefer a more hands on approach just plain Xen or KVM is a great option too. As for orchestration in that space have a look at running Openstack or Xen Orchestra etc.
- cpitman 12y ago
  First, I should say I work for Red Hat :-) If your goal is VM orchestration, and you are not ready to go full self-service via OpenStack and similar, then we also provide a product called CloudForms (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudforms http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudf...). Basic idea is that it allows you to manage your hypervisors/VMs, regardless of what you are using (VMware, RHEV, EC2, etc). By manage, I mean that you can provision and implement policies around anything that might be done to a VM. For example, it can require a manager approve an VMs deployed into the production data center. It takes a lot of configuration, but fills a gap between IT provisions all VMs and full self service.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Depending on what you're looking to do, you might investigate Xen or KVM, possibly with OpenStack on top.
- tw04 12y ago
  The problem with OpenStack as a replacement for VMware (outside of the complexity of installation), is that most people using VMware have an expectation of high availability being table stakes (a VM automatically being rebooted on a different node in the event of a node failure). OpenStack assumes the software on the front end can tolerate a node going down in it's current form and that the front-end application will just route around a node failure.
  - aabbccdd 12y ago
    SUSE offers High Availability support for the recently released SUSE Openstack Cloud 5 https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/ https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/ Additionally it supports some components from vmWare: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_deploy/data/app_deploy_vmware.html https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_d... Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.
    - tw04 12y ago
      Well, since you work there, perhaps you can let them know that while www.suse.com resolves to an IPv6 address, your webserver doesn't actually serve up any pages via IPv6. So for those with native v6 connectivity like myself, the page just won't load.
  - Swannie 12y ago
    Also available in some commercial distro's of OpenStack, like Metacloud. I always cringe when people believe VMware HA == HA solution. No. It's part of a HA strategy, but 30 seconds to declare a node is dead, and then however long booting up a big server full of VM's takes - if your storage is not that great, that can be quite a while (boot storms are fun). If up to 15 mins of complete downtime counts as HA for you, great! But that's already risking 99.99% SLA.
Nanzikambe 12y ago
kvm/qemu + virt-manager, switched from vmware-server ages ago & never looked back. Granted my needs are hardly enterprise scale, but may be worth you taking a look (if you haven't already)
rodgerd 12y ago
> I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space Grab the oVirt upstream and decide which of the commercially-supported downstreams you want.
- snuxoll 12y ago
  RHEV is a pretty nice product, and the licensing is a lot less costly than VMWare. $999/yr per socket pair.
gnu8 12y ago
If you're a customer, you could raise the issue with VMware through your support channel. You could potentially be at risk of a GPL violation yourself if your license agreement with VMware does not indemnify you.
Iaks 12y ago
Proxmox VE can be a very good replacement for many circumstances.
ternaryoperator 12y ago
As a VMware customer, why would you do any of that until you know the results of the litigation? Suppose VMware is found not to have violated the GPL.
redbeard0x0a 12y ago
You might want to consider Joyent's Smart Data Center. It is all opensource and you can buy support. A lot of the people leaving the engineering teams at Sun/Oracle ended up at Joyent. I think datacenter platforms will start to look more like "Cloud Hosting" and less like it currently does where we basically just slice up a server into many different servers. https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://github.com/joyent/sdc https://github.com/joyent/sdc
- stephengillie 12y ago
  Sorry for the tangent, but I keep confusing them with Joylent, the Soylent alternative. It's almost a Marketing Namespace Collision.
elktea 12y ago
My company has been using XenServer for years now, we find it to be an excellent product.
davidgerard 12y ago
The practical problem is that VMWare is the best by a ridiculous amount. The VM is better, the management tools are ridiculously better.
- xorcist 12y ago
  "The best" is, as always, depending on what you need to do. I'm seeing much better direct device I/O on KVM than on ESXi (which is saying a lot actually, since raw I/O is a bit tricky on the latter).
  - davidgerard 12y ago
    That is useful information, thank you :-)
    - xorcist 12y ago
      It's quite a difference too, above 10%. This is on raw device pass through however, which is not very useful to most people. As soon as you are on a file system things change considerably (pretty much the other way around, on my workload).

tw04 12y ago

Well, the go-to is generally considered Redhat with their RHEV product line. There are a plethora of other options out there, but if you're looking for an open source path with enterprise support they are generally candidate #1. Oracle has an option but... ya. Citrix Xenserver would be the other major player.

raincom 12y ago
VMWare has more than just ESXi: managing ESXi, HA and DRS, vmotion, etc. Open source lacks what VMWare offers to enterprise customers. Not every company can develop tools to manage hypervisors (say, kvm) like Google does. Openstack is trying to solve this problem; but so far, openstack seems to be more of marketing, less of success stories.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > managing ESXi, HA and DRS, vmotion, etc. These are all part of oVirt/RHEV.
jsmeaton 12y ago
Disclaimer; I'm not a sysadmin. Data point below is second hand knowledge from helping to track down issues with the ops team. Our company started with RHEV and ran into lots and lots of issues with it. There were compatibility issues between our VM infrastructure and SAN (firmware problems on one side, I forget which). Guests would just lock up all the time. There were other problems, but I'm not familiar with them. We've had little to no problem since migrating to VMWare.
- dijit 12y ago
  Controversial opinion here probably, but vmware has been doing virt for a long time, so it makes sense that it's rather polished if you fit there eco-system. however qemu-kvm hasn't been around so long, it's still not anywhere near the adoption numbers such as Xen, however I've used it in production in three different large companies with great success.. the beauty is that more people who use it means more eyes on fixing it. so for small things especially I'd really recommend it, and honestly I like it anyway, it feels very freeing to use libvirt/kvm- you have much finer grained controls than what vmware gives even in it's expensive offerings, and the best bit is that it's free as in beer- you can use all it's features without being in any kind of violation with licenses. the tools to administer it are ssh if you're familiar with unix or a GUI python program which gives you good control and graphs (works over ssh tooo, so encryption goodness) and works cross platform (last time I checked) contrasting to when I last used vmware:- you had to use there vsphere client which isn't ported to OSX or Linux. I use Windows at work so it's not a problem, but I would prefer to run linux so I can actually use decent virtualisation solutions for small test labs, my company baulks at the cost of vmware workstation, and if I run linux for kvm then I cannot administer our massive ESX clusters..

higherpurpose 12y ago

Oracle's Virtualbox? Oh, you said ethics...nevermind.

vetinari 12y ago
Abstracting from ethics, Virtualbox is probably not a suitable replacement for ESXi. Oracle VM Server might be. But then, you could use Xen directly.
- Alupis 12y ago
  XenServer seems a more apt replacement for ESXi. They are both tier 1 hypervisors and come with comparable features and management options, and both install from an ISO with easy setup. XenServer is also 100% open sourced now by Citrix. It's a completely free product with all the features, but you can pay Citrix for enterprise support if you want/need it.
  - vetinari 12y ago
    Oracle VM Server is Xen under the hood, just with different management tools (and comes with fees and occasionally, support too ;) ).

jpgvm 12y ago

Hyper-V is great, also System Center Virtual Machine manager kicks the pants out of VCloud Director and friends. If you prefer a more hands on approach just plain Xen or KVM is a great option too. As for orchestration in that space have a look at running Openstack or Xen Orchestra etc.

cpitman 12y ago
First, I should say I work for Red Hat :-) If your goal is VM orchestration, and you are not ready to go full self-service via OpenStack and similar, then we also provide a product called CloudForms (http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudforms http://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/cloudf...). Basic idea is that it allows you to manage your hypervisors/VMs, regardless of what you are using (VMware, RHEV, EC2, etc). By manage, I mean that you can provision and implement policies around anything that might be done to a VM. For example, it can require a manager approve an VMs deployed into the production data center. It takes a lot of configuration, but fills a gap between IT provisions all VMs and full self service.

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Depending on what you're looking to do, you might investigate Xen or KVM, possibly with OpenStack on top.

tw04 12y ago
The problem with OpenStack as a replacement for VMware (outside of the complexity of installation), is that most people using VMware have an expectation of high availability being table stakes (a VM automatically being rebooted on a different node in the event of a node failure). OpenStack assumes the software on the front end can tolerate a node going down in it's current form and that the front-end application will just route around a node failure.
- aabbccdd 12y ago
  SUSE offers High Availability support for the recently released SUSE Openstack Cloud 5 https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/ https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/ Additionally it supports some components from vmWare: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_deploy/data/app_deploy_vmware.html https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-cloud-5/book_cloud_d... Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.
  - tw04 12y ago
    Well, since you work there, perhaps you can let them know that while www.suse.com resolves to an IPv6 address, your webserver doesn't actually serve up any pages via IPv6. So for those with native v6 connectivity like myself, the page just won't load.
- Swannie 12y ago
  Also available in some commercial distro's of OpenStack, like Metacloud. I always cringe when people believe VMware HA == HA solution. No. It's part of a HA strategy, but 30 seconds to declare a node is dead, and then however long booting up a big server full of VM's takes - if your storage is not that great, that can be quite a while (boot storms are fun). If up to 15 mins of complete downtime counts as HA for you, great! But that's already risking 99.99% SLA.

Nanzikambe 12y ago

kvm/qemu + virt-manager, switched from vmware-server ages ago & never looked back. Granted my needs are hardly enterprise scale, but may be worth you taking a look (if you haven't already)

rodgerd 12y ago

> I'm not aware of many competitors in their market space Grab the oVirt upstream and decide which of the commercially-supported downstreams you want.

snuxoll 12y ago
RHEV is a pretty nice product, and the licensing is a lot less costly than VMWare. $999/yr per socket pair.

gnu8 12y ago

If you're a customer, you could raise the issue with VMware through your support channel. You could potentially be at risk of a GPL violation yourself if your license agreement with VMware does not indemnify you.

Iaks 12y ago

Proxmox VE can be a very good replacement for many circumstances.

ternaryoperator 12y ago

As a VMware customer, why would you do any of that until you know the results of the litigation? Suppose VMware is found not to have violated the GPL.

redbeard0x0a 12y ago

You might want to consider Joyent's Smart Data Center. It is all opensource and you can buy support. A lot of the people leaving the engineering teams at Sun/Oracle ended up at Joyent. I think datacenter platforms will start to look more like "Cloud Hosting" and less like it currently does where we basically just slice up a server into many different servers. https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud https://github.com/joyent/sdc https://github.com/joyent/sdc

stephengillie 12y ago
Sorry for the tangent, but I keep confusing them with Joylent, the Soylent alternative. It's almost a Marketing Namespace Collision.

elktea 12y ago

My company has been using XenServer for years now, we find it to be an excellent product.

davidgerard 12y ago

The practical problem is that VMWare is the best by a ridiculous amount. The VM is better, the management tools are ridiculously better.

xorcist 12y ago
"The best" is, as always, depending on what you need to do. I'm seeing much better direct device I/O on KVM than on ESXi (which is saying a lot actually, since raw I/O is a bit tricky on the latter).
- davidgerard 12y ago
  That is useful information, thank you :-)
  - xorcist 12y ago
    It's quite a difference too, above 10%. This is on raw device pass through however, which is not very useful to most people. As soon as you are on a file system things change considerably (pretty much the other way around, on my workload).