Thoughts on VMWare vs. the competition

[sxr7171]

VMWare gave some terrible guidance today and there are some people saying that Hyper-V is a better priced product and that licensing is easier to work out.

There is also some talk about lower to mid-end clients switching to OpenStack, Virtual Box and Eucalyptus.

And then I hear that some clients are moving to Amazon AWS and Rackspace.

Is VMWare on a big decline? Does its product offer any unique benefits?

 

[dawks]

Hyper-V is 'better' priced, most because its included with the Windows Server licenses you're buying anyway.

VMware vSphere/ESX can get EXPENSIVE fast. And they did some dumbass thing where licensing rates were based on the RAM in the system which pissed a bunch of people off. So they backtracked on that in August.

But IMO, VMware still has some amazing stuff. I run ESXi free on two servers and it works incredibly well. Reliable, fast, and great enterprise features. Can't say its on a decline, it just fits nicely in a niche.

 

[Gunbuster]

Hyper-V got a slow start but now is really starting to shine in Server 2012. Shared nothing VM migration, Change storage on a whim, Replicate to a DR facility over LAN/WAN, etc... all basically for free.

 

[imagoon]

While I haven't had time to put together a larger Hyper-V 2012 environment... On Hyper-V 2008 the performance was generally poorer and it didn't have [good] over provisioning. It also seemed quite a bit more difficult to setup clustering and failover compared to VMWare since it relied on clustering services while VMWare relied on vCenter and eventually removed the need for vCenter at all to do the HA / Fail over. It also required that $4k Hyper-V server manager to do most of the 'cool stuff.'

At the small level, VMWare essentials was cheaper pure $$ wise to implement and was a bit more powerful than Hyper-V. Essentials plus was about the same $$ to Hyper-V with the manager.

However some of the features of Hyper-V is pushing VMWare to add equivalents to the cheap packages like some of the Storage V-Motion tech etc. I don't think VMWare is going any where quite yet because they still have an advantage in the performance, density space and power usage (they are power aware and can do load based distibution, powering on servers as capacity is needed and then compacting them back and making them sleep etc)

 

[quikah]

While I haven't had time to put together a larger Hyper-V 2012 environment... On Hyper-V 2008 the performance was generally poorer and it didn't have [good] over provisioning. It also seemed quite a bit more difficult to setup clustering and failover compared to VMWare since it relied on clustering services while VMWare relied on vCenter and eventually removed the need for vCenter at all to do the HA / Fail over. It also required that $4k Hyper-V server manager to do most of the 'cool stuff.'

All of that is true for 2012 as well, but they did improve performance (clustering might be a little easier if you use network storage, I only have experience with fibre channel). Also, a lot of the new whiz bang stuff (like SR-IOV) is only available for Windows 8/2012 VMs.

 

[sourceninja]

We run a large vmware enterprise install. We have investigated hyper-v, xenserver, and products that use KVM like openstack. Overall in terms of performance and features we still prefer vmware.

They are on the leading edge of virtualization and their latest releases are amazing. Cost is a factor, but with the essential packages it's not really that much of an issue for small companies. For large companies the features in the enterprise/plus licenses are hard to beat and dead easy to manage and configure.

That said, I do have testing clusters setup of hyper-v and xen. We evaluated openstack and eucalyptus but found we really don't have a business case for the 'cloud' type technologies. vCenter has everything our company needs. Also, it was hard to find a commercial company willing to provide support. Redhat said their openstack product is in beta and we don't have the desire to run a product without vendor support.

 

[drum]

We have been on Vsphere 5 for a year now and are loving it paired with some dell equallogic arrays. We have used VirtualIron and Xenserver in the past.

SourceNinja, are you guys on 5.1? I just upgraded our environment to 5.0 update 2 and am currently investigating 5.1.

 

[KentState]

We just moved to a Cisco UCS/NetAPP/VMWare 5.0 environment and it is awesome. IMO, the next big virtualization threat will come from Cisco and probably NetApp while EMC/VMware blend more into each other.