Interesting views… and in my opinion they are all correct to some degree. What I mean, and was mentioned at some point, is that everyone has different requirements.
Our requirements center around scaling (something that Ryan is pointing out here) where for his needs and budget ESXi is the best choice possibly. Support would be nice option to have for us but much less important as we have expertise on staff. The other extremely important thing for us is redundancy and fault tolerance. At the extreme, we can accept a few seconds of node downtime should a hardware failure occur – this sets pretty aggressive demands on a virtualized environment in my opinion. Then we are into some of the more obvious stuff regarding multiple OS support, centralized management, backup strategy etc For storage design, there are several approaches from slow and bulky storage right up to super fast, extreme IOPS storage for high transactional rates. Most of our current expertise lies in Hyper-V and Proxmox. The Hyper-V environment will remain untouched (mostly used in development environment) but our Proxmox environment will be slowly migrated to Citrix Xen Server (open source). Some of the folks involved took a look at a Citrix Xen Server and felt the learning curve was very minimal From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Ryan Ray Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2015 3:14 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] VMWare Etc If you think you are going to spend more time learning ESXi vs any other product I think you'll be surprised. The rest of those things like dedupe, compression, design storage etc apply to any virtualization in general and has nothing to do with the product you use. Just to give a frame of reference I manage about 100 ESXi nodes, 8 vCenters across 4 data centers almost 20TB of ram in everything. On top of that we run a 2000 seat VDI environment using View. The time I've spent with Prox, Xen, Hyper-v has always lead me back to VMware as long as you have the money. On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Josh Reynolds <j...@kyneticwifi.com <mailto:j...@kyneticwifi.com> > wrote: You make this statement like there aren't things to learn about non-open-source products, which is a pretty silly argument IMO. Knowing when to dedupe, what compression to use, design storage strategy, optimizing IO for throughput vs latency vs price, vs bulk storage, best performance settings for different types of hosts / services... similar things to learn between products. On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Ryan Ray <ryan...@gmail.com <mailto:ryan...@gmail.com> > wrote: > See, this is always my problem when these types of threads come up. Sure, > Xen is free, as long as you spend the hours and hours it takes to learn the > system and maintain it. Your time isn't free. I don't know how much time you > have to dink around with your hypervisor but my time can definitely be > better spent anywhere else. Large companies use this technology because with > their team of engineers on staff to maintain and evolve it it gets them the > flexibility they need to run their services. Your small business running 6 > vm's doesn't need this. > > > On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:29 PM, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuh...@gmail.com > <mailto:eric.kuh...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> >> This is just my opinion: Disregard VMWare and use a Linux based hypervisor >> with Xen. You can use either PV (paravirtualized) or HVM (hardware >> virtualized) guests on the same hypervisor. >> >> My typical hypervisor setup is Debian Jessie AMD64 and the latest Xen. >> >> Xen is what powers Amazon EC2 and a bunch of other services. It has a >> learning curve but is very much worth it. Everything is free, whether GPL, >> Apache or BSD licensed. >> >> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 1:47 PM, Matt <matt.mailingli...@gmail.com >> <mailto:matt.mailingli...@gmail.com> > wrote: >>> >>> Is there a free version of VMWare? What are limitations vs paid? How >>> do you manage containers? Does it support software raid? Does it >>> have scheduled backup capabilities? How does it compare to Proxmox? >>> >>> I have a few linux centos servers: directadmin, email, DNS, speedtest, >>> mysql database and box running lots of perl scripts to monitor my >>> network. Would like to move them all to data center on one box and a >>> second box there to shove backups on. >> >> >
