back to article After months of teasing, VMware finally allows us all the joy of six

VMware's teased us about vSphere 6 since August 2014's VMworld, then threw a big launch bash for it on February 2nd. And on Thursday Virtzilla got around to actually making it available. Six weeks after it was launched. The long wait doesn't look to be dampening enthusiasm for the upgrade, if this informal survey by Veeam is …

  1. CheesyTheClown

    Might as well move to a solution instead

    I can honestly say that since a proper deployment of VSphere 6 requires rethinking the entire storage system and arming the blades with hard drives. In addition, it would require using the barely integrated NSX which their competition sees as a base component as opposed to VMware who thinks first you should first pay for Enterprise Plus and then pay for basic modern networking features on top of that... pretty much charging you twice (or is it three times) for networking.

    If I want the hack and slash VMware way of doing things, I'll probably use KVM as it's pretty much a VMware clone which I can automate using some really great third party tools.

    If I want to properly plan an upgrade and have a proper solution, I'll use Microsoft Cloud OS which is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper and is a complete IaaS and PaaS solution out of the box. And best of all, it's like $2000 a socket vs. $7500 a socket compared to VMware... and it's management system is MUCH better.

    1. vee Hybrid

      Re: Might as well move to a solution instead

      Well then Cheesy, your IaaS and PaaS will be insecure!.

      VMware = 1.6BN US Government Deal. Speaks volumes or should I say vvols.

      1. Calleb III

        Re: Might as well move to a solution instead

        "VMware = 1.6BN US Government Deal. Speaks volumes or should I say vvols"

        Yeah, because public sector IT projects / expenditure are a pillars of success, to which everyone tries to align.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Might as well move to a solution instead

      In what reality does vSphere 6 require you to deck out your blades with hard drives? Sure, if you want to use vSAN that's true, but it was also true in 5.5...

      Please tell me why you think you need now to add HDDs to them in order to roll out vSphere 6 - I'll be fascinated to hear it.

    3. Andy Bell

      Re: Might as well move to a solution instead

      Not sure how you define a "proper" implementation of vSphere 6...but we'll in due course have hundreds of hosts and many thousands of VM's running 6...and we won't be using local storage or NSX.

      Just like you don't have to use all Windows features and MS products from the Windows ecosystem, you don't have to use VMware everything either.

  2. yossarianuk

    Vmware is like Windows

    Seeing as you get better IOOP's and more flexibility with KVM why do the masses use VMware - which has less features and still to this day involves being windowscentric to use (the webGUI sucks)

    Things that cost £1000's in license fees (i.e HA/clustering) is free in KVM/Ovirt

    There are many thing you can do in KVM that are just not possible or are a PITA on Vmware.

    i.e try resizing the first partition of a virtual disk image in VMware... (i.e /dev/sda1) when /dev/sda2 exists.

    in KVM you can resize the first partition easily using virt-resize, you can also expandthe disk image, the LVM partition and underlying ext filesystem with one command (no twating about with parted/fdisk, etc)

    i.e

    virt-resize --expand $resizedisk --LV-expand $lvm /var/lib/libvirt/images/$Servername.img /var/lib/libvirt/images/$Servername.img.tmp

    This is just a little thing of course but the most I use vmware the most I find it less flexible (and slower) than KVM.

  3. Yugguy

    I'll upgrade..

    just as soon as the web client loads.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Competition

    I recall Gartner et all saying three or four years ago that something daft like 70% of workloads would be public cloud hosted by 2017, that just isnt being born out and with Microsoft seemingly focusing on public (Azure) and the rest of the options like KVM having single digit market share (despite being 'free') I can't seem anyone eating into VMwares on premise market share to any great degree in the near future.

    Also I think the first poster is getting mixed up with VMware EVO:Rail - the appliance that has disks in it and a bit of NSX as well as the normal vsphere etc. I say mixed up, rather than saying for instance, 'spoon', 'plank', 'troll' 'numpty', etc.

  5. Sloppy Crapmonster

    It'll be interesting to see

    I just got done migrating from free ESXi to paid-for Server Essentials - I at least get someone to call when the servers go titsup (and they haven't, inshallah, ever since running VMWare Server 2 many moons ago). The next hedge is to investigate some flavor of openstack. Not because I dislike VMWare, but because our next logical step with VMWare costs five figures (Essentials cost us $500), and that buys a lot of time playing around with the competition. I'm licensed to upgrade to 6 but I'm in no rush to do so.

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