back to article vSphere scales up, if you're willing to ditch a switch or server

VMware's popped out the first update to vSphere 6.5 and it's unusually interesting for this sort of minor release. Scale is the headline-grabber. You can now run 50,000 VMs in a powered-on vSphere Domain, up from 30,000. That Domain can now register 70,000 VMs, up from 50,000. To wrangle all those VMs, you can now run 15 …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    *a tumbleweed rolls through the empty villiage*

    Does anyone still care? The exodus is well under way, I think people are only upgrading to stay in support until their other plans are complete (cloud, Hyper-v, Azure Stack). I don't know a single customer who is keeping vSphere on purpose right now.

    It's actually a little bit sad to see Virtzilla like this, although at least it gives the staff time to find new jobs.

    1. LeoP

      tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

      What we see here is indeed a move away from vSphere, but into different directions.

      As a benefit of moving some workloads into the cloud, the size and managability needs for the on-premises part of the mix tend to be reduced, often allowing a move away from the full vSphere product with huge license savings.

      With many users we know of, this is picked up by either ESXi (if the remaining workloads are small enough and no vMotion is needed) to leverage existing skills and kit, or more often by KVM introduced by a next generation of admins, who are natural with command line Linux administration and run virt-manager from their Ubuntu workstations, Macs via XQuarz or even Windows via Xming. These bring bcache, DRBD and friends to the table, providing quite a bang for the buck for the investment of a set of skills, that are much more easily available today than they were a decade ago.

      Hyper-V (in all its flavours) doesn't see many vSphere converts here: The licensing model is not so different from vSphere as to be convincing, and asking an Admin to run Windows 10 as a hard dependency to administer his VMs is a very hard sell.

      1. Nate Amsden

        Re: tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

        Linux admin since 1996(yes linux is primary OS on my laptop too). Still love my vsphere 5.5(about 1200 VMs 99% linux). No reason to upgrade yet. I run a win7 VM for vpn and xenapp to run the good ol .net vsphere client on my laptop(linux xenapp client doesn't play well with vsphere console last I tried ). I remember i hated the .net client originally but learned be careful what you wish for as the web client was obviously worse.

        Tried the cloud thing twice at different companies(they had it before I got there), didn't work out. Kept people up at night wondering what the next random failure would take down.

        Vsphere and vcenter are so solid that i worry about the day I upgrade. Generally 1 or 2 support requests per year on it for me going back the past 7 years or so.

        It just runs and runs.

      2. TheVogon

        Re: tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

        "Hyper-V (in all its flavours) doesn't see many vSphere converts here: The licensing model is not so different from vSphere as to be convincing"

        I guess you are not aware that Hyper-V Server is completely free with all features enabled? See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2016

        You only pay for VM OS licensing where required and management tools - and you don't need to get either of those from Microsoft.

        "and asking an Admin to run Windows 10 as a hard dependency to administer his VMs "

        Not needed - you can use Powershell, or third party tools to manage Hyper-V. VMM is not a requirement. And if you do want to use VMM then you can also run the console from a server running Windows 2012 or later so no need to upgrade your client PCs.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

          "Not needed - you can use Powershell, or third party tools to manage Hyper-V. VMM is not a requirement. And if you do want to use VMM then you can also run the console from a server running Windows 2012 or later so no need to upgrade your client PCs."

          Exactly - it's still too Microsoft-centric for a heterogeneous shops. PowerShell is not a feature for us as half the adim in team don't run Windows desktops.

          We prefer VMware because it stands alone as it's own product and doesn't make assumptions (any more!) about what type of platforms you both run inside it and manage it from.

          1. Equals42

            Re: tumbleweed it is, but the direction might be wrong

            Oh, come on. You can ssh into a windows server and run the powershell commands. You don't have to have BASH installed on your systems to admin Linux either.

    2. TheVogon

      "a tumbleweed rolls through the empty villiage"

      Are you confusing Vsphere with Google Cloud?!

      The exodus might well be underway, but for now at least afaik VMWare is still the market leader in on premise hypervisors. Yes it's ridiculously expensive with loads of security holes, but it does still have a few technical and feature advantages.

      If I was greenfield then yes Hyper-V all day long, but if I had an investment in VMWare why would I move?

      1. Nate Amsden

        Just curious where are these 'loads of security holes' ? Are you referring to undocumented security issues that any product has? Or are you referring to actual security advisories.

        I have noticed I think exactly one guest escape security issue on vsphere hypervisor in as long as I can remember(going back to at least 3.5?), and that seemed to affect 6.something (i.e. no impact on my 5.5 stuff).

        I have seen some other minor security things here and there, but overall it seems the security of ESXi hypervisor (and vCenter) is significantly better than the competition (that primarily being things like KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), though that is just based purely on casual observation over the years.

        Can't speak to the other management stuff that vmware pitches(VSAN, NSX, and management tools), as all I need and use is Enterprise+ and Vcenter (on windows, with Oracle DB back end on Linux).

        I suppose I am both the best and worst kind of vmware customer, best in that I have been a customer since 1999 running vmware on linux 0.x, later Vmware GSX, then ESX starting with 3.x. At the same time the last major release of vsphere that got me really excited was 4.0(feature wise). Moved from 4.1->5.5 after 4.1 was EOL, and likely will move to 6.x after 5.5 is EOL next year. Their products have literally been easily top 5 of the most reliable big software packages I have ever used, which is the biggest reason I have kept using them, even though I really was expecting(back in about 2009) I would want to migrate to KVM by around 2013. Obviously never happened.

        Cost wise it is not cheap, but it is not expensive either, the enterprise + hypervisor is far cheaper today than it was when I started using it in about 2006(and that was standard edition back then, no vmotion etc). The way I calculate that is basically cost per core. With ever increasing core counts and CPU performance the cost per unit resource continues to decline. When I started with ESX I remember our fastest system was I believe a DL380G5 with dual proc quad core, the hypervisor license for standard edition was I believe $3500 for two sockets at the time (Vmware didn't "support" single socket configurations back then). So roughly $450/core. I don't think we even bought support back then, so that is hypervisor cost only.

        Very recently I paid about $7800 for a 2 proc license for enterprise + with 3 years production support (through HP- we don't buy a lot so no fancy discounts). Our new systems(DL380Gen9) are 44 cores, so that $7800 cost comes to about $178/core, less than half of what it cost a decade ago.

        That's being generous too because the cost a decade ago was very basic ESX, no vmotion, no HA. And no support if I remember right.

        1. TheVogon

          "Or are you referring to actual security advisories."

          Yes. Vsphere has had hundreds.

          "Cost wise it is not cheap, but it is not expensive either"

          It's a lot more expensive than free...

      2. Equals42

        "If I was greenfield then yes Hyper-V all day long, but if I had an investment in VMWare why would I move?"

        I'm going to go out on a limb here and say $$$$

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      we just build a vsphere 6 cluster

      11 machines, about £5K per machine, but the ESX licenses nearly doubled the price.

      personally, I would have spent the money on some other solution.

      anonymous because my employer might be a bit sensitive about me saying they've wasted £55K on software.

    4. TheVogon

      Also worth noting that to run 50K VMs on VMWare requires 15! Vcentre servers at about £8k a pop!

      One Microsoft VMM server has a recommended (non hard) limit of 25,000 VMs.

  2. Paul

    I've been pretty unimpressed with the web interface onto ESX.

    It's a bit crappy and unreliable when controlling vcenter - the dedicated Windows-only tool is better. You need both to ensure you have access to all the features.

    And as for the ESX web interface, wtf! I recently, and wished I hadn't, upgrade the ESX web interface on existing installation, a Mac Pro with a lightly hacked ESX to see the drive controller), and now the web interface is useless, can't start or shutdown VMs, can't put the hypervisor into maintenance mode or turn it off, nothing useful.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There are viable alternative

    I can't understand companies running vSphere in 2017. Linux based solutions like Redhat's virtualisation platform or Mirantis Cloud Platform has matured over the years, scale up perfectly to vSphere numbers, are rock solid and at fraction of the cost.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: There are viable alternative

      Red hat is way more expensive than Hyper-v server though (which is free) and Linux solutions don't scale as well as per recent openstack benchmarks. Not to mention being much harder to setup and maintain...

      1. Equals42

        Re: There are viable alternative

        I have large clients (Fortune 500) who look at HyperV every couple years and tell me it doesn't scale for management. I'm not an expert so I just listen but it must have issues if they won't take it for free. These guys are frugal and still send VMware checks.

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