Re: Are all the big cloud migrations complete?
Disclaimer - I've been running VMware as a 24/7 server platform for 13.5 years, and I've just updated my VCP.
For the vast majority of virtualised payloads, the hypervisor doesn't matter. The ecosystem around them does.
VMware has a nice ecosystem from being first to market. They have really easy and really scalable management tools, and have great support from the likes of Veeam. But they charge a significant premium because of the name. Sure, they do have the best features, and if you need *that one feature* that only they offer then you're fairly stuck. On the other hand, for the rest of us the other hypervisors are "good enough", as a rule.
Microsoft is dick-waving with Hyper-V 2016 VM stats, which is mostly irrelevant because the hardware is not there to keep up. However, they also have an integrated management platform (SCVMM, which is a pain in the arse to get set up, but seems pretty decent to me), and Veeam support. For most companies that's really all they need.
It's been said before that VMware is "legacy". They have nice things like e1000 NICs, and can effectively fool the guest OS into believing that it's king of its own castle. And VMware plays that game better than anyone. KVM, Xen, Hyper-V all want to play in a space where the guest cooperates, and is aware that it's running in a digital version of Plato's Cave. For some virtualised workloads that's simply not good enough. But at the same time, how many people still have an old Win2k VM kicking about?
Did I say that VMware was expensive? I'm flirting with Hyper-V / SCVMM simply because we can save half of our VMware licensing costs by ditching VMware and going Microsoft. And I didn't think I'd consider that even 3 years ago.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
