VMware’s new cloud service will run on AWS
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I'm afraid managers are going to see this as an easy way to jump to the cloud and lift and drop their on-prem apps to AWS without re-architecting to handle failures and expect high uptime.
Source: I've got hundreds
Instance and host reliability aren't the issue here. The issue is that a disgustingly high number of enterprises rely on vSphere High Availability and Fault-Tolerance features to restart VMs or keep them alive when an OS hangs or the host fails, instead of architecting for high availability at the app layer.
To be entirely fair though, vSphere HA and FT are incredibly friendly to the bottom line relative to rebuilding apps that simply weren't designed for HA.
I thought it was the usual complain about AWS instances dying and needing to be replaced on regular basis. That thing is a myth. An instances can run for years without any issues, if noone stops it manually.
Sometimes.
And sometimes the hardware it was running on dies or there was a maintenance event. Now you have a message like this waiting for you:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34259924/instance-retirem...
Fail to notice? Bye bye instance.
That said, you're right, it's not any more common than hardware failure. But that's common enough. Keep a backup and don't expect your stuff to always be there no matter what.
"High Availability and Fault-Tolerance" would hopefully involve more than restarting the VM.
I mean, you have like bajillion people that solved the above "challenge" with a three-line bash script. And not one of those people would call it "High Availability and Fault Tolerance". It's just a small shell script.
vSphere FT replicates a VM while it runs so that it doesn't even notice the failure of one of the underlying servers.
How often is your hardware fucked up enough that you need to move to another machine?
Honestly, if that happens often, there is something wrong with your hardware or your hardware provider or something.
On a 900-servers fleet on AWS, yeah, sometimes it would warn me that "the server needs to be retired" or whatever. Then I stop the server, then start it. Sure, inconvenient, but happens maybe... once a month? In fact, the frequency is decreasing so maybe once every two months?
> vSphere FT replicates a VM while it runs so that it doesn't even notice the failure of one of the underlying servers.
That would be great, right? You paid some $ to VMWare and now your servers never go down?
Excuse me but, that did not happen.
Makes you think.
Thanks.
VMware HA runs quite a bit IME for a variety of reasons (network failure, storage issues, etc). "The network is reliable" is a classic fallacy of distributed computing.
More often used is Vmotion and DRS which transparently moves VMs around physical hosts at runtime with no downtime and very minimal performance hit . Servers, switches, and fabrics need maintenance, firmware upgrades, hypervisor OS patches, etc. in most data centers.
"That would be great, right? You paid some $ to VMWare and now your servers never go down? Excuse me but, that did not happen."
VMware FT is used in almost every major company on the planet that runs virtualized database instances that can't go down. It is serious technology.
AWS has mopped up the IT industry to date, and this is them going hard after Microsoft which is making inroads.
That said in recent years it's much less of a problem , though the fixes tend to require a lot more expenditure for provisioned IOPS, dedicated hardware instances and 10 gigE network instances. But then nearly any legacy shit app can run in AWS ...unless it needs some crazy specific configs like live hardware assisted disk replication, or VMware FT levels of resilience.
Of course they will, but that's hardly unique to this product announcement.
In my experience working with many vSphere-heavyfirms investigating AWS for use in production, the lack of seamless workload portability between on-premises vSphere and AWS ends up being one of the major factors that leads to abandonment of any ambitions to adopt AWS, even if there are workloads that can tolerate instance failure.
Furthermore, with this comes vMotion. EC2 has yet to implement live migration.
Couldn't you already do this? AWS lets you import/export in OVA (an open, standardized format which is cross-hypervisor compatible) and VMDK (VMware's proprietary virtual disk format)[1]
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/vm-import/latest/userguide/import...
I've never personally dealt with software that licenses to a network interface (and the idea does seem silly...), so I can't fully comment on your situation, but it seems you could find out what specifically the license is attaching to and set that up again (if it's MAC, you just override the MAC, etc...).
The software I've used that bound to the CPU (which is silly as well) always had a mechanism to "de-register" the software specifically for migrating to new hardware. So you could setup your vm, install all your software, etc... then de-register the software (but leave it installed). Make your "appliance" image (OVA), import to the new "cloud" and re-register your application.
This is super, super common with legacy software products narrowly scoped to very specific business functions.
This was super super super super fun on IRIX when NIC died. Usually in the midst of work chaos.
tl;dr In the VMware world you've always had the ability to specify your own MAC and IP address. In VMware Cloud on AWS you'll have the same ability.
This move opens the gate to more seamless migration of workloads between on-premises vSphere clusters and AWS, and extends native vSphere management and configuration functions into AWS. For big vSphere shops with large investments in the platform (especially those running legacy workloads), this product offering is a very, very big deal. If the costs are right, it will put true hybrid cloud operating models into reach of a lot of Enterprises for which the pricing or level of effort to get there previously didn't make sense.
In an ideal application, instances are a commodity. Not every workload is there yet, so there's a need still for individual instance recovery. But it's something we and our customers strive for.
If they want to innovate. They can move to IBM SoftLayer + VmWare on top, which is allegedly a solid offering, while keeping their ways of doing things.
The value in migrating is that you get access to the same VMware hypervisor and ecosystem, but now you have access to a wealth of new data services that are fully managed and much lower cost than building your own.
I know this is hard to believe, but in the early 1900s, any large business had a power generator in the basement, because the power grid was unreliable and daily outages were common. How many businesses today have their own power generators? In 2050, how many businesses do you think will have their own datacenters?
Nothing in the open source world currently matches NSX's ability to extend the network from on-prem to the cloud. I really wish they did, but it's not even a discussion.
If you are using kvm w.r.t. openstack, the vm machine actually is suspended by way of acpi, then moved, then unfrozen again. VMware doesn't do that in vmotion. All your problems with clock skew, dropping of network traffic are lessened (they don't completely go away) with vmotion.
Most Enterprise Customer's don't want to take any pain of redeploying the application to suit cloud. This becomes a tick in the box.
This service will either need to choose between being much more expensive than raw AWS, and effectively killing Air overnight, regardless of the current claims.
I think containers are hyped _far greater_ than the benefit that they provide, and I still think it'd be swank if you could have CDNs retrieve containers and run them at the POPs if your workflow allows for it.
Interesting times and all that jazz.
>...it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS...
But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense.
If you want to have special snowflakes, you go for SoftLayer + VmWare. You can be as exotic as you want with that.
Otherwise, just use AWS. And you get the benefit of all the services that VMWare don't and can't provide. (servers, storage, load balancer, databases...).
Better, go for GCE. It's the same as AWS for 20-50% cheaper. :D
AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.
If you're my customers? AWS + VMware makes plenty of sense because you have gazillions of dollars sunk into vSphere management and automation that's narrowly tailored to the enterprise's needs. Making the case that all of that prior work should be abandoned or phased out in favor of going all-in on AWS is a difficult up-hill battle in these situations.
>AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.
This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.
If a company has a HUGE VmWare legacy, we'd both make the case to stay on VmWare.
> This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.
VmWare and AWS are both hugely complex (possibly among the most complex software on the planet).
They have a different philosophy and they were never intended to fit together. The route to doing so will be filled with endless complications.
We'll see how they execute. IMO they can't overcome their legacy easily, the result will be a mess.
VmWare is owned in part by EMC (or the other way around).
By just shifting workload to AWS without doing anything to the VM, I can save a ton of money. In my case, for every dollar I spend on AWS/VMWare, I could probably avoid spending $2.50 in data center buildout costs and $3 in application rationalization.
With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.
Not a very accurate statement. SoftLayer is IaaS, everything is monthly or hourly on the compute, storage, and networking side. You pay SoftLayer monthly for VSphere 6 licenses with zero contracts.
This is 100% false. Unless you are running your infrastructure at less than 50% utilization 24/7, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to go to "the cloud".
GCE has so little of the enterprise compliance and security solutions engineering bureaucracy that enterprises love to spend tens of millions of dollars and years doing POCs with it's just not viable at this time.
Not totally kidding. There's a subset of the market for whom being more expensive both in complexity and cost is seen as an obvious sign of a more "serious" "enterprise" product.
That would be the killer use case, to use AWS low cost storage while being able to stand up your entire infrastructure.
This is a good move on their part.