Ask HN: Are VMWare / VSphere products any good at what they do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are VMWare / VSphere products any good at what they do?

5 pointsscandox5 comments

I've been tasked with developing a system with some reasonably high initial requirements for infrastructure/hosting. It will be an all Linux system.

As I'm not an infrastructure person the first thing I did was hire someone who is. I've a lot of confidence in and liking for this individual.

What they have told me, is that if they use vSphere to deploy the required infrastructure then we will much more quickly and easily have:

* Failover

* Redundant Storage

* An Out-of-the-box solution for scaleability

He mentioned a host of other things in terms of monitoring and tooling that I wasn't too concerned about.

Now I'm a bit of "can't we just do it with a text file" guy and my natural reaction is: do we really need a product? But even overcoming that natural bias, my real uncertainty is whether VMWare products really work as advertised?

I'm concerned that the individual may feel, due to time pressure and perhaps safety concerns, that VMWare will take a lot of the responsbility away...but that in the medium term we will fall foul of performance problems and/or hidden licensing costs.

I'd love to hear from people that use these products heavily and have a view.

My vmware experience is a couple of years mostly as an internal user of a cluster totalling about 1000 VMs, not using any advanced features like FT/vSAN/NSX. I've also developed a KVM-based IaaS platform.

I think your concerns are justified (and is it possible they are just applying existing knowledge and experience without considering your requirements properly?)

The vSphere Web Interface drives me insane. It is slow, does not do background polling for updates and ends your session after 2 hours (by default). ESXi is fine as a hypervisor but not having a Linux host (as with Xen/KVM) to do things like advanced networking/firewalling/hardware troubleshooting/stat scraping is quite frustrating. You're mostly limited by the vSphere(/NSX/etc) APIs. DevOps tooling (e.g. packer, terraform, ansible) treat it like a second or third class citizen, if at all.

I think you need to look at the applications' architectures and work backwards from there.

Appreciate the insight. Hard to get real feedback.

AFAIK the main difference between vSphere & something free like ProxmoxVE is the latter lacking automatic guest VM migration for load balancing. But I've never worked with any VMWare product aside from tinkering with ESXi years ago.

My (limited) understanding is that a well thought out DRBD configuration would be just as effective, & quite possibly a better use of finances.

If you want to take advantage of all the bells and whistles of VMware vSphere that makes it worth using (e.g. failover/vMotion) you will need shared storage (hardware or software), decent networking and shell out for at least the cheapest licenses (as well as the support they force you to buy)which give you some of the tools/benefits but not all.

The first question I have is, do you really need it, is there a need for all these bells and whistles?

We use vSphere to manage 1k + vms and it works well. The ansible plugin to manage it makes most of the pain go away.

I am seeing this from a dev perspective who has stuff running in those vms, spawn vms and kill vms. We have a systems team who manage the more systems part of it.

cheers

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