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What about setup and maintenance of the infrastructure that hosts either VMs or containers?

Given a mediocre number of physical machines (say, 40), which is easier, install, setup and maintain a VMWare cluster or a Kubernetes cluster?

If someone has any insight, preferably backed by actual experience, it'll be most appreciated.

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Assuming unlimited budget for hardware and licenses, then building a team that can deploy and manage VMWare on 40 nodes will be much easier - however raw VM is not really comparable to what k8s is giving you, so you'll be also solving reproducible deployments, load balancing traffic to your cluster etc. Still, with enough money those can be solved by purchasing more hardware&software, and you'll have easier time finding people who can maintain that over on-premise kubernetes.

Many thanks!

VMs are application agnostic, while Kubernetes is a service manager.

If you want to run 200 different services on 40 machines, you may find hand crafted VMs easier to create and forget.

If you want to run 10 services with different levels of replication and redundancy on 40 machines, then Kubernetes will do that for you.

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