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Comment by lisk1 | Hacker News Reader

Just heard that VMware is changing the license for vSphere up to 32 cores and you have to pay more expensive license if your using more than 32 cores per CPU. In my opinion VMware products are overated there are good enough free to use products similar to vShpere without the per CPU/socket licenses with payed support if you need one.

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VMWare developed the first useful virtualization software and had a monopoly for years because of this.

They still have some performance advantages over all competitors.

But if you are not enterprise, I see no point in paying their prices.

As you say, free products have caught up and are just good enough.

Nitpick: IBM beat VMware by some decades at "first useful virtualization software".

The VMware thing was that they figured out how to make virtualization on i386 compatible hardware hobble along despite the hardware architecture being technically unvirtualizable, using clever binary translation style tricks. Virtualization support came to x86 hardware many years later.

Overrated? If I had to pick a level 1 hypervisor for a production environment id probably choose VMware without hesitation.

What makes it so good?

If there is a show stopping bug I can throw VMWare under the bus.

If Xen has a show stopping bug I get to patch it myself.

Oh you mean technical reasons? None.

Well, you could buy RHEV and throw Red Hat under the bus. I don't know if there are enterprise-supported Xen distros.

Alternative exist, but VMWare has a lot of mindshare and their products are pretty good, so they're hard to beat.

> I don't know if there are enterprise-supported Xen distros.

Didn't Citrix buy xen a while back (or some part of it)? They had something called xenapp, now apparently "Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (XenApp & XenDesktop)"?

Not really the same as "a supported xen distro" I guess.

You could also go with Triton, in which case if there's a show stopping bug you can throw Joyent under the bus.

Also, I'm pretty sure if there's a Xen bug you can throw Citrix under the bus (assuming you're paying them for enterprise support).

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