Sudden disturbing moves for IT in large companies, mandated by CEOs
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
> Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames.
> Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically.
As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments.
We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing/discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while.
[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
OpenShift Virtualization (based on KubeVirt) exists to provide a path of migration for "legacy" VM environments to containers, allowing admins to maintain one platform in a consistent manner (Kubernetes resources) while giving the teams that can to evolve their applications to containerized deployments.
I believe there are plans to get the management capabilities of RHV into OpenShift Virtualization, I'm not quite sure how far that's gotten. In terms of virtualization solutions from Red Hat, we have the following:
- KVM on RHEL. With the announcement of the RHV EOL, we removed the restrictions on how many guest VMs you can run simultaneously on RHEL. Note that this is different from the RHEL for Virtual Data Center (VDC) subscriptions we sell; it's just the removal of the contractual limitation, it doesn't entitle your guests.
- Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: already discussed.
- Red Hat OpenStack: If you need to be running a broad private cloud platform that has a virtualization component.
Didn't know RHEV was being killed. It makes sense, the enterprise virtualisation market is shrinking by the day, but it's still a bummer there's less competition. Is oVirt being maintained?
> That's what solutions like Nutanix are for.
Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.
Proxmox has been solid and near problem free for our simple deployment
As far as Linux system containers go, is the landscape still raw LXC, LXD, and Proxmox?
LXD snap had caused some issues for me. I didn't have any issues with it when it was packaged as a distribution package. Plus I briefly considered it again when VM management came out, but Proxmox still won over it.
There's also Nomad which has an LXC plugin alongside all the others.
With the release of RHV 4.4 a few years back, it's become the last RHV release and will be maintained until its EOL in 2024 (ELS 2026). Like any open-source project, oVirt will be maintained by whoever wants to work on it, be it Red Hat engineers, other virtualization organizations, or just random contributors. But RH engineers won't be payrolled to work on oVirt on a daily basis.
> Nope. Nutanix is for when you want to replace your hardware and software, have specific workloads that fit a hyperconverged hardware deployment, want a good piece of software with a ton of extras that don't really work all that well, being bash and random FOSS smushed together with duct tape. Oh, and you have money to burn.
I don necessarily disagree, I was just pointing out one commercial virtualization solution that theoretically could operate large scale deployments. I don't typically see alternate products like Proxmox come up often in discussions (I honestly only know one person personally using it), but virtualization isn't my forté either, so there's that.
A dozen or more companies (poster claims it's exactly 14) can move 100k-500k VMs in a short time frame, without killing anything.
Otherwise, your concern would have been spot on.
That's not to say it's not possible or a bad idea, just that each org would need to evaluate for themselves. We do have customers that have made this just and are running OpenShift clusters with >1k VMs on OpenShift Virtualization.
Like possibly a national security issue of some kind.
'We' are at 'war' with Russia, after all.
That said, I'd keep an eye on any future 0-day announcements ... if there's anything here, it has that kind of smell about it.
The West is at war, my downvoting detractors are naive to not contemplate that the world's #2 Army is not running shenanigans as they have literally publicly stated they would, and we have direct evidence to support it. And literally Biden gov. urging US businesses to 'patch up' at the start of the war. They are looking for whatever leverage they can. And there are other capable enemies notably China and North Korea.
If in fact this rumour is true, i.e. 'CEOs doing this at the same time' then this could very well be a national security issue.
So: heightened alertness, but not immediate panic.
It installs virtio drivers into Linux & Windows guests and updates configuration and registry, so the VM will boot straight away on the target.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine these enterprises moving have a million of VMs before the end of the year, so they probably do have a point. But it just seems like short-sighted short-term thinking here, giving up enterprise market share in exchange for some additional $ now.
At least happy until whatever IBM has been promising behind closed doors runs out, and then IBM start turning the screws.
Weird SSL errors I have no clue how to fix. I think they are talking about my clients in this reddit post.
Wild stab in the dark: the only things that would kill SSL/TLS on a disk-image based lift & shift where the certificates and associated config moves with the VM are:
- An internal Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Distribution Point (CDP) was forgotten about and not moved along with everything else. These are often Enterprise PKI certificate authorities on servers like AD domain controllers. Admins will typically deploy new domain controllers in the cloud, and move everything else. They'll forget the old CAs and maybe even turn them off. This then causes SSL issues after... about a week.
- Another possibility is that they incorrectly moved an outbound access restriction. Again, overzealous network security admins tend to block Internet access on servers and forget about CRLs. It's an especially common issue on "secure" environments where someone decides to block HTTP outbound and only permit HTTPS because it's "secure". However, CRLs (and OCSP) absolutely require HTTP and will never work via HTTPS by design.
If these are old systems, it could be this... if they're running .NET apps compiled against framework pre... 4.7? 4.8? TLS ain't gonna work...
Fortunately it's quickly nipped in the thread on reddit. The news isn't new, and companies already had shy of a quarter to work on it, but not that we hit Q3 and forecasting for Licensing is now kicking in for Q1-Q2 23' it's now sudden that the capex will be $$$ so there is a huge rush to migrate to mitigate licensing cost and sunk cost of a yearly licensing option.
Most IT/Sysadmins do not communicate with Finance/FPA, but the ones that do are really ahead of the game. I'm fortunate that in my past and present org(s) I always include them on talks, and once they are on your side they are an invaluable ally. Money talks, finance talks.
IT and Finance are back office administration, or the other side of the house in many orgs and should be talking about all terms of licensing and proper forcasting, but I do see it strained because IT focuses on what the tech can do, and finance only understands money and liability.
But IT can also mitigate liability if it's framed properly. This MSP sysadmin is clearly only in tech and never went out of it. Which isn't bad. But it is a very, very common silo and trope for external IT partners.
No. Everything on reddit is true.
(On the fence if this story is true or not, it could very well be)
RIP VMware. Been getting Novell vibes from them for the last 10 years.
It does seem a bit strange that all of these requests supposedly come specifically "from the CEO" though, as I would expect most companies would have CTOs making purchase decisions like this.
This reddit post is just a late canary in the minefield that shows a what one sysadmin is doing at one MSP.
I think if the story is to believed, the Red Hat sellers dedicated to big Fortune 500 accounts were given marching orders to reach out about recent negative publicity regarding vmware and the c-suite is asking for pricing/feature comparisons. This doesn't seem sudden or disturbing but rather what happens multiple times a year.
"Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/newman-still-considering-lega...
Which tells me that that company’s HQ had already put a sort of kill switch in place for cases like this.
And these big brand companies with international offices are full of spies it's good cover.
> VMWare had a price hike in August and is going to a very aggressive subscription model so that may play a role here.
Sounds like CEOs trying to gain leverage in negotiating with VMWare.
Hard to say for sure, but at least I am confident that the OP is not a dog!
As much as I don't like VMWare as a company, I have to agree, this stinks.
VMware was burning bridges long before the Broadcom announcement. Broadcom is fuel on the fire.
Leadership taking a strategic decision to shop around for options following the VMWare price increase isn't so crazy. In fact, I'd say it's expected.
There’s not enough hours in the day where these CEOs would be so far down in the weeds of the business that they’re making VM flavor decisions.
CEOs hearing about some stuff and immediately jumping on it and ordering someone to look into it is quite common.
Obviously a fortune 500 CEO does not know jack about IT. But someone has raised the alarm on the price hike and presented a few possible solutions, that have reached all the way to the board.
Given the high risk, tight schedule, and the amount of work something like this must be driven by the CEO (or at least directly sponsored by him) or it will not happen.
He also knows about Linux and license free virtualization. But making a move requires people, and people with Linux knowledge are very rare.
They might tell someone below them "we need Linux VMs, stat!" the same way they might say "We need to move everything onto the blockchain!", all depending on what they pick up at a conference or the golf course.