What is the enterprise virtualization alternative?
Is everyone on Hyper V already? Does Citrix still exist?
Are SuSE or Red Hat offering an 'open source' alternative? Surely people aren't using Proxmox in production?
Is everyone on Hyper V already? Does Citrix still exist?
Are SuSE or Red Hat offering an 'open source' alternative? Surely people aren't using Proxmox in production?
Lot's do, e.g., the Austrian domain registry:
https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/stories/story/nic-at
And many others (albeit the big ones aren't listed there, a bit harder to get real testimonials from them, and we do not pester everybody):
The oVirt community's most recent release is from last December, so I'm not sure whether that project is going to thrive now that Red Hat has largely stepped away. (Last blog update is also December 2022.)
I don't expect Ovirt to survive, the vast majority of development was RH.
"The market" seems to "deciding" that in-house virtualization will be insanely expensive, and otherwise you need to rent OCP.
Yes, https://www.xenserver.com/ and French OSS derivative https://xcp-ng.org
Citrix is now a private company run by former Broadcom head of software who negotiated VMware acquisition, https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/citrix-tibco-new-ceo-tom-krau...
Disclaimer: I work here
..and your answer is kvm? KVM in itself is enterprise? ..or was it in context to my response referring to Oxide as an enterprise alternative? Well, in that case I can tell that there are only advantages to bhyve as the code base of kvm fork is old and all focus shifted to bhyve which build with todays hardware in mind.
https://klarasystems.com/articles/virtualization-showdown-fr...
edit: also bhyve runs on SmartOS too, and I think Bryan is going to be more comfortable with a Solaris OS under the hood
That is incorrect. It's faster than KVM's virtio, not faster than KVM's NVMe. They didn't bother to test KVM's NVMe virtualization[0]. To quote your source: "As it turns out, bhyve/NVMe isn’t just faster than bhyve/VirtIO—it’s faster than KVM/VirtIO as well" They're comparing apples to oranges. Why would they do that?
"Meet the Author: Jim Salter"
Oh, that's why.
>Bhyve may be juvenile compared to KVM but it seems to have a better design
Likely not, debatable.
>better license.
Debatable, but I get it.
>also bhyve runs on SmartOS too, and I think Bryan is going to be more comfortable with a Solaris OS under the hood
Most definitely why. KVM uses a lot of Linux kernel specific interfaces and functions. Bhyve is easier to port due to this.
[0] https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/devices/nvme.html
Now they bolted on virtual machines onto their OpenShift container platform and are pushing that.
In all seriousness, I think it is a hot topic in Enterprise Architecture (tm) meeting rooms ever since the merger was announced (I know it was in ours). But even if you find an alternative, you need to move, and a lot of companies have a lot of hard to modernize workloads which are skillfully managed by a lot of VMware trained personnel. No easy task.
VMware's true magic is with vCenter. While Microsoft has an equivalent to that (SC VMM), nobody seems to use it because it is virtually unusable. I've never seen a successful production cluster of VMM running.
Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there and mostly it just is useful to provide some negotiating leverage when talking to your VMware rep.
YMMV, but I think one of the main drivers of OpenStack is that it can be modified, because it's open source.
IE, if you're Verizon / AT&T / T-Mobile, it's valuable to be able to modify the product to suit your needs. I did some work on an OpenStack project a couple of years ago where the client wanted to leverage some hardware that was absolutely cutting edge. Literally so new, that engineers from the hardware vendor were involved in tweaking and optimizing things.
Try doing that with VMWare; it's impossible. With OpenStack, there's nothing stopping you from modding the product to suit your needs.
Obviously, this works particularly well if you're running hundreds or thousands of servers and you can justify the investment. If I were only running a few dozen VMs, OpenStack is probably overkill.
> Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there
I've been doing OpenStack continuously for 10+ years, and it's never been more popular than today.
It's bizarre how people think it's dead.
The biggest difference between OpenStack in 2013 and OpenStack in 2023 is that in 2013 there were a dozen different vendors promoting it, and in 2023 it's basically Canonical and RedHat.
The CEO of Canonical wrote an editorial years ago, basically arguing that the implosion that happened in 2017-ish, when Cisco/VMWare/HPE/Pistoncloud/etc threw in the towel would be good for OpenStack. And I think that was true.
It's very similar to what happened to Linux, remember how there was a period where there were 20+ distros vying for supremacy?
Lots of reasons:
- the Python 2-3 migration clusterfuck (which is when I got to play around with it) burned a lot of people
- the learning curve just to get it set up and running is absolutely and horribly insane. It's understandable given its history of being open-source and because of that loved by universities who could shoehorn their existing crap infrastructure/hardware/designs into it. But that makes setting it up very very tedious and annoying, because there's countless options in the depths of its configuration files that you all need to go over so you don't miss anything.
- related: the effort required to set up clusters is soooo much higher for OpenStack vs VMware. VMware ESXi? A day or two, including racking and wiring, and I got something to show to my boss. OpenStack? Talk about three weeks until the myriad of its services are running without crashing under your feet twice an hour. Been there, done that, for both.
- the amount of people and skillsets you need to keep an OpenStack production cluster alive are, I'd say, double the headcount required for the usual VMware+Cisco+Netapp "standard" environment.
- there's barely any commercial support for OpenStack. And that's not "just" the usual vendor support side, but also the management side... finding freelancers or staff that has experience with VMware+Cisco+Netapp is easy, there's tons of people and MSPs with certifications on the market, but for OpenStack? Whoops.
Basically, even a small shop can't go wrong with a basic VMware setup, but OpenStack just doesn't make financial sense unless you're either an university (where you can hand over parts of the ops and support to students, and that has large enough demand for homegrown QEMU-KVM libvirt setups just being Not Enough anymore) or a huge institution (ISP, hosting provider, telco, large multinational megacorp) that wants to save the fuckton of money to VMware for licenses and has enough scale that the headcount for ops staff + Python developers is cheaper than VMware licenses.
What also killed a lot of demand for OpenStack (and a lot of other on-prem) was the general availability of reasonably-good-enough cloud providers. Why invest into an OpenStack environment and all the effort associated, when you can just rent servers on AWS?