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Comment by thedougd | Hacker News Reader

OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking.

The challenge is that companies architect their services and applications around what they have, and they may be very operationally dependent on specific features of vCenter and how they've configured those features.

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There is also Rancher Harvester (https://harvesterhci.io/) which I think is a breadth of fresh air compared to VMware and OpenStack and then there is the Windows Server based Azure Stack HCI, too. In my experience, VMware‘s biggest moat is the vast support from software vendors. It basically is the default supported platform for almost every business application. This comes with well known best practices, many experienced admins, out of the box solutions from hardware vendors and highly standardized managed services. Most apps leave VMware for the cloud or Kubernetes but not another on-prem VM platform.

Or go vendor independent with pacemaker + drbd + libvirt. For that stack you can get support from SUSE, Redhat and Linbit and maybe even Ubuntu. Or just go with Debian if you don't need support.

Harvester has been great for me, except when I wanted to start using a real SAN with it. It's KubeVirt under the hood if I recall correctly, which is also a great project to check out.

Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great! Otherwise, prepare to invest in other ways. I'm not going to say VMware has a super intuitive system, but I've gotten surprisingly far at times without a lot of deep knowledge. Well, until the *nix-like kernel in the hypervisor misbehaves....

> Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great!

If you know (say) Ubuntu and Ansible, then there's pretty good automation with openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible. There are a number of moving parts, but an intermediate-level Linux sysadmin can get things going without too much difficulty. There are vendor-provided solutions (e.g., from RH) as well if you don't want to do a fully DIY, or want commercial support.

* https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/

At a previous job we had a team of 4-5, and 1.5 FTEs split their time between our HPC cluster and our OpenStack cluster (20+ hypervisors, ~10 Ceph servers; >350 VMs/instances).

If you have any significant workload on vmware you likely already have an expert on payroll.

The setup is not too complicated with something like https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack

devstack is for dev work, expect nothing to persist.

If you want a deployment choose something like openstack-ansible.

unless something has changed recently, openstack is a horror to setup and administer.

the point of vmware is that is fairly trivial to go from a single server with some VMs, to a massive cluster with live zero-downtime migrations. (and have funky storage, get working snapshots and backups.)

Sure openstack can do that. but its non trivial to setup.

We used Openstack for a while, but overall it was a nightmare. I'm sure it's better than it used to be, but it is not simple to spin up or maintain, and it's not designed to baby VMs -- if one acts up they expect you to delete and recreate it, which works OK for microservices but not for huge Windows terminal servers.

I see companies hire a team of experts who plan and architect for six months to a year before they are ready to deploy a new VMWare cluster. I've seen a two or three rack cluster cost a million dollars before the architecture team requisitioned a single piece of hardware or software.

I've seen a very small outfit spend six months with all hired consultants to set up a 3-server VMWare cluster.

VMWare doesn't seem that trivial.

> I see companies hire a team of experts who plan and architect for six months to a year before they are ready to deploy a new VMWare cluster.

Then those people are woefully incompetent and will be regardless of the software they're using.

I mean yeah, but thats the cost of hiring consultants.

VMware (wasnt) that hard. How many VMs do you need? work out the storage requirements, triple it, plumb it in, get the right licences, and go.

> VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking.

* https://www.vmware.com/ca/topics/glossary/content/openstack-...

* https://www.vmware.com/ca/products/openstack.html

It's a pretty good product, IME, especially if you're using it with NSX-T.

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