Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A better fit for tinkerers and hobbyists, collectively, is open source software.
And the proprietary thing being shut down is just one of many reasons why.
This is just going to kill whatever hobbyist user base they did have, and make it harder to learn the platform.
People tinker with free stuff in their own time a lot. Some of those people would have sway in what products a business purchases in future, like virtualisation software for example.
People go with what they know.
In the early to middle days of virtualization, when corps had huge datacenters that were split between bare metal and virtualized solutions, I needed test labs of my own to more quickly and easily test different scenarios, then pause and save them to reduce use in the future.
The software chop shop I was working at had some solutions for lab provisioning but they were inefficient. Plus, I wanted spare machines for personal use too. Not really ideal to use personal resources to enhance my capabilities at work, but they were truly test-only with no customer data entering them.
I used ESX for a long time. Even kludged together a little automation. Then I uh borrowed a vCenter license for a long while. I changed jobs and decided that since most of the environments were useless I should really kick VMware to the curb.
I tried OpenStack, but it was too painful of a setup for a single hard node or even two nodes. Ovirt, on the other hand, was PERFECT. This is the open source upstream to RHV. Great integration with Ansible and a number of other tools, and there's very little configuration effort required after the base install, unlike with VMware.
I enjoyed that for a while through the orchestration wars, spinning up 6 and 8 node clusters of Kubernetes, mesosphere, and Swarm just to have a clean environment to test things out. Then it was just kubernetes, and configuration changed and improved a bit. At one point I even got kubernetes autoscaling to work, where load levels on a cluster would trigger calls to Ovirt to spin up additional nodes and add them to the cluster.
The first of my servers ran about 13 years until I put it into storage last year. It still runs great. I calculated out costs once for equivalent 24/7 resources on AWS, and they would have run $300-400k to have equivalent computer power at my disposal. For an investment of around $6k on that server plus a small monthly bump to my electric costs.
Of course, that doesn't count labor. But really, there was relatively little labor involved after moving to Ovirt compared to the ESX ecosystem, where there are a lot of frequently recurring decisions to be made between spending your time or paying ridiculous licensing costs to ease the workflow, both for the platform itself and for anything that integrates with it.
NOTE: RedHat seem to make the open source page look ugly and dated on purpose. Don't let it fool you. I speculate this is because RHV has traditionally been a _very_ thin skin over the top of Ovirt.
Over the past several years, though, they seem to have significantly added value to their downstream RHV by merging with OpenShift to create Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as the primary value-add on top of Ovirt. But I've only used Ovirt since anything requiring me to test OpenShift necessitated licensing and therefore not-my-own-resources for proper reproduction and testing scenarios. One might check out how well OKD integrates with Ovirt, though, if they want a similar experience to OpenShift at home without the price tag.
And OKD is a mess as of a year ago when I last tried it. Red Hat seems to be uninterested in maintaining it as a viable platform out of the box. OKD/OCP is an opinionated distribution and many Kubernetes operators that would work fine out of the box on a cluster that deviated less from upstream need significant effort to get working on OKD. That’s not an issue on OCP as redhat maintains their own versions of major operators via OLM and their own catalog. But on OKD you don’t have access to the subscription catalog. And the free catalog is missing many operators or they’re extremely out of date.
I needed a service mesh for my cluster and wanted to use istio. On OCP istio is Openshift Service Mesh, on OKD you must use the upstream project Maistra. I was having issues with installation when I realized that Maistra had not been updated in the catalog in like a year. There was no simple workaround. Redhat employees were aware of the mess and keen to address but management was not interested in devoting time to fix it.
Also the OKD docs are just copy-paste from OCP and in many instances especially during install the instructions are just inaccurate.
I’ve always used RH upstreams in my lab. Used ovirt briefly, keycloak for a good while, freeipa for a decade. All of those products are pretty much 1:1 full featured clones. Keycloak’s documentation is great. Freeipa is identical to IDM so you can use the RH docs. OKD is a far cry from any of those and I don’t think it’s worth looking at unless you are an organization like CERN who can devote the resources needed and has unique needs.
Just curious about what do you think of Talos?
In short, if what you really want to do at the end of the day is run your applications, then k3s or kubeadm seem like the best bet to avoid getting bogged down in the lower level details. At least looking from the outside anyway, as I haven’t migrated off talos.
In the end I didn't go that route because I typically try to make sure that core systems in my lab are FOSS and not in a licensing gray area. E.g. I use freeipa for my dns, certs, etc instead of the AD environment I also have running on windows server eval systems. Availability of non FOSS software is always subject to change, and I like the idea of being able to quickly rip out any non-kosher systems in my lab should I choose to start selling services or run a business off it.
VMware is a dead product at this point, but Broadcom will still be able to extract significant license fees from slow-to-change customers for a long time.
If I didn't frequent certain resources I wouldn't have known about even the aquisition yet.
And some more today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534
You can also do a cluster with live failover without needing any third party like vCenter.
It also is just running on Debian and using KVM and LXC under the hood so you can easily interact with things via scripts or other automation.
I used to use ESXi and it felt very limited, vCenter added more but running that was absolutely ridiculous in system requirements, and it was slow as molasses.
But I guess when you have multiple machines Proxmox, Harvester or KubeVirt (on top of your k8s cluster) makes more sense.