Reason #7927 to always use virtualization
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If he isn't the sort of person to think that, he wouldn't have created his account here.
Touchə
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What cost of virtualization? licenses? Resources? I virtualize my (home) storage servers, it's a no Brainer for me. I don't see any costs associated with it (other than a single hdd).
It's worth it because of the added flexibility when I eventually upgrade hardware or when the os dies I can spin up a clean/safe/stable one while I recover the other. As I might have mentioned most of my storage is on zfs, so I just mount the pool on another os...
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I even have VMware servers with a single VM on them, simply because it's convenient for backup, snapshotting, or migrating to other machines.
That has been the best thing about virtualization for me. It has allowed me to experiment in ways that I never was able to before I setup my own virtualization lab. It allowed me to just try shit and if things got messed up I could just roll back to an earlier snapshot. It allowed me to spin up a ton of VMs from a snapshot and just try things out and play around. My learning curve got a lot steeper.
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I virtualize my (home) storage servers, it's a no Brainer for me. I don't see any costs associated with it (other than a single hdd).
What virtualization platform are you on? I am guessing you are not purchasing multiple licenses for VMWare for multiple sockets and shitloads of RAM?
I think you missed the entire point of my post.
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It allowed me to just try shit and if things got messed up I could just roll back to an earlier snapshot.
That's my favourite thing (outside of work) with it too - although I don't tend to use snapshots, more just trash it and start again.
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I don't tend to use snapshots, more just trash it and start again.
You're Doing It Wrong.
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What virtualization platform are you on? I am guessing you are not purchasing multiple licenses for VMWare for multiple sockets and shitloads of RAM?
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You're Doing It Wrong.
Probably but as it's just experimenting from home with new things, it's not like it causes problems. Few experiments end terminally anyway.
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I understood the content,but not the specifics of the problem. So you're saying it's expensive? I've heard prices around 5 usd/20gb ram/month, which seems fairly minor, unless you are peddling terabytes of ram.
I'm on vmware single socket. Some fairly cheap (single socket up to 64 gb ram i think) license.
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I'm just going to leave this here
www.xenserver.org would have worked also. ;-)
He asked what costs are associated with virtualization, I told him. At least how it pertained to this particular client.
I am not anti-virtualization by any stretch of the imagination. But it is not a panacea. I believe in the right tool for the job. ;-)
We actually have machines with VMWare, Proxmox, Xenserver and Hyper-V all running right now. We try to keep up on the latest tech as much as is economically feasible. But, when we need big storage, we still run bare metal as it makes no sense, economic or otherwise in our case. We also tend to keep database servers that really need to be performant on bare metal as we don't want to run in to disk contention in some cases.
The right tool for the job and all that. But when your only tool is a hammer, you tend to treat all problems as nails.
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That has been the best thing about virtualization for me. It has allowed me to experiment in ways that I never was able to before I setup my own virtualization lab. It allowed me to just try shit and if things got messed up I could just roll back to an earlier snapshot. It allowed me to spin up a ton of VMs from a snapshot and just try things out and play around. My learning curve got a lot steeper.
Not to mention trying things out that may be considered a "security risk" on an empty OS VM, thus reducing the risk of actual data compromise to virtually zero (pardon the pun).
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So you're saying it's expensive?
Yes. VMWare is not exactly known for being inexpensive...
I've heard prices around 5 usd/20gb ram/month
I have no idea what you are talking about? I have never heard them run their pricing that way, but if anyone can give Microsoft a run for their money on confusing licensing terms, it would be VMWare, so I would not be surprised.
which seems fairly minor, unless you are peddling terabytes of ram.
Not terabytes, but they are currently running two hosts with 4 sockets each. ~192GB of RAM in total. Licensing was approaching 5 figures/year. I cannot recall exact numbers.
I understood the content,but not the specifics of the problem.
Fair enough. The content for this case was easy, the specifics (and specifically, the backstory) were where it got really involved. In their case, everything was tremendously overbuilt. The business was owned by two brothers who used the business as their playground. The brother who built the network like to tinker with computers and used company money to buy lots of cool shit to play with. No problem there, it is his business and he can do what he wants to. But then he passed away and now there is no reason to keep all of this complexity.
They are an office of ~15 people with another 3 people in Florida and an occasionally 1-2 in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. Instead of 5-6 VMs with Windows Server licenses plus VMWare licenses running on $25K+ worth of servers they could be served by something much less complex. Shift the hosting of the email off to another provider, on their next hardware refresh (which they are due for due to disk contention largely because of all of the OS overhead), they could be downsized to two boxes running bare metal (cutting $3k in server licensing), repurpose one of the VMWare boxes to run a few VMs for the out of towners to connect to over VPN (because their ERP software will not run over VPN) and drop the VMWare licensing.
As the only machine that really needs to be updated is the one running the file server, it could be replaced with a new machine running cheap SATA storage for their file server. Update it to 2012R2 to get deduplication and with their usage they will probably dedup at 70% or more so four 4TB drives running 2+2 in RAID10 will last them for years at 1/4 the cost of the heavy duty iron that the VMWare boxes would require as it would not need 4TB+ of SAS storage.
Coalesce the other machines all down to one and run them on the domain controller and dump terminal services and its associated licensing. This was planned to be done on to the old file server after it was migrated off of. We could just trash the VM that interfaced with the Blackberrys (that they got rid of a couple of years ago). After migrating them to hosted email we could dump the Exchange VM also (which was chewing up a lot of the I/O on that box). Then you are down to two machines running bare metal with one VMWare host left over to run the VMs for the out of towners which would be more than adequate to just run a few Win7 VMs to connect to over VPN.
So, the costs associated were not just the VMWare licensing. The savings were to be had by simplifying everything massively, to the point that they did not need virtualization. By not refreshing 5 Windows Server licenses, dumping Terminal Services and its associated licensing, and not buying $30K in servers to keep the status quo...there was a shitload of savings to be had.
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Yes. VMWare is not exactly known for being inexpensive...
swayde:
I've heard prices around 5 usd/20gb ram/monthI have no idea what you are talking about? I have never heard them run their pricing that way, but if anyone can give Microsoft a run for their money on confusing licensing terms, it would be VMWare, so I would not be surprised.
I've had several suppliers/colleagues quote me prices that way when I inquired about licensing costs. I have zero clue why they would do that. I asked about pricing for say a webserver VM.5 figures in usd seems insane.
Argh. Multi quote/ reply is broken on Ipad...
Thanks for the explanation.
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I asked about pricing for say a webserver VM.
Ahhhhhhh, you weren't licensing VMWare. You were asking them about renting a VM off of them. That is a completely different story.
5 figures in usd seems insane.
I can also tell you have never licensed anything through Oracle. ;)
Argh. Multi quote/ reply is broken
on Ipad...FTFY
Thanks for the explanation.
No worries.
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No no, I swear I asked how their costs were calculated. I wasn't buying that service from them, I was just curiois compared to say digital ocean or aws. Their cost was several times higher than say aws. The ones that had vmware made the comments about aws cost for me was lower than their license cost.
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The ones that had vmware made the comments about aws cost for me was lower than their license cost.
AWS has rolled their own virtualization, so they have no licensing costs, though they do have ongoing software development costs which works out in their favor at their scale. Economies of scale really work on IaaS and SaaS. It does not favor the little guy if all you are looking to do is compete on price.
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I believe they only list prices up to 6 sockets and 3 hosts. Their prices really jump from there.
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So, do you still think that you know better than I do, now that we have went from a sentence or two to a more full explanation?
(Hmm, discourse doesn't quote the emoticons when select+quote).
T'was a joke as I am just a code monkey and don't do much high-level things with my setup.
[redacted some stuff]At home, I just have a laptop and a fit-pc, so I run VMw workstation on the laptop and the fit-pc is my NFS (also holding some VMs). But having 7TB of storage on a server that uses 7W/h vs some huge server with a bunch of SAS drives is a big savings for me.
I'd probably agree with you assessment for that potential client, but some people don't take good advice.
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I did not take you seriously (especially with a wink in your reply), but felt like responding.
I'd hope to post some time to your thread on the entrepreneur stuff some time, and at that time hope you are serious
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When it comes to business, I am completely serious.
No, not really. Even in business settings I tend to use a lot of hyperbole and cursing.
