

VMWare Screw Customers - wilhil
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320877?start=0&tstart=0

======
malandrew
Having worked with VMware in the past and spent literally millions of dollars
in licenses, I had the opportunity to meet lots of VMware employees. My
observations is that the company had some very technically brilliant people,
but also a lot of people that epitomize the super smart MBA that but naïve MBA
that can understand high level business models and financial cleverness, but
that are terrible business people because they are completely oblivious to the
skill that all great business people have and that is empathy for your
customer. This is ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I am their
customer anymore.

~~~
rfreytag
VMware has had some significant management changes:
[http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-t...](http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-
to-recent-vmware-ceo-change.html) so you are maybe right about the MBA, non-
founder thinking at the C-level there.

Compare VMware's 20110331 net income to 20101231 net income:
[https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii)
\- note how it has flattened.

Since VMware is public quarterly results are vital to the naive MBA. Said MBA
might decide to improve profitability by pushing small customers to cloud
services (Amazon) who are already customers of VMware.

This also has the advantage eliminating VMware as a competitor to some of
VMware's largest customers.

ESXi is already free with limitations. This will definitely be the reasoning
if we see VMware make workstation free thereby bring even more potential users
in.

~~~
chrisbolt
Amazon uses Xen, they probably don't pay VMware or Citrix for any licensing.

~~~
malandrew
They don't. Amazon is built off the FOSS version of Xen - <http://xen.org/>

------
hillad
VMware Customer here.

Lots of FUD coming from the community- at first glance it sounds bad, but a
lot of us should do the math before getting the pitchfork ready. ( Script to
help "do the math" <http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/> )

We will actually be saving money with the vRAM licensing changes.

~~~
dave1010uk
It looks like by changing the pricing to reflect more of the provisioning
they're encouraging people to stick more CPUs per guest. I guess the more
people are overloading their hardware at the moment, the bigger the license
price jump.

------
bshep
On the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper
to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that?

Example:

a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses

-or-

b) N x Small Servers

If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...

~~~
Duff
Many large enterprises are exceptionally bad at managing physical hardware.
And if they are ok at it, they spend obscene amounts of money to do so.

One of the key advantages of VMWare from a operational point of view is the
management capability, which is either much better than what most people have
for physical hardware or much cheaper. Even with this new licensing model,
VMWare still offers a positive ROI for a large customer, since that customer
would also need to buy more licenses for products like IBM/Tivoli, CA
Unicenter, BMC, etc. Those products are mega-buck, and enterprise customers
are/were realizing cost savings by getting rid of them.

It's hard to see this from a small/mid-size enterprise perspective. Imagine
$2M in recurring licensing charges and $750k in annual consulting expenses for
a product functionally similar or inferior to Nagios. Or spending $20M
annually on maintenance on software that you don't use. This happens every day
in the Fortune 500 and government spaces.

~~~
dholowiski
Agreed. I work at a small company and IT is just me and another guy. We have 2
physical servers, but probably 6, and growing, virtual servers. If we had 6
physical servers, even if it was cheaper, we'd need to hire another 'guy' to
manage them. A 'guy' costs the same as 5-10 physical servers, per year...

~~~
gaius
I'm sorry to be blunt but a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins:servers means you are doing
it very, very wrong. 1:300 is not uncommon these days with the right tools.

~~~
mst
That really depends how much of the additional "IT guy" hours are going into
desktop support of the (presumably) more complex configuration.

I'd say a 1:3 ratio of sysadmins to servers is actually pretty common -if- the
sysadmins also do desktop support for the organization. At one of my ISP jobs
the customer/production servers had a 1:50 or so ratio (but a lot of time was
spent on new products/features, maintenance could easily have been 1:200 and
our automation was mediocre) but the internal IT dept was around the 1:3 mark.

And he said "IT is just me and another guy", not "systems is just me and
another guy", so I suspect that's the case for him.

~~~
cultureulterior
Depends on how large that organization is, and how much IT junk, like mail,
etc.. is outsourced.

(I'm sole sysadmin for a search engine, and I handle 200 servers.)

~~~
diziet
What search engine?

~~~
cultureulterior
picsearch.com

------
sc68cal
Red Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They
should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare
customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.

~~~
bdunbar
Oracle is just as bad, in it's way, with respect to licensing.

~~~
newman314
Actually, worse.

I've been involved in a project where we have actually had to change the
direction of technology as well as deployment schedule to avoid incurring a
massive (think over $100 million) license upcharge.

------
wazoox
I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should
be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very
well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it
won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

~~~
SnowLprd
We were faced with a very similar dilemma when we set up our virtualized
cluster... Do we go with a free open-source solution like KVM, forgoing an
easy-to-use GUI, or do we go with a more expensive solution such as VMware?

We eventually decided to build a KVM-based cluster, and while we were already
extremely glad we did before the vSphere 5 licensing change, this latest
development only serves to confirm the wisdom of our choice. We have
enterprise-level support if we need it, the virsh command-line interface is
very straightforward and easy to pick up, and we have not shackled our fates
to an organization that can yank the rug out from under us whenever they like.
Moreover, for Linux-based folks who find themselves pondering their options,
consider that VMware requires that you run Windows in your cluster if you want
the full advantages of vSphere (e.g., live migration). Because of the added
maintenance and security concerns, we were quite loathe to introduce any
Windows operating systems into our cluster environment, and the unfortunate
state of the VMware world is that it's extremely Windows-centric.

The best part? Not only do we have a fast, rock-solid virtualization solution
in place, but the easy-to-use GUI we wanted is also on the horizon. Take one
look at the Archipel Project at <http://archipelproject.org/>, and I think
you'll agree its interface puts vSphere to shame. Archipel is not yet ready
for critical production environments and (last I checked) currently lacks full
support for libvirt-based storage APIs (e.g., for LVM-backed virtual storage
pools), but development is progressing steadily. I, for one, am looking
forward to getting the best of both worlds (liberated + easy-to-administer
software) in our data center when the time is right. If that interests you,
head on over to <https://github.com/primalmotion/archipel> and fork away!

~~~
lhnn
If you have a blog, would you write something up about Archipel? That looks
pretty damned nice, and I'd like to hear the perspective of an implementer
(alongside reading docs).

I'm all about getting FOSS some visibility in my company.

~~~
SnowLprd
Absolutely. I'm already half-way done writing an article on Archipel, and I'll
be sure it gets posted to HN when it's ready.

As an aside, Antoine (the author of Archipel) just told me that beta 3 will be
released next week, after which he'll be focusing on expanding the VM storage
options.

------
aliguori
This is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software.
No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing
fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project
(Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going
(LibreOffice).

Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that
happens to be free, but it's fundamentally better because it is free (as in
speech, of course).

~~~
eru
There's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in
speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.

~~~
zacgarrett
XenServer is actually the product name from Citrix. Xen is the open source
project that is Open Source.

I know its being a stickler for the tiny facts, but when you are a XenServer
admin find the differences rather quickly.

~~~
eru
Xen is a hypervisor. XenServer is the product name from Citrix which uses Xen
underneath. Xen Cloud Platform is actually the name of opensource xenserver.

You wouldn't use just Xen as a hypervisor, in most cases. Amazon uses Xen plus
their own stuff on top.

To make it more complicated, there's also XenClient, which also builds on Xen.
It's also mostly open source.

------
schiptsov
Why use proprietary (less tested, less stable) solutions while there is
community-tested and community-supported ones? ^_^

People still stuck with a stereotype that most brilliant programmers work for
corporations. This is, obviously, not true. Most of corporations outsource
their R&D and QA and spend for marketing instead. That is a very common
strategy.

Now tell me - how this strategy correlates with a quality of a code or
services? ^_^

Oracle vs. MySQL is a very good example - high quality community code is
usually much better and well tested. (hint: it is about comparing the code
quality, not a feature lists)

Being attached and depended (that is exactly what their marketing department
is for) or not is your own choice. In some cases, like SAP, there is no
community-supported alternatives, but it this case there is more than one.

Some people could say that we really need all those modern features, such as
iscsi per lun mirroring, etc. But it is exactly this code is less tested and
lower quality.

One cannot compete with Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS) communities in matters of
testing and code quality. No code is better tested than those included in
mainstream kernel or a polular distribution.

~~~
dave1010uk
Has anyone had any experience with VMware's products being untested or
unstable? I've heard annectodally that VMware's hypervisor is miles ahead of
the others in terms of performance and useful features. Does anyone have any
info on this?

~~~
schiptsov
I have seen crashed ESX servers with unreadable error messages while no
information or support except PR and forums full of new users trying to
convince themselves they did right choice. (post-purchase rationalizations).

------
westajay
I think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to
vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts
sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt.

They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing
is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make
money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this
game too..

~~~
IamBren
Their marketing materials say this is much easier but it doesn't seem easier
to me. Right now, we have a three node Enterprise Plus, six CPU cluster. This
is six licenses period.

Now, I have to track vRAM usage and decide to purchase EP licenses for all
available RAM or just go with usage + growth for the year...or something. I'm
not sure how that's easier.

------
jjm
This is a mean price increase.

~~~
Andys
Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you
piss off your existing customers.

The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going
so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and
do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their
core product without a price decrease.

~~~
jjm
Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though.

But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

~~~
i2o
Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks
depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based
on the median cost per GB.

~~~
CrLf
Those "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is
running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just
wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see
what pain is).

------
patrickgzill
Proxmox.com integrates OpenVZ and KVM virtualization with a decent Web GUI.
Might be just the ticket for those not needing all of the ESX features.

------
tcarnell
VMWare have started Screwing their Customers? Thats quite a diversion from
virtualized operating systems. Does it scale?

~~~
abalashov
+1 for making me spit out my drink in a hearty chortle.

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hm2k
Did anyone else see this?

<http://i.imgur.com/5OyW7.png>

------
chaostheory
A strong open source alternative is sure to come now.

~~~
wmf
Red Hat's been working on it for years and they're still years behind VMware.
I don't think they could go any faster.

~~~
jlawer
Yeah, but its not surprising that converting from a .net codebase to a java
code base takes a few years.... they should have just re-written from
scratch.... Once RHEV-3.0 is released though RHAT will open source it, so
watch the product grow at that point, just like KVM has been growing in leaps
and bounds recently.

I say that as someone who was part of the RHEV support team at launch.... RHEV
2 was a mistake. Red Hat should never have sold a product that depends on
windows. They just don't know how to support it.

~~~
wmf
Is that what they're doing? I thought maybe the new RHEV manager would be
built on oVirt.

~~~
jlawer
Would you believe I heard something being bandied around about a $200 bit of
software that converted c# code to java... and then have the devs fix the 20%
that didn't convert.... I kid you not....

There was also talk about bringing in parts of the JBOSS stack... and I am not
exactly sure why... but synergy might have something to do with it.

RHEV 3 will use more oVirt developed technologies (libvirt, etc) but now they
have Enterprise customers who need compatibility for an extended period... so
its going to be the ugly stepchild of RHEV2 (aka Qumranet's Product) and oVirt
(redhats R&D). I suspect that RHEV is going to be carrying around baggage for
a while.

------
known
Companies care about Profits. Everything else is secondary for them.

