Reply to post: Maybe not a commodity

Maybe not a commodity

The article seems to try to claim it is a commodity then goes and says why it's apparently not yet (I would agree it is not yet too).

Citrix has been interesting to me for a while, they won't (in my experience) bat an eye and try to sell you Xen if you say you're interested in VMware. They know VMware is better, Xen is an option if you are *really* cost conscious, but I've admired them to some extent to know that it's not a competitive product and don't try to sell it to the wrong customers. I haven't used XenServer myself but am a Netscaler and XenApp(tiny installation) customer.

It's too bad the state of tools for KVM haven't gotten better yet. There's quite an opportunity out there for someone to step up.. (I haven't used KVM either). But of course historically the open source crew can't stay focused for more than 30 seconds on usability they get bored and start bolting on new features (I say this as a Linux server+desktop user for almost 20 years now).

Maybe KVM's future is just being a background thing in Openstack and the management layers will be built for openstack (again haven't used Openstack but people that I trust that use it tell me it's still not stable, so I have no interest in touching it in the meantime).

For me, VMware has been probably the most solid piece of software I've ever used in my career. I have had a single PSOD in almost 10 years of using ESX/ESXi (PSOD was triggered by a failing voltage regulator). Other than that no crashes, very few bugs (practically a rounding error, but keep in mind I leverage only a fraction of the platforms abilities, probably sticking to things that are the most mature). I've certainly had FAR fewer support tickets with vmware than I have for any other software or even hardware product I have used. Citrix just called me yesterday saying me opening 10 tickets so far this year on Netscaler set off a alarm on their end thinking maybe I'm having a lot of problems and maybe I need more dedicated support resources. I told them no, that is pretty typical. Lots of issues but I am still a happy customer. I've had one memory leak they have been unable to trace for the past 18 months.

VMware just runs and runs and runs......the track record with me is impeccable. The only thing that got me even THINKING about changing was the vRAM tax a few years ago. I have seen absolutely nothing from hyper-v, Xen, or KVM which makes me even want to even look at them still(I do keep very loose track of them).

The cost for vSphere for me is still quite reasonable(enterprise+). I do not subscribe to the most sophisticated management tools, our needs are pretty basic. Especially as systems become more powerful, my newest DL380Gen9s have the newer 18 core/36 thread Intel chips in them. I want to say my early ESX 3.5 systems were DL380G5 with dual socket quad core, I think the entry level ESX at the time(no vmotion etc) was $3500 for 2 sockets. Which came to $437/core (not sure if that included support or not). Latest systems are about $10k for 2 sockets w/3 year support enterprise+ which is about $277/core. So overall cost is down quite a bit(while features are way up), not only that of course per core performance is much better than 9 years ago. I'm happy.

I've been a vmware customer since 1999, I still have my 'vmware for linux 1.0.2' CD around here somewhere. Their stuff works really well, and for my organization and myself the cost is still very worth it. Now that vRAM tax with my 384G servers would of been too much, but fortunately that never materialized as a problem for us (we never used the versions that had that tax imposed).