[nimbius]

but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you.

KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run.

Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC.

And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business.

"enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.

[treesknees]

> KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare

Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough.

VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.

[gregmac]

> VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.

This is it, really. For big companies this kind of stuff is important.

And "cobbling it together" is very much understating the effort involved to keep it running: eventually you'll upgrade one of the components and it will break something, because you didn't read the release notes of an upstream dependency that mentioned a breaking change that affects your particular setup.

Having the vendor (vmware) provide this as a delivered, tested, supported solution is so much easier.

Similarly, I suspect it would be significantly simpler to find IT firms and/or hire individuals with VMware knowledge than it would be to find the equivalent on KVM + Cockpit + the dozen other components you need.

Note: I'm not saying this is right or the way things should be, but simply pointing out the "enterprise" perspective. Boring technology is safe.

[foobiekr]

Same. VMware leagues better than the various horrible Openstack deployments some customers want to use.

I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn’t kvm it’s everything else.

[nimbius]

colour me unimpressed. VMWare cheerleaders haul out openstack as their touchstone example of how hard VM's are in linux but forget that VMWare pales in comparison to what Openstack is, which is an entire full-stack cloud hosting provider with accounting, DNS, tenant metering and network delegation, and support for k8s.

Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out of the box solution anyone can use and includes every single feature of ESX and many vsphere features youd easily lose your shirt for. https://www.proxmox.com/en/

heres an independent performance test. KVM is easily faster than ESX.

https://www.spec.org/virt_sc2013/

[treesknees]

You've missed the point a bit, and for the record I prefer to deploy Proxmox/KVM over VMware most of the time, I'm not a VMware cheerleader.

There are plenty of features Proxmox doesn't have that VMware does have. I've ran into a few of them

1. No ability to pin vCPUs to physical CPUs from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and set affinity for each vCPU's PID by hand if you want that.

2. You can't provision a VM with more vCPUs than physical CPUs. For example if I have a host with 8 cores, the max vCPU I can allocate to a VM is 8. And yes, I did have a use case for this.

3. You can't configure networked serial ports from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and edit the vm configuration file by hand if you want that.

4. Lack of serial port concentrator, which means you can't really use networked serial ports reliably when migrating VMs across hosts in a Proxmox cluster. In the NFV world this can be pretty important.

5. You can't manage multiple Proxmox VM hosts from a single UI unless they're clustered, which in many cases isn't practical to do. vSphere will let you manage multiple independent hosts from a single pane of glass.

6. (at least historically) lack of RSS/multiqueue in virtio networking. vmxnet3 on VMware supports this and allows you to scale better. But I will admit it's been several years since I've had a look at this area.

Again I'm not a VMware cheerleader. I'm sure I could generate a list like this for what Proxmox has that VMware lacks. But it's incorrect to state that it includes every single feature of ESX.

[thedougd]

I've deployed the full VMware Integrated OpenStack running on ESXi, NSXT, and network attached storage; everyone was happy. Users happily deploying full stacks via API in their own Tenant with tools like Terraform. Operators thrilled to be able to patch and reboot a host without even a notification email because VMware Live Migration. The bosses without a worry because in the end it's just running on VMware.

Expensive as hell though.

[scarface74]

You don’t grok “the enterprise”. Any CTO of a large company would feel much better about having VMWare behind them and their ecosystem than your proposed solution.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.

[rad_gruchalski]

I learned this lesson in an interview once. I was bullish on sap pricing and the cost of consultants. The person from top management, multi-billion chemical, said “you think we have no money”? They did, 2 years later they’ve opened a brand new building to fit a 1000 of those consultants.

[tlamponi]

Proxmox provides enterprise support staffed mostly by devs and engineers, and not some crappy outsourced service asking you the three questions from their predefined support handling sheet.

It is also deployed in many many enterprise and government settings.

[scarface74]

Again, you’re arguing about technology which is besides the point. A CTO in the enterprise is going to make the safe choice.

Also, notice when you go to VMWare’s home page you see “referenceable clients” - ie well known companies that use the software? This is “Enterprise Marketing 101”.

Besides, I can throw a stick and find someone who knows VMWare. As a (hypothetical) CTO of a non tech company, I don’t want “support”, I might want an MSP to do it for me.

[tlamponi]

This is my first reply to you, so how can I argue against your point again? Also it seems I can count myself lucky to work under a chief technology officer that actually thinks about technology and also understands actual benefits, not the ones just looking at the gardner quadrant of "who paid the most for pr". Besides that:

How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and at their bidding, their standard support reply is to install from scratch as otherwise the won't look at the setup. If you don't look at the technology POV (in addition to others) the choices probably won't be the best.

Notice how on Proxmox.com there's a testimonial page that links to enterprise and gov't customers, how's that different "Enterprise Marketing"?

Proxmox also has reseller partner all over the world: https://proxmox.com/en/partners/reseller

So we got enterprise support, world wide enterprise reseller network, enterprise features available for all, with or without support, not sure how much more enterprise vibes one can get..

vmware isn't really moving forwards since a while, the acquisition by broadcom won't help that either IMO, but sure they're currently still able to pay "bribe" some CTOs or sales people lunch, so they got that edge going for them, won't be enough to stay the #1 in the long run though.

[amenod]

I agree with you - and you are still missing the point. The enterprises are buying a service. They don't care that it is running on AHWRGGG instead of TLMWBBB (which is soooo much better). What they care about is that it runs, and when it doesn't, that someone fixes it. This is it. Could you run everything on PostgreSQL instead of Oracle? Yes, take a look at EnterpriseDB. I guess Oracle just sells better? (guessing here, no idea)

The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.

[thedougd]

Where you get screwed is when some legacy system of record application requires Oracle. So you think, I'll cheat and use Postgresql with an Oracle dialect. Then you find out the application uses tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL including some of the most obscure features. Now you're looking at millions of dollars to get off the database software you don't like. Oracle, IBM, etc can buy time like this but eventually all the proponents of their software will be retired and the halls of IT will be filled with an army of "never again."

We meet on Wednesdays; the coffee and cookies are free.

[fragmede]

You could run everything on Xen instead of VMware, except as you point out - you can't really. Oracle is similarly positioned. Their database software is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem of products. An "enterprise solution", if you will. Oracle actually competes with VMware in the broader enterprise space.

[mbreese]

> if you dont care about performance or features

Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about two things:

1) does this software do the job I need?

2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of using it?

If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you made a sale!

Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen. But so long as the software works good enough, then the externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-stuff" may matter more than features or performance.

[ghaff]

>if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing

I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.

[scarface74]

Would you suggest that all companies write their own office suites? Manage their own SSO solutions? Manage their own mail servers? Manage their own expense system (Concur)? Manage their own payroll (ADP)? Every small company manage their own benefits (Insperity)? Do whatever Workday does?

The health care organizations overwhelmingly use third party EHR/EMR systems and schools use third party companies for enrollment (Blackboard).

It doesn’t make sense to bring any those in house.

[rconti]

No, it only ever works if you care about your core competencies more than performance or features of the software products you run your business on.

Remember, not only are most non-software companies better at their business than they are at software, they're also not hiring from the same tech talent pool, they're not paying their tech people as much, they're not letting the tech run their business.

[eatYourFood]

lulwut?

I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.

What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?

I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.

The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?