KVM or VMWare
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Plus even with things like openshift, kubevirt is doing any KVM work for you. You need 0 KVM expertise to let Kubernetes manage your hypervisor/VMs.
You also need 0 KVM experience to run Proxmox.
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Also, Proxmox doesn't count as KVM expertise in case that's the angle you're trying to use here.
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
While I never implied it, it absolutely does. That's like saying that working with vSphere doesn't count as VMware experience.
In fact, as Jared was saying, you always deploy with management suites.You do as I say and deploy management suites because the SMB sector does not know jack shit about what they are doing. If they did, you would not have a job fixing their broke ass shit.
Most of the user posts you see about Proxmox never even mention KVM unless someone really fucked shit up.
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@scottalanmiller you are out of touch. You have not had a real job in years, and your big business job was more than a decade ago.
I know I am out of touch, I do keep minor reading on tools and processes though. Even if I am unable to implement them or truly learn them. But your blatant refusal to admit as much and update yourself is clearly showing.
Sure, lots of the SMB mediocrity is still all about the local virtualization. Hell, I still see physical servers on occasion.
But that is not where things are moving.
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I used to use XCP-NG couldn't fault it, moved over to proxmox a while back. I have had no issues with Proxmox. Last time I use Vmware was a couple of businesses was using esxi 6.5 I believe. I personally have no issue with Vmware just have no interest in using it in production.
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@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller you are out of touch. You have not had a real job in years, and your big business job was more than a decade ago.
I know I am out of touch, I do keep minor reading on tools and processes though. Even if I am unable to implement them or truly learn them. But your blatant refusal to admit as much and update yourself is clearly showing.
Sure, lots of the SMB mediocrity is still all about the local virtualization. Hell, I still see physical servers on occasion.
But that is not where things are moving.
I have bank experience currently, though. Just this week, the KVM over VMware discussion came up and KVM won, hands down. It wasn't even close. And that was with VMware themselves pitching their solution.
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@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
But that is not where things are moving.
There are always "trends" with the "follow the buzz word" crowd. Like "cloud". Did cloud become an import part of the equation, heck yeah. Is every workload going to cloud? Heck no. Is 90% of the workloads on cloud there because it was the right choice? No, it's because it was the word someone knew how to repeat to sound cool.
Heading towards doesn't make something a big solution. If anything, things are "heading away" from VMware since it already had the pole position.
And what "most people" do is almost always total incompetence. Remember, the average company fails. The average of anything is complete garbage. That VMware is used more than anything else is a testament to their sales team, and says nothing about their product (good or bad.) The average deployment is not done based on what is good for the business, but rather what sales is able to convince people of.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller you are out of touch. You have not had a real job in years, and your big business job was more than a decade ago.
I know I am out of touch, I do keep minor reading on tools and processes though. Even if I am unable to implement them or truly learn them. But your blatant refusal to admit as much and update yourself is clearly showing.
Sure, lots of the SMB mediocrity is still all about the local virtualization. Hell, I still see physical servers on occasion.
But that is not where things are moving.
I have bank experience currently, though. Just this week, the KVM over VMware discussion came up and KVM won, hands down. It wasn't even close. And that was with VMware themselves pitching their solution.
I just simply don't believe this unless it's a no name single branch bank somewhere. In which case, his original point still stands.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@jaredbusch said in KVM or VMWare:
But that is not where things are moving.
There are always "trends" with the "follow the buzz word" crowd. Like "cloud". Did cloud become an import part of the equation, heck yeah. Is every workload going to cloud? Heck no. Is 90% of the workloads on cloud there because it was the right choice? No, it's because it was the word someone knew how to repeat to sound cool.
These are trends anymore. They are best practices.
It's more than should this specific workload go to the cloud or not. There's so many things at play beside the infrastructure of a single application. If you understood compliance frameworks and SDLC maturity, you'd know that doing all that stuff on premise is much more difficult and alot more work for the organization to maintain. In a large enterprise, audits are constantly going on, and there's so many things that I have to be in place.
You can say all these requirements are stupid, and the most companies fail at IT. At the end of the day, these companies are making billions of dollars and revenue and are leaders in their industry. These leaders are paying $200-300 an hour for contractors and consultants to increase their maturity levels.
Your expertise is mostly with businesses with less than 10 employees who are struggling to survive let alone care about IT processes. It's such an apple and oranges comparison to Fortune 500s. You may have had expertise in enterprise over a decade ago, but it's obvious that's it's been over 10 years since you've had any experience. Nothing wrong with having a niche, but I wonder why you left $500k + job to deal with these tiny businesses.
I also think you shouldn't reject new concepts without understanding them. You should do some training in modern IT. I honestly think you'd love it! Embrace new concepts and at least give them the time of day. The attitude of everyone is stupid except me gets old. Especially when you aren't grasping the concepts or are basing your opinions off how things were 15 years ago.
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I would of thought the industry standard would be vmware. I know a lot of datacenteres use KVM/Proxmox though
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Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
Sure, and as well, what does VMware talent, mean? It's not one sided. When someone hires a VMware resource, the average is pretty bad. This is nothing about VMware as a product or vendor, I'm talking purely IT practicioners out in the field selling themselves to employers. If I put out a job req for "VMware experience" or the like, what do I get and what do companies expect.
In many cases, as employees, you just get people who have a passing ability to install and spin up VMs. Rarely do you get someone who can even have a conversation about how VMware works at all. Knowledge rarely goes deeper than what can be gleaned by anyone who knows a little about virtualization looking at the interface for a few minutes. Even fundamental information about how to license it is often over their heads, something I think is a big piece of the baseline minimal viable knowledge base.
If you hire a VMware firm, most don't have anything more than one or two employees similar to the above, some don't even have that. The majority are just sales people who then call VMware and pay for support from the vendor. They aren't VMware experts or even VMware support, they are just resellers. Some, sure, have skills, but not the majority. Anyone and everyone can just call VMware (or any other vendor of this nature) and sign up to resell their product and maybe, and only sometimes, have to pass some minimal certification level.
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@stuartjordan said in KVM or VMWare:
I would of thought the industry standard would be vmware. I know a lot of datacenteres use KVM/Proxmox though
"Industry standard" means nothing here. First, no one knows the real deployment numbers in the industry. But studies suggest that VMware absolutely dominates the in house deployments and KVM absolutely dominates the huge enterprise / cloud space (all the Amazons, Alibabas, Googles, IBMs, etc.) So it really depends what you are looking at.
But like Windows, VMware is often installed because there was no evaluation. SOmeone just used the name that they know or what a sales person said to buy. How often is it evaluated versus just sold and no one does the IT work around the process? No one knows.
Also, do we define "industry standard" simply by "what lay people know best" or "what companies install most, even when no IT is involved?"
Same for operating systems. There's no industry standard. Same with office suites. Same with essentially everything. CRM, ERP, IDE, accounting apps, servers, desktops, etc. There are market leaders. There are good and bad products. But not industry standards.
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
These are trends anymore. They are best practices.
Wow, um, no. Anything but. The absolutely, total opposite. Best practice means that there is essentially no exception. These aren't even "good for the majority."
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
You can say all these requirements are stupid, and the most companies fail at IT. At the end of the day, these companies are making billions of dollars and revenue and are leaders in their industry. These leaders are paying $200-300 an hour for contractors and consultants to increase their maturity levels.
Your expertise is mostly with businesses with less than 10 employees who are struggling to survive let alone care about IT processes. It's such an apple and oranges comparison to Fortune 500s. You may have had expertise in enterprise over a decade ago, but it's obvious that's it's been over 10 years since you've had any experience. Nothing wrong with having a niche, but I wonder why you left $500k + job to deal with these tiny businesses.Y'all like to say I've no experience for over a decade. Yet I was still on Wall St. full time just six years ago and have never had a gap of more than maybe two years since the 90s that I wasn't working for a Fortune 100. I still work in the space today. Just because I've manage to add lots and lots of other companies, too, doesn't mean I don't still work in the enterprise space. And I can tell you, we still see absolutely enormous companies working, for better or worse, absolutely nothing like you describe. Not that others don't, of course they do. But trust me that Fortune 10 CIOs still demand in house servers when SaaS would be better and on prem instead of hosted and on and on.
I'm only for the "every situation should be evaluated and nothing be knee jerk" camp, I push these types of solutions all of the time. The amount of "no cloud here" and "no saas here" in the Fortune 10 is far more than you are implying it is (which is basically zero.)
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@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
I also think you shouldn't reject new concepts without understanding them. You should do some training in modern IT. I honestly think you'd love it! Embrace new concepts and at least give them the time of day. The attitude of everyone is stupid except me gets old. Especially when you aren't grasping the concepts or are basing your opinions off how things were 15 years ago.
Simply saying that new ways don't supplant everything else is not the same as not embracing new concepts. My biggest problem with people talking about lots of new concepts is that instead of seeing them in the grand scope of decades of IT, it is always (almost) presents as "this new thing replaces absolutely everything" and that unlike the entire history of the industry, suddenly there is "one size fits all" and everyone should change to work in a singular way (not necessarily overnight, I understand.)
But that's never been how it is and I see nothing to suggest that any new trend is changing that. Cloud was the example almost twenty years ago now and it is mature enough to make a good study. People used to think that cloud was going to replace everything in IT, even the jobs, almost overnight and that no other computing model had any place in the world.
Many years later, we know that this is so far from the truth. Of those that use cloud, most don't use it meaningfully. And so many don't use it at all. And of people claiming to use it, almost none actually are. Still almost no one in the industry is even sure, after all this time, what cloud even is or when they've used it. That doesn't mean that they should or shouldn't, just that they can't talk about it and tell you their own situation.
I see all of this today as the same. Super useful, very powerful, critical new paradigms that have an important place in our IT toolbox. Brilliant stuff. Fun stuff. Exciting stuff. But does it have a reasonable place replacing everything, everywhere for every business? No, not at all. For the average business, even pretty big ones, it often does not apply at all. It just doesn't have a place.
Keep in mind, this thread is about a small IT team in a small business, a private school. The needs for all that stuff doesn't apply to them, at all. Any effort put into all that auditing and governance is lost. How do we show financial or educational value to justify it? How would school administration benefit from it?
You pointed out that I don't work with the biggest enterprises anymore (I do, but not exclusively), but we have to point out that this thread isn't about an enterprise or even a traditional business. So the framing of my experience that people want to make, also has to be made about the context of the question. We aren't talking about what might or might not be good for a Fortune 100 financial or medical firm, we are talking specifically about the area that you've pointed out has also long been my area of expertise.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
Sure, and as well, what does VMware talent, mean? It's not one sided. When someone hires a VMware resource, the average is pretty bad. This is nothing about VMware as a product or vendor, I'm talking purely IT practicioners out in the field selling themselves to employers. If I put out a job req for "VMware experience" or the like, what do I get and what do companies expect.
In many cases, as employees, you just get people who have a passing ability to install and spin up VMs. Rarely do you get someone who can even have a conversation about how VMware works at all. Knowledge rarely goes deeper than what can be gleaned by anyone who knows a little about virtualization looking at the interface for a few minutes. Even fundamental information about how to license it is often over their heads, something I think is a big piece of the baseline minimal viable knowledge base.
If you hire a VMware firm, most don't have anything more than one or two employees similar to the above, some don't even have that. The majority are just sales people who then call VMware and pay for support from the vendor. They aren't VMware experts or even VMware support, they are just resellers. Some, sure, have skills, but not the majority. Anyone and everyone can just call VMware (or any other vendor of this nature) and sign up to resell their product and maybe, and only sometimes, have to pass some minimal certification level.
So KVM talent, to you, means "more than the passing ability to install and spin up VMware VMs" and who can "have a conversation about how VMWare works"?
That seems more of a dance around the question.
Edit: OK just seen this later
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
Yeah this just doesn't widely exist.
You still haven't pointed to any companies that provide KVM expertise (excluding yours because you're making the claim and truthfully I don't think you have it either).
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@irj said in KVM or VMWare:
These are trends anymore. They are best practices.
Wow, um, no. Anything but. The absolutely, total opposite. Best practice means that there is essentially no exception. These aren't even "good for the majority."
That's just plain incorrect.
We work with large companies ranging from DoD (Platform One, GD, ), to Walmart, to big 4 accounting, to even training Red Hat. We also work with small companies down to 4-5 IT/devs. You are out of touch. All of them want CNCF landscape cloud native tooling. Some still use more legacy tools like Jenkins, but still want cloud native.
Just because the local branch of the single fortune 10 company you say that you work with uses on prem servers means nothing.
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@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
@stacksofplates said in KVM or VMWare:
Maybe we need to level set on what "KVM talent" means.
In the context of support for an SMB, like is the context of this thread and to meet or beat what is expected of a Fortune 100 hiring standard KVM support staff, it is someone who can manage licensing, consult and system design, install and implement the bare metal install, storage setup, performance tuning, updates, patches, networking, at least consult on backups, essential monitoring and automation, troubleshoot issues with all of the above. The ability to work with multiple tools, to work from the command line, etc. and, most importantly, the ability to reach out to highly level support meaningfully if more is needed.
A low bar, but the bar for any baseline talent should be.
Yeah this just doesn't widely exist.
You still haven't pointed to any companies that provide KVM expertise (excluding yours because you're making the claim and truthfully I don't think you have it either).
I'm thinking about this - who's right? Do these skills exist in abundance out there or not?
I'm sure anyone can really accurately measure this?
How does a company find NTG? or any vendor who does support KVM - Google searches are generally trash in this regard - they are frequently limited to the huge companies who spend tons on advertising and search optimization.
So Scott could be right, the might be tons of talent out there, there might be tons of companies with that talent on-board, but how is one supposed to find those companies in the first place.
Yes, I know that's the job of the person in charge of IT....
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@scottalanmiller said in KVM or VMWare:
Keep in mind, this thread is about a small IT team in a small business, a private school. The needs for all that stuff doesn't apply to them, at all.
Yet you somehow claim there's tons of KVM talent out there for them to pick from.
That was the whole point of all of this. The only people hiring KVM expertise are enterprises and mainly tech ones. Sure some companies like DO hire them but that's maybe only a handful since the company only has 500 some employees total.
The KVM talent is eaten up by large companies that pay them well because it's hard to do correctly. And with the current landscape it's getting more and more specialized. When I can spin up vms with kubevirt automatically and have it orchestrate and manage them for me, the uses for bare KVM are much smaller.
