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.
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.
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.
I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn’t kvm it’s everything else.
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.
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.
Expensive as hell though.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.
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.
We meet on Wednesdays; the coffee and cookies are free.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
