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0 pointschris_wot2y ago0 comments

So… what are the alternatives?

0 comments

We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it.

When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet spot, any more shifted the price dramatically).

So I eventually shifted our production to ganeti as well, because it had been so solid in dev/stg. It's all manageable from the Linux CLI, and it works really, really well. It's basically a management layer on top of kvm+qemu+drbd+ceph. https://ganeti.org/

The other popular option, which I ran in my previous work, is Proxmox. It is probably a more comfortable analog to VMWare users. https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

SteveNuts2y ago

>Windows GUI

I assume you're referring to the (ancient) VIC? Vsphere has been all web based for a long long time now. It had probably just never been upgraded.

Also I'm curious why the move to local storage, what do you do if a host dies?

linsomniac2y ago

Good to know it's got something web-based now. Is the licensing still got that 5-machine sweet spot?

What we did if a machine failed was: design our apps to be resilient. Basically everything we run can survive machine failures via either app design or corosync/pacemaker.

We're a pretty small shop, but we ran an experiment of trying a SAN (an HP of some sort) and every year like clockwork the redundant SAN would fall over and take our whole stack with it. Every year like clockwork HP would say "you aren't running the latest firmware, try this one". Equallogic at another job was super reliable but also was easily twice the price of the HP.

The simplicity and redundancy of local storage has largely been a huge win. We did have a couple of Dell machines where the drive arrays seemed to fall over, possibly because of too much IO, but Dell identified a particular SSD and the array has been solid for 3-4 years since then.

nunez2y ago

I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.

linsomniac2y ago

It's mostly in maintenance mode right now, but that's also kind of fine because it is pretty solid. I would like a better ZFS storage story, but it does have great DRBD, LVM, and Ceph stories.

FireBeyond2y ago

Docs page: "Last updated: Jan 4, 2021."

mvdwoord2y ago

The million (billion?) dollar question... problem is for a lot of large companies to do any sort of upgrade is already a long enough process. Moving everything to a different/new stack is simply not feasible in a short time frame. Add to this the issues with regulators (need to run on supported sw), especially at places like banks, it will be a bumpy ride I think.

mschuster912y ago

if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult.

Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Small home lab? Hand-roll QEMU-KVM.

Dalewyn2y ago

>pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.

I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:

* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.

* Host webcam passthrough.

* Intel PXE boot ROM.

* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.

* Cloud integration features.

[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

jandrese2y ago

For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.

xz18r2y ago

For everything VDI, take a look at Parallels RAS[1] or Parallels Secure Workspace[2]. For the hypervisors and cloud part, probably Nutanix[3].

[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

[2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/

[3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...

sofixa2y ago

Evaluate what workloads you have and what is the best way to deliver them instead of searching to replace VMware with the exact same thing. Virtual Machines are nothing more than a means to an end, and nobody on the business side actually cares about them.

You might find that some workloads are best fit for a modern orchestrator running containers such as Kubernetes or Nomad, or a SaaS, or a PaaS/IaaS, or a different hypervisor such as Proxmox or full infrastructure management platform such as OpenStack.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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linsomniac2y ago

We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it.

The other popular option, which I ran in my previous work, is Proxmox. It is probably a more comfortable analog to VMWare users. https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

SteveNuts2y ago

>Windows GUI

I assume you're referring to the (ancient) VIC? Vsphere has been all web based for a long long time now. It had probably just never been upgraded.

Also I'm curious why the move to local storage, what do you do if a host dies?

linsomniac2y ago

Good to know it's got something web-based now. Is the licensing still got that 5-machine sweet spot?

What we did if a machine failed was: design our apps to be resilient. Basically everything we run can survive machine failures via either app design or corosync/pacemaker.

nunez2y ago

I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.

linsomniac2y ago

It's mostly in maintenance mode right now, but that's also kind of fine because it is pretty solid. I would like a better ZFS storage story, but it does have great DRBD, LVM, and Ceph stories.

FireBeyond2y ago

Docs page: "Last updated: Jan 4, 2021."

mvdwoord2y ago

mschuster912y ago

Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Small home lab? Hand-roll QEMU-KVM.

Dalewyn2y ago

>pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.

I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:

* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.

* Host webcam passthrough.

* Intel PXE boot ROM.

* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.

* Cloud integration features.

[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

jandrese2y ago

For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.

xz18r2y ago

For everything VDI, take a look at Parallels RAS[1] or Parallels Secure Workspace[2]. For the hypervisors and cloud part, probably Nutanix[3].

[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

[2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/

[3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...

sofixa2y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse