Is VMware Making A Huge Mistake With vSphere 7?

vmware 7 has launched and vmware makes one of the best also most expensive virtualization platforms on planet earth but vmware now goes so much farther beyond virtualization like you get the idea of just virtualization out of your head it does so much more than that we'll talk about that but i think vmware's making a big mistake with vmware seven let's let's talk about it because there's a little bit of nuance there's a little bit of subtlety [Music] all right so first up if you're not running a home lab at home with you know leftover hardware or cast off hardware or small you know tiny mini micro hardware as they you know it's like patrick from serve the home likes to call it the tiny mini micro project i love that it's so cool it's like you have you got a little box and inside the box is a cluster you know there's 73 virtual machines in this unassuming little box that's not making any noise having a home lab at home is fun having a rack full of very loud equipment especially if you live in apartment not too much the electrical requirements of that it's a little less fun there are fun projects like the drambl that's a raspberry pi cluster that's a great way to level up your skills you don't need much more than a 35 computer in order to level up your skills with automation and clusters that kind of thing well fact is virtualization software stacks like vmware are moving toward that sort of automation and orchestration don't believe me well in the past you would run vmware esxi it's a great virtualization platform you know it's awesome it does stuff but now you pretty much also have to install a program called vsphere to manage multiple esxi hosts now in the past that was kind of a luxury the distant past and now it's pretty much a requirement and in fact now you have to do that in order to orchestrate lots of vms give you an example vsan so with vsan it's a feature in vmware that lets you spread your storage around to multiple physical hosts the idea is that you run three or four or five or ten physical servers that have local flash local spinning rust multiple tiers of storage on each node and when you configure vsan you configure at an application level how much redundancy you want sometimes the database server calls for like a raid 10 type access pattern sometimes you need raid 5 as as just you know standby ordinary redundancy well in the past you would have separate storage and your storage administrator would configure those policies and then give you a volume into which you could dump your files well now it can be managed directly by vmware you just create a vm and you say hey this machine needs this level of redundancy we see that also in linux with things like btrfs butterfs you can specify how much redundancy you want those are good ideas but it's sort of an abstraction that instead of having a container and an appliance that meets a certain level of redundancy or a certain level of storage you're just doing it on a per atomic kind of a basis or in this case a per virtual machine kind of a basis that's software configuration that's you know software orchestrating configuration uh it goes a little beyond what you would expect of just esxi to be able to do and to be sure esxi doesn't do that and look at what what happens with vsan when you configure that with vsan it deploys agent vms that are managing the replication and doing all that stuff vmware 7 adds the ability for nfs exports to be available so if you want to you can create an nfs 4.1 volume that has you know geographically distributed redundancy it's point and click inside vsphere and vsphere manages setting up those agent vms on your physical hosts because it's aware of your physical hosts creating files in the data stores and physical hosts in whatever level of redundancy you want so if your cache ssd dies in a particular host or you have a particular mechanical hard drive that dies somewhere the replications stay intact whatever level of replication that you wanted it's all managed in software it's all handled in vmware and knowing this and playing with this and doing this kind of fun stuff is not something everybody gets to do every day on you know half a million dollars worth of server you do it by playing with lower end machines well with vmware 7 they've made the decision to rip out the last vestiges of anything that could resemble anything with the linux kernel partly because of the lawsuit let's not talk about that in this video and partly because they want to leave legacy functionality behind so you have hardware with these fusion i o drives this is only 1.2 terabytes this is sort of a precursor that predates nvme so there's not really a controller on here like you know a modern ssd we look it's like oh it's got a faison microcontroller this doesn't really have that well okay it kind of does under here it's totally not a field programmable gate array that would be wildly expensive that you can repurpose to do your own thing but this is a really uh nice set of flash chips this is this is classic there's this is hardware is desirable still to this day in 2021 even though this is from 2014 uh this is still really good hardware to have yeah the capacity is starting to show its age 1.2 terabytes these are available all the way up to like 6.4 or 8.4 terabytes but these are no longer compatible with vmware 7 and that's because those linux vestiges have been removed so i've got a lot of these like a box of a dozen or two dozen as as we go through and update hardware you know hp and dell were selling servers with this kind of hardware in it as recently as just three or four years ago and in a lot of places you know they've got a 10-year service lifetime for their servers well this has been coming for a long time these are still supported in vmware 6.7 but they're no longer supported in vmware 7. and i don't really think deprecating old hardware is a big deal it's just that so much old hardware is being deprecated by this move for vmware that it's going to make some of the home lab stuff a little more difficult because to be sure this is not plug and play on vmware in order to install this on vmware you have to download a special driver and do some other stuff and jump through some hoops and it's pretty crazy you work at the command line but that is great experience to get with vmware and the performance from this thing is also mind-blowing because it doesn't really have a controller it doesn't really suffer from the limitations of whatever the silicon controller hardware was in 2014 when you put these in a modern system with a modern processor it's basically you know flash plugged directly into the pcie bus of course the downside for that is they're not normal nvme drives they don't show up as normal nvme drives there's not a driver stack all this kind of stuff is because these that didn't really exist that specification was a glimmer uh you know in an engineer's eye when these things were already basically in production facebook and google and amazon and pretty much everybody under the sun bought such an ungodly number of these that they are super easy and super cheap on ebay in fact don't be surprised if over the next six months as people replace vmware 6.7 with vmware 7 systems that you know you'll be able to get these for 20 25 less than that on ebay because you plug them in and they don't they don't necessarily work out of the box i'm really hoping that vmware will turn around and provide some sort of backdoor unofficial way to claw in you know linux compatible drivers like if you really really want to we're going to do this thing that's completely unsanctioned and oh how did they figure it out we totally didn't you know back door help them into getting that working just to be able to support the home lab people the reason the home lab people are so important is because it provides a skills pipeline so you have people like me that are working in their home lab doing stuff doing experiments and that helps me have a better understanding of what's going on the people working on you know things like the drambl that guy is one of the most talented developer dudes out there and this was an exercise you know for himself to get more acquainted with this stuff this is the kind of thing that you have to do if you're serious about your craft you have to do all this sort of stuff that doesn't seem like it's fun you know home lab and other kind of stuff okay the home lab stuff does actually seem really fun in order to level up your skills and so i think that this change with the drivers and other changes that vmware is making with things like availability of some of these features in like a home lab context like i want to run vsfan on a home lab it's like well there's some gotchas i want to be able to run efficient you know differential block based backups with my free version of esxi well hang on there there's some gotchas so even though there still is a free version of esxi 7 for now i really think that vmware is doing itself a disservice because hyper-v and other competitors are catching up also you know honorable mention proxmox i've done a bunch of videos on proxmox i don't think proxmox is going to be it but you can have a really productive system with proxmox and another you know magical keyword ceph so your your distributed storage and all the kind of stuff it's a completely different set of keywords it's a completely different vernacular it's a little bit different philosophy and how it works and to be sure vmware is a great product and they've got everything else on the market beat hands down in terms of virtualization ease of virtualization management you know data assurance integrity takes all the boxes it's an expensive product it's worth the money but i think they're doing themselves a disservice because it's making it harder for people to get the skills with this kind of orchestration ultimately what vmware should be doing is providing the same level of orchestration and automation as amazon as a systems administrator i like to be able to go in and set some limits for my dev team but turn my dev team loose with the physical parameters like the physical it's like okay you get this many pcie devices you get this much memory you've got this many cpus have at it and they've got an api for creating compute instances or creating gpu attached instances or creating instances that have locally attached nvme vmware does actually have a pretty robust api in vsphere that's some of the zero-day vulnerabilities we've seen lately but the fact that vmware is not providing education and a lot of really exciting stuff at the home lab level means that nobody's ever really going to use those features amazon is everywhere because it is insanely cheap and at least for like the free stuff they offer free versions of their technology why did they do that so people would be able to gather the skills there's a free version of hyper-v and it's not to give away the product it's not to try to poison the well it's literally so the people like you the people watching this video will have more skills with hyper-v and powershell and all the stuff that goes with it microsoft is building the infrastructure to do exactly what i described with azure it's not there yet they're still years behind vmware but vmware i think is sort of missing the boat here and i haven't really seen anything from the vmware side of things that would let me do that kind of a scenario where i can turn my developers loose and have an amazon like api like an aws cli type interface to my uh vmware virtual machine environment i'm getting there with azure it's coming it's almost here it's not quite here but it's getting close and this is a really exciting time for people that are doing home lab stuff because you can finally have a small you know machine or two or a nook you have a couple of eight core nuts with 32 gigabytes of memory and then you know something like a synology nas for storage and iscsi a mix of the three you can use the virtualization capabilities of the synology to run your your vsan witness appliance there's a lot of fun that you can have with that at a home lab level really get some amazing skills and i've done videos on some of it i need to do videos on more of it and if you do that you're a lot more employable you can make a lot more money potentially but also just have more confidence in in your understanding of how stuff works and how to build stuff and see who's trying to solve you know the problems and and who's taking care of it to be sure vmware is chasing the dollars like their enterprise customers and and things like that they're you know their ear is to the ground for those customers but a lot of the time it's like what henry ford said it's like if i'd asked my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses there's a lot of that in the enterprise they can't think outside the box but this level of automation and orchestration for developers and system administration where i just run a script and create my infrastructure that's already here we need better tools to be able to do that and they're mostly there but it's frustrating that vmware is making it harder for people to learn the skill sets by taking functionality out of the free version uh and you know doing away with the drivers making it harder to get good hardware that works with vmware and that kind of thing it's not all bad news i mean you know just because i can't run my fusion i o drives anymore doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the world i mean at one terabyte modern nvme is around a hundred dollars so it's not a great loss but they're also plug and play and they're also different the flash memory here this is a lot nicer flash memory than once you get on a modern uh ssd in terms of endurance and and reliability there's a redundant path to each microchip on this for pete's sake so how crazy is that so i just i really hope that vmware understands the nuance with the uh the infrastructure automation component of it and doesn't miss the boat there i'm wondering this has been a level one ramble if you like it you know update if you didn't you can do the other thing too i'm hanging out on the forums forum.level1tx.com i'm signing out and i'll see you there [Music] you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 63,655

Rating: 4.9043269 out of 5

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: muvkfbCvPwo

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021