Why use XCP-ng instead of other products?

tom here from lauren systems this is in no way brought to you by big bee coffee i just like their coffee get that out of the way real quick you know full disclosure of things this is also not sponsored by xcpng it is just an open source product we use but i wanted to talk about it because there was a good forum post and this discussion comes up a lot i figured hey these are some good talking points that are just interesting to me and maybe interesting to you and a lot has happened since i talked about xcpng and how we use it for clients and i still get these i don't know how else to describe them but people who work in technology who are very dismissive and say tom just plays with things and he's just some guy who likes open source and you know that's not how the real business world works tom you know you just like to do content for youtube and people like free things and et cetera et cetera i have slowly watched a lot of those people over the years uh kind of go by the wayside who don't embrace some of the open source stuff and i do choose to embrace it but there's a lot of business use case and well the xcpng story is definitely one of those wide adoption of open source for a lot of really solid reasons and that includes very much so in the enterprise space and there's a forum post that starts this off that kind of got me really thinking about it again now i've done my previous videos on this topic and i've compared it to vmware and vmware is where xcpng really competes and people think um all the time like oh i thought it was just some little home lab project and it's not really ready for the corporate space the zen server itself the zen hypervisor that this is all based on is a very mature product and has been deployed in a lot of places so it is not it by any means just some hobby project get over here to the xcpng it is actually based on the original how citrix was doing things citrix proved not to be a good steward of that project and their move and licensing changes that confuse people and kind of caught people off guard well that is a business risk technology is no longer just some tooling that companies use it has become the lifeblood of how they operate it's very integrated into large corporate processes so when you have a company that makes a change especially when the change doesn't add any value such as raising prices and this is where vmware went as well which caused tons of controversy vmware licensing hike is severely unattractive to partners to say the latest was last year when vmware is like hey these cores are going to cause problems for the way we like to monetize this so without providing any value people thought hey we could buy these extra cores and be able to run things more efficiently and vmware goes absolutely uh you could but we want to make more money and this would not make us more money so let's just throw this monkey wrench at you called here's your no value ad but we're going to add a lot more fees and this actually was kind of timely because i thought this was interesting too uh wendell level and techs did a great job talking about the new epic processors and a calculation that not everybody really stops to think about it is the core cost of things like sql so now when you're buying a processor with the most cores that seems like a good idea maybe when you're building your home lab but if you have things that are very core dependent licensing you can end up with a better value by buying something with a higher clock speed less cores because of the way the licensing works on your sql i'll leave a link to the video it ties in a lot of the topic but before we get too far off topic let's talk about this right here now these are some strong reasons not just to use xd png but there are also strong reasons to use open source and have a better control over potential price hikes that you have no control over and these points are pretty well taken right here at least to me and i think this is something more and more large enterprises are really thinking about here and no more vendor lock-in being right off the top that is a big problem when you have a strong vendor relationship that also turns sour because the vendor goes we're just increasing prices without increasing value and yeah it's just not not necessarily a good thing easier to grow without license limitations now this is something you have to predict when you're especially a startup and this discussion that i had with some friends the other day was about you know how the apache server became very popular during the com you know rush in the 90s was it was not advantageous for companies who had licensing and companies that were just starting out and trying to get everything online and put things on the web to try to figure out license models around things and this is where an open source model just kind of made sense going wow we can expand as needed and the concept that people won't make money on this is obviously just a myth that has been busted since the 90s and the 2000s and all the way into now that you can't make money with open source the value place when you have an open source product becomes on the people it becomes on a continued value of innovation and customization this is still how the bates team and them make money we'll get to more on that in a second capability to improve the platform yourself or to pay people for it uh good luck on doing that with vmware yeah that's a really well taken point and this is what happens i there are of course some people who grab some open source code and never contacted developers and will never hire them for anything that's absolutely a thing that happens but they weren't going to pay for anything anyways and i you can't focus on well someone used it and didn't pay me that's not a good way to look at it if you keep innovating and you keep offering services and there are enough people you know i've done this on my channel many times i go in depth explaining how to do something and yet people still hire me and they frequently hire me based on some of the videos where i actually told them how to do it but they decided it would be better to hire the person that knows how to do it because well that's how actual business works you outsource things i mean i could probably watch some videos on accounting but i'm going to keep outsourcing my accounting because i did watch some videos on accounting i was like i understand the complexities of it this much and uh the complexities grow and i would rather have someone that's a paid professional to do that and this is still how this works there people still pay for professional services and support to the people over at the xcpng or the zen orchestra team and they hire them for things because they're like well i've seen it i started in my lab and it worked really well but i realized i don't want to manage some of these complexities i'd like to be able to pay for support and so they can do so it's pretty simple it's a nice model they have there more control on what's going on in the lower stack unlike blackbox vmware this is really important it's people are always wanting to know what's going on what are the things happening and being able to not saying everyone will audit the code but being able to go through the code and modify it uh for people who have an innovative idea this actually allows that innovation to happen faster when people want to build something on xcpng but they go you know what i'd like it to do this or i'd like it to do that because i have a new business idea it gives them a firm base to work on and then they'll have their idea and then they often will contract someone like the original team that wrote it to enhance it and you know this goes right into the relationship xcpng is formed with a lot of very large hosting companies to build this into the infrastructure if you follow their blog you'll see there's been developments with terraform there's been developments with lots of different cloud init systems and these are these large corporate scalable systems to make this easier to deploy and they've announced partnerships uh where there's strong relationship with them working with these hosting companies to make this deployed and easier to use it's just it makes logical sense for everyone involved avoid bad commercial practices from a quasi-monopoly uh this is something i think about a lot because the monoculture that persists throughout technology brings us things like the exchange problem we've seen recently i don't understand so many people who have an absolute dedicated relationship even if it's not the best solution to a certain product and this happens a lot where this you know you create these kind of monopolies in there and it's not good for the health of any large ecosystem because if everyone uses exactly the same software so i'm not saying that xcpg is a solution for everything and create a monoculture around it but i think there's a lot of innovation when you look at alternatives and this is something really important that people should always be thinking about of you know i know there's the old adages no one ever got fired for using ibm and related where you could just insert that same phrase to a lot of other very popular commercial products but some of those commercial products have let us down they have not always been the best product to choose over time so yeah playing into some of the quasi monopolies can be kind of a pain and this is a really important decision when you start talking about how to build your infrastructure because you become very reliant on there get rid of extremely complex licensing oh man um this is something huge because it's not just the license it's not like we're just trying to save money we're trying to get something for free no complex licensing is the enemy um being the fact that microsoft and they're probably the biggest example of this they just have convoluted licenses on some things occasionally that are very you know hard to sell and as the it team they're like i'm trying to figure this license model out you know i i love companies if there are licensing and it's a more simplistic approach to it that obviously makes it easier to sell easier to scale as an i.t provider as a managed service provider uh we deal with licensing issues all the time and stuff and some of them get come complicated some of them are simple i definitely praise the simple ones because i'd rather sell that product because it scales easier it's easier to understand but when there's all these little nuances to it that's kind of a pain now wider hardware support this is something that has obviously become really a factor where you want to be able to support all the hardware and the hardware you have or the hardware that can be the best deal this is something they've worked really hard at and i'll go a step further that wasn't really talked about in air but it's the storage hardware that's a big piece of the pie because well when you start running a lot of vms and hundreds or even thousands of them now you're going okay where do i store all this how do i build out my sand well vendor lock-in is another popular problem that you run into there if they only support a limited subset of it they have done a lot of work and a lot of tooling in xcpngs especially since i first started using it to include multiple different common open source formats this open source formats that they are using allow for a diversity of storage devices or even a mix and match of storage devices now the last thing i'll kind of mention because this is also where a lot of innovation has happened is xcpg being a more complete product in my opinion because they offer a backup and disaster recovery solution built in with their zen orchestra now zen orchestra is technically a separate product from xcpng i know the nuance is not lost to me for that someone's going to be pedantic and say exactly that yes there are two separate things you're conflating them together tom i look at them very much the same because if you run one you pretty much manage it with the other so the core project of xcpng and then the separate vm that runs inside of it with zen orchestra and vase hasn't alluded to a couple times it's not available yet but they're going to be kind of nesting the two together like a basic version for people that don't want to run two separate products that's future coming that's not right now follow some blog posts on it he's tweeted but no there's not a lot of uh movement on that just yet that's coming i'm hoping this year but seeing all that innovation i thought i'd bring it up again that the real competitor that xcp ng is going up against is vmware and the fact that they're open source gives them all these strong advantages and open sources wide adoption because it seems to pose a lesser business risk than it used to this is a discussion that's you know coming up very frequently and i talked to some large corporate companies about this i have friends that work at large places and this is something they think about because they're been really unhappy many of these companies you know see the corporate opportunity and do things like just change licenses a little bit to increase revenue but then don't provide great support don't provide any innovation they just repackage the same product at a higher price next year because that's their way of monetizing it more and this is not something that necessarily is a good thing and it can be kind of problematic when you're trying to do budget predictions over the next couple years uh especially when innovation is key because as the market changes we're hoping a product innovates with it and sometimes the innovation of product companies do it's just we're gonna innovate our licensing because some company came out with new processors like amd that are many more cores and more availability so that would actually hurt our revenue model so our innovation is a new license model to do that and that's essentially what happened in the vmware story i'll leave link to the level one video just because it's kind of a fun dive into that topic how cores can affect licensing and performance and the way you budget for things at scale especially when you talk about spending a half million dollars in sql licensing on topic is of course i'll leave links to it i just discussed here with xd png and some of the other videos i have on the topic let me know your thoughts in the comments below or head on my forums for a more in-depth discussion thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a shared project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there is a join 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 40,928

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: tCklJ0Gkkaw

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021