If you were to start from scratch what enterprise VM platform would you choose today?

[PigLover]

Yeah, using the Windows 2012 GUI is madness. I love my job, but the metro interface in a server environment (even when "properly" set up to remove as much of it as possible) was the first time in years when I dreaded having to RDP into a machine to work with it. I am not a command-line-Linux guy at all, but for 2012 Powershell does make everything far less frustrating for me.

There are many ways to say the same thing. Some are inflammatory and - yes - immature. Some are constructive or just expressing an opinion.

I'm pretty sure your message could have been conveyed better, e.g., "I prefer managing the system using PowerShell and think I can be very productive with it" rather than saying "Using the GUI is madness".

 

[lopoetve]

Well I'm going to ignore that card and tell you to research it. Given that everybody I know that uses VMware professorially and personally know how VMware plays. Yet they still use it because it does what they need it to do. So again, it's not a bad product, in fact it's a pretty great product, but VMware as a company can be pretty y about things. Luckily they don't have anything that I need, so it's not a big deal, except when vendors try to push it all the time.

Regardless of where I work - I'm curious what you think VMware does that stifles competition. This is not the normal feedback, so what are you feeling/seeing? We try to make things better - what are we not doing right?

 

[lopoetve]

Yeah, using the Windows 2012 GUI is madness. I love my job, but the metro interface in a server environment (even when "properly" set up to remove as much of it as possible) was the first time in years when I dreaded having to RDP into a machine to work with it. I am not a command-line-Linux guy at all, but for 2012 Powershell does make everything far less frustrating for me.

I don't disagree in any form (I hate metro), but I'm curious why it is that setting it up apparently requires significant amounts of PowerCLI (rather than providing it as an option). One can totally build Virtual Center, for instance, out of PowerCLI and API calls, but it's certainly a functional GUI when need be as well.

 

[renixinq]

I made the mistake of assuming people keep up with the tech industry and the b.s. major players pull. I don't care enough to elaborate when it's more fun to do this.

Obvious troll is obvious? I am by no means "in the know" but I've never heard about anti-competitive practices in regards to VMware. Seriously you cannot get any more trollrific than this.

Back to OP, the bad thing about talking about starting from scratch is it isn't possible. We all have invested time and money into the technologies we've chosen. A big part of selecting any type of technology is what capabilities and skills you have. I'm a VMware person (thought I'm actually a DBA) and I won't say that HyperV or any other virtualization software couldn't perform just as well as VMware. I will say there's no way I could load up another hypervisor as quickly and efficiently as I can ESXi and be off and running without issue. But that's the great thing about competition is if I run into something that VMware just can't handle or if I decide their pricing is too high or any number of reasons I can start learning about platform tomorrow.

So to the answer the question, VMware. But really because I'm most proficient in it and there's not a thing I need to do that it doesn't handle well.

 

[-Dragon-]

I'd say for me it would depend on exactly what type of deployment we're talking about.

For home or small business I'd say go HV, since honestly that 32GB limit for the free version isn't near as much as it used to be, hell I have 192GB in one of my home servers now but then again I'm insane. Small business will probably have a SMB or WS2012 Essentials on said HV host giving them their domain for easy admin and a home user would probably be more interested in keeping things cheep or adding another 64GB of RAM to their home server rather than paying the same amount of money to "unlock" being able to use more than 32GB.

For medium to large business it would probably switch back to VMW for all the reasons already mentioned a million times in this thread and forum.

At the enterprise level where you're talking datacenters with dozens to hundreds of VM hosts and thousands of VM guests, I'd advocate a mixed platform using both HV and VMW, simply to not have all eggs in one basket (or in case VMW decides to go full retard like with their RAM pricing scheme again sometime in the future). Besides at the enterprise level you're more likely to want to be taking advantage of more advanced features and each platform has features the other doesn't.

 

[DigitalDaz]

For me, its a case of what exactly do you want to do with it. For example, I've seen KVM slated but for a cheap two node HA cluster, its Proxmox all the way. If you want pass through etc, its a complete no no.

I'd say try as many as you can and see what best measures up to your exact needs and budget.

 

[Thuleman]

I don't disagree in any form (I hate metro), but I'm curious why it is that setting it up apparently requires significant amounts of PowerCLI (rather than providing it as an option). One can totally build Virtual Center, for instance, out of PowerCLI and API calls, but it's certainly a functional GUI when need be as well.

My comment was strictly in response to "finally got around to testing out server 2012, how do you setup the GUI? It's pretty piss poor design." and didn't mean to imply that you need the command line to set up or run vCenter.

 

[bman212121]

Yeah, using the Windows 2012 GUI is madness. I love my job, but the metro interface in a server environment (even when "properly" set up to remove as much of it as possible) was the first time in years when I dreaded having to RDP into a machine to work with it. I am not a command-line-Linux guy at all, but for 2012 Powershell does make everything far less frustrating for me.

For virtualization using Hyper-V I believe you can add the server into the hyper-v manager onto your desktop. Then you wouldn't even need to RDP into the server to manage Hyper-V. For remoteFX to work I *think* you still need the desktop environment on the server but for non accelerated VMs you wouldn't even need to have the GUI on the server at all saving resources.

 

[Wrench00]

For virtualization using Hyper-V I believe you can add the server into the hyper-v manager onto your desktop. Then you wouldn't even need to RDP into the server to manage Hyper-V. For remoteFX to work I *think* you still need the desktop environment on the server but for non accelerated VMs you wouldn't even need to have the GUI on the server at all saving resources.

Actually you do need to RDP but it should be Core and to properly manage 2012 you do need 8 and last time I checked 8 has Metro.. Remote FX is really disappointing compared to PCoIP