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Ask HN: How dominant is VMWare (as of Aug 2016)?

10 points by thickice ↗ HN
In enterprises big & small VMs have become ubiquitous. Ecosystem around the OpenStack still seems to be pretty fragmented with not many good enterprise ready end to end solutions. For the IT Orgs is it all VMWare or public cloud (AWS, Azure etc.) ? How dominant VMWare really is ?

5 comments

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akulbe
I can't answer the question as to how dominant VMware is, in the entire market.

I can say that ever single company I've worked for has used VMware for their virtualization solution.

I also use it for my business. It's pretty much ubiquitous, if you ask me.

That said, I don't expect it to stay that way forever.

<heavily opinionated part>

Some folks say KVM performs better, but I haven't seen much difference in my experience.

That, and KVM has little/no polish. Certain things are much more difficult to do with KVM, like create a VM with anything other than a NAT interface.

There are LOTS of tools available for VMware.

There just seem to be a lot of things that make VMware one of the easiest solutions to go with. I think ubiquity is part of that. If you're running something on VMware, and you want to relocate VMs, it's easy to do so.

OpenStack - also messy, and not very easy to learn. I'd love to learn it, as I hear folks with OpenStack skills can make bank. It seems like a jumbled mess, though, and I have no idea where to start. </heavily opinionated part> :D

akulbe
After rereading my comment, wrt to the parts about KVM... I realizing I may have been trying to use KVM in a manner other than how it was intended to be used.

Initially, my experience with virtualization was just desktop products. Now I run a vSphere host in my home office, and admin several clusters for work.

I have read elsewhere that KVM is basically just the plumbing for the virtualization, and I was trying to use it with a front end like virt-manager, and KVM is basically just the back end piece.

I'm prepared to be corrected/educated on this. Open mind here.

Definitely have a bias to VMware, but I'd like to know more about the competition.

caseymarquis
I've seen about 50/50 VMware/Hyper-V in my travels. I mostly deal with manufacturing companies in the US. They're very Windows centric, which, I imagine, is why Hyper-V comes up so often. Virtually none of them want to touch anything cloud based; there's a lack of trust and potential legal issues depending on what they're making. Cloud platforms targeted toward government might change that. The more forward thinking small/mid sized operations seem to be moving towards some cloud based products, but the industry is behind the times.

Can only speak from experience within US manufacturing. Don't apply this beyond that.

akulbe
The legal worries about putting stuff in the cloud are much more apparent with companies outside of the US, in my experience.

Was formerly part of a US company that was pushing a new product hard towards a cloud-based model. They were expecting a particular foreign customer to go for it.

The customer said "NO WAY. EVER."

waverider
VMWare is probably ubiquitous in large enterprises.

Small and medium IT shops probably lean towards an open source based solution like KVM.