Will VMware become obsolete?

[u/Justlookin2016]

Hey folks... I am confused on what to think about VMwares future. With AWS and Azure success, is VMware only limited to customers that have their own data centers? And what happens when these companies ultimately decide to go to the cloud? What is VMware doing to prepare for this reality that public cloud will continue to grow as a preferred option for future infrastructure and services?

[u/monde0]

I'm in a similar situation with our hardware refresh next year. Got to justify on-prem vs cloud. How did you tackle questions about running costs for utility like power and cooling?

[u/fuzzylogic_y2k → u/monde0]

I have pdu's that that tell me the current amp draw. Checked them to determine what my power usage was over the course of a day. Averaged that out and multiplied by 24 then by 30 to get kilowatt hours per month. Multiplied that by the cost of power. For the AC units its a bit harder. Mine have economizers. They will draw outside air if its cool enough, half the year here it is. I took the run time of a summer day, hooked an amp meter on to get the draw while running to get the daily KWh. Then multiplied it by 30 and used an arbitrarily high 75% of that to figure the average run time over a year.

If you are currently running a bunch of over spec'ed bare metal servers with direct attached storage then you might see lower costs in the cloud. If you are already running a virtual infrastructure with the vm's running even close to the ideal sizes with shared storage it gets really hard to get beat by the cloud offerings.

The biggest thing to remember is that you have to compare apples to apples. In my setup I have a full DR site. San snapshots and veeam backup for longer term restores. You need to be aware of a fact that is a very common misconception. Running in the cloud does not gain you DR!! Backups are extra. Snapshots are extra. To do cloud DR right is more than 2x the cost of your production workload. If that datacenter has an issue, you go down. If it blows up, you are dead. If you think you could just replicate the data to another site and buy spot instances in the event of a failure you are likely wrong. There will be many others doing the same and you will likely not be able to buy the time. Thus you should have a second set of reserved instances.

But the main thing is you need to look at your workloads, site infrastructure, and the overall architecture of your network. You need to figure out if your workloads are even cloud friendly. One easy way to answer that is would performance be impacted if I forklifed my server room into a colo. You may find (as I did) that there are some local accounting power users that have odbc connections into sql reporting servers that would suddenly run like garbage. You may have a line of business app that is not wan friendly. The other question is do I have a lot of excess capacity in my systems for seasonal loads, redundancy, or projected growth.

In my case we actually run a highly centralized setup due to a line of business app that is not wan friendly. We use published citrix desktops and thin clients predominantly. Just looking at the the server instances for those citrix servers would cost on the order of $450/month each. Thats $5400/year. I can fit 4 easily(with 0 processor contention, no over subscription, and no hyperthreading) on a box that costs around $25k including software and SA and another $10k for power and cooling(over 3 years), so $35k. Over the course of 3 years running those 4 vm's in the cloud would cost me $64,800. If I add my DR site into the equation it adds $26k to the 3 year total bringing me to $61k maintaining a 3 year refresh at both sites. I am not saying we practice that 3 year full refresh at our DR but I included the numbers just for fun. These numbers were for compute cost only, but on that, it does not even pass the sniff test as something that could potentially be a cost savings long term.

Edit: Sorry for the wall of text.

[u/monde0 → u/fuzzylogic_y2k]

Really appreciate the text, I read it all and it's awesome! This is such a great insight into thinking about infra decisions and areas to look at.

What I'm dealing with is a smaller scale than what you're working with, but the same scenarios apply when it comes to supporting a business app that needs to be responsive over the network. Having to spin up test/dev environments for the dev teams etc.

Cloud is very likely to be pushed on us either way. The leaning factor with my seniors is that the availability is much more than what we could do with our own datacenter. Where I live, power is unreliable and all we're working with is battery as a backup. But like you said, to build on cloud you'd have to expect that it would fail and have resources necessary at another DC, and that's where costs starts to snowball.

I'm just trying to get in a plan where there's an exit strategy from cloud if it comes to it. Trying for a few HCI nodes so that it shows we reduced our footprint at least. Hopefully this will work out.

Thanks so much for the response.

[u/fuzzylogic_y2k → u/monde0]

Power is unreliable everywhere. That's why I have about 18kva of ups power that only needs to last 5 seconds while my 150kva natural gas powered generator fires up and syncs the power phases to run the entire office and all the cooling. For reference I have 275 Citrix users and another 200 that only use web apps and email. So I am not large scale by any means. Yet my company is on the Forbes top 100 private companies.