Installing vCenter on Linux Technical Preview

If you somehow encapsulate the database it will make it easier, sure, but I dont think that’s the problem. I think you have basically two groups of people clamoring for this product:

1) People who want a cheaper solution.

and

2) People who want to fit virtualcenter into their existing administration/policy/environment etc.

You can satisfy the first group of people any number of different ways, including simply making virtualcenter less expensive, but I believe that you must pay more attention to the second group.

See, Oracle, no matter how you deploy it more often than not has a cost involved to this second group of people. These are the people that by choice or by force have to deal with bringing another alien application into their environment. And databases are very expensive applications to deal with when you are talking about policy frameworks and compliance and certification and all of that. People need to leverage their existing database systems. At our company, we have all these little bits and pieces of policy to deal specifically with our virtualcenter server because it’s sitting out there all alone talking to its lonely MS SQL Server database. You can bet I’m not going to go through that all again with Oracle. What I want to do is to throw out all of that specific policy and configuration management and backup headache and handle it like we handle every other linux app on the face of the earth.

Now, maybe you already use Oracle; great. A lot of people do. Please continue to support it. But in that same vein, I also think that vSphere vCenter for Linux (or whatever it is going to be called) should at minimum talk to SQL Server and MySQL.

Ignoring MySQL on the Linux product is ignoring the gorilla in the room. I have it on good authority that every Oracle license ships with this little bottle of red stuff that makes the gorilla invisible when you drink it, but there are lots of people who haven’t had the pleasure.

— Or you can continue to have this debate with your customers every single time you show them the back of the box.

i really don’t care on how easy/difficult the installation is, but I think is very important to support MySQL. In the case of an appliance I’m sure it is a lot easier to deal with an embedded MySQL server than an Oracle one.

MySQL uses less RAM, less disk space, it’s easy to install, configure and to do maintain.

Right now having vCenter on Windows forces me to have a Windows Server box, and just because it’s cheaper than Oracle, a MS SQL Server. Before this we did not have any windows servers in our environment, so you gave MS one more customer.

Hope you can have a great Linux version of vCenter with MySQL support, or some other embedded database that does not have the restrictions of Oracle XE.

I think you should keep your products MS free, support them for the tons of clients you have that run on MS, but try to avoid throwing more business to MS and for that matter to Oracle, that is also trying to get into the virtualization market.

With Hyper-V coming along there is going to be a serious push from Microsoft into the space currently occupied firmly by VMware. Personally being a Unix person I dont care for microsoft’s policies, architecture or the hassle of dealing with their licensing, installation methods and lack of clean and concise information (eg Their platform usually requires quite extensive “poking” to debug).

From what I’m seeing of the management solution – why would a shop with a solid windows staff use VMware over hyper-V ? One of the reasons is “cross platform” features, but generally most shops that have robust skills in their IT staff tend to avoid Windows only solutions (they cause more trouble than they are worth) and instead go with the trivial deployment and more sane management provided by a *nix. These shops (almost every one I’ve ever worked in) wont use VMware until the management comes up to par (eg cross platform without hassle).

All of that being said I dont understand why VMware regressed 10 years and made all of its management applications desktop based. The management of the cluster should be inside of an “appliance” or custom VM thats not running anything else that requires a license, patching or maintenance. This can be fairly easy to accomplish if you utilize Web technologies and an opensource database. It is not difficult to package up one of the many web and DB servers into a small image (hardened accordingly) like every firewall, storage and /dev/random appliance vendor does. At that time the management can be performed from any Web enabled (and theoretically console) device regardless of platform. Nothing VMware is doing is so special that it cant be cross-platform, and if the code is that jacked up I probably dont want it anyway.

Long term VMware should look at a solution not-unlike RAC which doesnt have a dedicated “management” host – instead that portion is handled by the nodes via a negotiation where the IP lands is unimportant if everything is truly HA.