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.

Eric

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.

FYI Key leaders in the vCenter R&D group have been made aware of the various comments on this article.

While we *do* run Oracle (among other DBs), we would prefer to decouple vctr from EVERYTHING else (hence the desire to have an appliance) Whatever DB solution, I’d prefer to see it embedded in the appliance, installed automagically and isolated from the rest of our environment.

I understand that a DB is required for vctr, and I think a lot of the grief on this issue stems from the install steps of “download and install the Oracle ODBC drivers” then “connect to the Oracle instance that you already have installed” which is a little beyond what I’d expect from an appliance.

If it’s bundled and “hidden” in the appliance, you can use flat files or SQL Server running via Wine for all I care That said, if I were on the project team, I’d be porting the SQL to postgres as we speak.

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 do understand that they’ve already coded everything for Oracle on Windows, therefore that work transfers over to Oracle on Linux, but I would still like to see a really good reason why they can’t use mySQL instead.

Your above idea is good but…what happens when the db breaks, there’s issues caused by or related to Oracle, which most people don’t even know how to work with…but there’s lots of info easily found about mySQL.

I thought it was a no-brainer that they would use a mySQL database.

What if the database was also distributed as part of the appliance and it happened to be Oracle, but did not require esoteric configuration or maintenance? Would that be more appealing?