Comment by kev009
12 hours ago
Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.
There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc.
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.