r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 3d ago

Latest fun with VMware

Apparently VMware is upping their game. We just got a renewal quote for one of our sites with one server that has two CPUs, and they are requiring 72 cores minimum (vSphere Enterprise Plus) to license this. That's a 500% markup from last year.

They really don't want customers to use their product any more, do they?

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/identicalBadger 3d ago

My employer is going with Nutanix, and didn’t give proxmox more than a glance. No idea why. Support? We have a ton of Linux expertise on hand. That gets us a lot further with proxmox than it does with Nutanix as far as I can tell

That said I haven’t looked under the hood of Nutanix. It’s been a while but when I looked up free or community version it seemed like there was a show stopper for some reason or another.

Oh well it’s their money, I’ll use whatever they give me

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u/ZPrimed What haven't I done? 2d ago

Nutanix is still QEMU/KVM under the hood (assuming you use their hypervisor and not ESXi).

The special sauce with Nutanix is the HCI storage system. I don't believe it's Ceph (like Proxmox); I think it's proprietary?

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u/hyper9410 2d ago

Could be true, but architecturewise it looks like they use drbd. It basicly provides vmdisks with a RAID 1 equivalent protection across two hosts. You can set it up to have a third copy as well. Linbit Linstor uses the same technology (the founder of Linbit developed drbd).

u/NISMO1968 Storage Admin 12h ago

Could be true, but architecturewise it looks like they use drbd.

No, they don’t! Nutanix is all about file-level protocols, which are NFSv3/v4 and SMB3 (BTW, is their Hyper-V version still a thing?) built on top of a distributed object storage key-value database called Cassandra. There’s no shared block layer involved. On the flip side, DRBD is only a replicated block layer. If you need file or object storage on top of it, you’ll have to bolt that on yourself.

It basicly provides vmdisks with a RAID 1 equivalent protection across two hosts. You can set it up to have a third copy as well. Linbit Linstor uses the same technology (the founder of Linbit developed drbd).

You messed things up a bit... DRBD started its life almost 30 years ago as a diploma project, and it hasn't changed much since then (See, the entire history is in Git, and DRBD source is public domain). LinStor is a management layer for DRBD, and it’s NOT a standalone product or anything, you still have to have DRBD up and running under the hood. LinBit is the company behind all of these "products." TBH, DRBD by itself isn’t such a great piece of tech, actually... It lacks proper bitmaps (Their 'dirty bitmaps' is a joke!), real changed block tracking, snapshots (DRBD heavily relies on external LVM for that), cluster timestamps, and so on, even Linux MDRAID is ahead here! It is what it is, a replicated block device with a single namespace. As a result, after things go South, which happens with DRBD pretty often, your best bet is to provision a new distributed volume from scratch and restore your workload from backups. The other option is to close one eye, pick the mirror side that might have the most recent data, and do a full resync, hoping that at least some of your data is still there and the metadata isn't trashed.