Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack

I hate cloud headlines. What's the hypervisor? VMWare is a hypervisor (ESX) and management applications (vCenter/vSphere, vCloud Director, etc). Openstack is only the management applications. And VMWare contributes the most interesting part of OpenStack, anyway, which is the virtual networking based on Nicira's OpenFlow.<p>My personal experience with OpenStack (admittedly late Diablo release timeframe) was that it was borderline unusable outside of the developer setup of a standalone node on Ubuntu 11.4 backed with KVM (edit: and that was only Nova/Compute, not even including Swift/Storage).<p>Anyway, very interested to see if this is KVM, Xen, or something else backed. Also very interested to see when they reverse their decision (probably after VMWare comes down on pricing by 10-20 percent).

A few things going on here,<p>1. According to Business Insider (BI), PayPal is using Fuel from Mirantis to manage its OpenStack deployment.<p>2. BI also announced that Fuel was released on March 25 under the Apache 2.0 License. However, the fuel website points to a form that appears to give free access to fuel under a creative commons attribution, noncommercial, share alike license, with additional licensing options available from Mirantis.<p>3. To top it all off, the CEO of Mirantis contacted BI and said the information about PayPal migrating over was incorrect and based off of second-hand knowledge (as seen on the update in the bottom).<p>4. BI also spoke to paypal who stated they are diversifying their VM infrastructure to "enable choice and agility", not replacing VMware.<p>So, based on all this, it sounds like what really happened is PayPal decided to implement OpenStack to allow for a more diverse internal set of tools to develop infrastructure. A miscommunication occurred somewhere, which resulted in the BI and Forbes story.<p><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-paypal-chooses-rival-openstack-2013-3#ixzz2OeJgF5JI" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-p...</a><p><a href="https://fuel.mirantis.com/" rel="nofollow">https://fuel.mirantis.com/</a>

Slightly relevant:<p>If you're interested in discovering OpenStack, you should check out devstack[1]. It's a bash script that (git) pulls different projects of openstack into a machine and install them.<p>The script itself is very readable, thoroughly commented, on purpose. You're encouraged to read it while the whole thing installs (which can take several minutes).<p>Feel free to launch it inside of a VM (preferably running Ubuntu or Fedora), in order to avoid polluting your current system.<p>[1]: <a href="http://devstack.org/" rel="nofollow">http://devstack.org/</a>

Can we at least link to the original article: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-paypal-chooses-rival-openstack-2013-3" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/a-dangerous-sign-for-vmware-p...</a><p>I'm stunned by the extent to which the forbes.com rehashing of articles crest the front page compared to the original articles.

<i>"UPDATE: We have heard from Adrian Ionel, the CEO of Renski's company Mirantis, who says that Renski is "exaggerating the use case" of OpenStack at PayPal and that Renski's "knowledge of the project is second hand and therefore limited." Renski's title at Mirantis is executive vice president."</i><p>It looks like they are adding OpenStack to the suite of tools they use at PayPal and not replacing anything(at least, not yet). Sounds like Renski is just a little over-excited when commenting about a platform he believes in.

Paypal runs on <i>80 THOUSAND</i> servers? And it takes hours for me to even get a quarterly transaction log prepared for download?<p>That just boggles the mind....

I think this only solves the cost problem. VMware is damn expensive for what it is.<p>I'm not really a fan of virtualization myself. We canned it at our organisation a couple of years ago. We had 30 ESX/vSphere managed hosts across 3 data centers which hosted app servers, web front end servers, virtual load balancers and some other minor infrastructure. The final straw was the upgrade costs. Not only that we had problems with volume size limits on our SAN which would require more expense and hackery to work around. Also, we couldn't host our database servers on top of it due to performance problems so we had to have dedicated machines there anyway.<p>The whole thing at the end of the day just added complexity, expense and didn't improve reliability, security or load distribution as our architecture was sound on that front already.<p>We've gone back to the original virtualization system: processes and sensible distribution of them across multiple machines. Performance, cost and sanity have improved.<p>I can understand that virtualization is useful when your resource requirement is less than one machine but above that, I doubt there are any real benefits. It's snake oil.

So they're going to move to OpenStack Compute but... which supervisor are they going to use? I guess is not VMware (KVM? Xen?), but I still find the article a little bit confusing.<p>Besides the quotes suck ("OpenStack is not really free"; well, if you don't know how things work you'll have to pay who knows), so I'm not sure if I can trust that information.

"VMware’s RabbitMQ, an open source middleware-type application deployment project, ..."<p>Perhaps it's mean to poke fun at reporters, but this is pretty brazen.

Is anyone in the startup world using OpenStack? If so, how is it working for you?<p>I'm always skeptical of abstractions but it'd be great to hear about any real world experience.

I think VMWare is going to be in some trouble in the next few years. A lot of opensource projects are picking up speed. One of my favorites, oVirt (<a href="http://www.ovirt.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.ovirt.org</a>) especially. Red Hat mainly runs the project, and is pretty much the open source version of RHEV.

Well, it makes sense... OpenStack is getting better and better with each release and whilst VMWare do add some cool new features every now and then, the price simply sky rockets and you don't really need the new features.<p>For the customers who do not need much more than basics (e.g. just virtualisation, storage server etc.), it is just so hard to justify the price now.<p>Just the other day I had a client who wanted basic fault tolerance and by changing versions, the quote goes from 6k to 47k! It is crazy pricing... :(

I can confidently say forbes.com is the worst website of all time

If I'm correct, Openstack is different from Openshift and Openshift actually runs on top of Openstack, right? It's more like an appserver that can run Ruby on Rails, Play framework, etc., right?<p>Because very often I tend to get confused between the two..because of the vague similarity in their names..

In other news, VMware has announced plans to accept only Square payments for all $4 billion of its revenue.

I'm very interested to see how this all plays out. Despite their customer service issues, PayPal has a huge ecosystem. I'm curious to see if this speeds up their infrastructure at all, considering that their API and website have been notoriously slow for years.

What's wrong with VMware? Why would someone not choose VWware over something else?

previously @ <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5439770" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5439770</a>

Internet to drop Paypal and replace with Bitcoin :D