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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

I am familiar enough with that. Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage.

But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense.

If you want to have special snowflakes, you go for SoftLayer + VmWare. You can be as exotic as you want with that.

Otherwise, just use AWS. And you get the benefit of all the services that VMWare don't and can't provide. (servers, storage, load balancer, databases...).

Better, go for GCE. It's the same as AWS for 20-50% cheaper. :D

AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.

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>But why AWS + VmWare? That makes no sense.

If you're my customers? AWS + VMware makes plenty of sense because you have gazillions of dollars sunk into vSphere management and automation that's narrowly tailored to the enterprise's needs. Making the case that all of that prior work should be abandoned or phased out in favor of going all-in on AWS is a difficult up-hill battle in these situations.

>AWS + VmWare is the worst of any world. It's not even a real solution. It's an experimental idea waiting to be released and go though years of bugfix/improvements.

This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.

The case is to go AWS or stay where you are.

If a company has a HUGE VmWare legacy, we'd both make the case to stay on VmWare.

> This isn't even a real argument. The same could be said of any new product anywhere.

VmWare and AWS are both hugely complex (possibly among the most complex software on the planet).

They have a different philosophy and they were never intended to fit together. The route to doing so will be filled with endless complications.

We'll see how they execute. IMO they can't overcome their legacy easily, the result will be a mess.

VMware is the de facto private cloud incumbent and switching costs are incredibly high, and AWS is the de facto enterprise public cloud incumbent with perhaps even higher switching costs and the same kind of inertia as legacy on-premises systems. What this signals to me is that the "hybrid cloud" management voodoo software that's been peddled for years by various vendors isn't sufficient enough to keep VMware viable enough on its own, and VMware wants to partner with the incumbent enterprise public cloud for continued relevance rather than to risk partnering with anyone that's competing against AWS.

GCE has so little of the enterprise compliance and security solutions engineering bureaucracy that enterprises love to spend tens of millions of dollars and years doing POCs with it's just not viable at this time.

Say I have 30,000 VMs deployed in my VMWare infrastructure. I have a good licensing agreement with them and have thousands of applications.

By just shifting workload to AWS without doing anything to the VM, I can save a ton of money. In my case, for every dollar I spend on AWS/VMWare, I could probably avoid spending $2.50 in data center buildout costs and $3 in application rationalization.

With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.

> With Softlayer, you're inviting IBM into your house, which is rarely a good idea. Give them an inch, they take a mile.

Not a very accurate statement. SoftLayer is IaaS, everything is monthly or hourly on the compute, storage, and networking side. You pay SoftLayer monthly for VSphere 6 licenses with zero contracts.

Nobody got fired for buying VMware + nobody got fired for buying AWS. Now if only they could add Cisco and EMC it would be perfect.

Already done :D

VmWare is owned in part by EMC (or the other way around).

> Traditional datacenters are a money sink and anything will do cheaper, more reliable and easier to manage.

This is 100% false. Unless you are running your infrastructure at less than 50% utilization 24/7, it will ALWAYS be more expensive to go to "the cloud".

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