In this episode of the Hipaa Vault Show, we delve into the recent changes in VMware’s pricing model and its impact on businesses, particularly small to medium-sized enterprises. We discuss the challenges these businesses face with skyrocketing costs and explore potential solutions to mitigate these financial burdens. The conversation covers various strategies, including migrating to Google Cloud, utilizing VMware within Google Cloud for cost efficiency, and exploring other hypervisor options. With detailed insights and practical advice, this episode aims to help businesses navigate the complexities of cloud hosting and virtualization in the face of sudden price increases. Tune in for expert tips on maintaining stability and cost-effectiveness in your cloud infrastructure.
Google Cloud VMware Pricing https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine/pricing/
Do you have any remaining questions, requests, or just want to chat with us? Email us at podcast@hipaavault.com!
Transcript:
Adam
Hello and welcome to the Hipaa vault show, where we discuss all things HIPAA compliance and cloud technology. My name is Adam Zeineddine and I’m joined, as always, by the CTO and founder of Hipaa vault, Mister Gil Vidals.
Speaker 2
Hey, Adam, like that introduction. Thank you. Yeah, looking forward to talking to you today about VMware and Google and all that good stuff.
Adam
Yeah, let’s dive into it. So we’re talking about VMware, and in particular, this is, if you haven’t checked out our previous episodes from, I think it was last, was either last week or two weeks ago, I’ve lost track. But it’s one of those two. We were talking about the recent news about VMware’s pricing model changing. And so this has led us to have a lot of discussions with companies out there that have been hit by the pricing increases in some cases when they’ve been using VMware to host their applications. And so we thought what we’d do today is dive a little bit deeper into how potentially companies using VMware could save a bit of money by migrating from one hosting provider to another. So Gil, with that introduction in mind, what are you seeing right now in terms of in the industry?
Adam
What are the most pressing and urgent issues when it comes to this VMware situation?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think you’re right. We mentioned some of this in the previous meeting, but it’s worth going over that again. So what I’m seeing is that there are some smaller businesses and this is affecting the SMB space. Small medium sized businesses that have had their infrastructure on VMware for many years, and suddenly the price has gone up. And not your typical, like, oh my gosh, is inflation, you know, 10% higher, 20%. We’re talking three to seven x. I’ve even heard one guy said it went up ten x. So it’s a ridiculous increase and it’s so high that let’s say somebody was paying 3000 a month and that was part of their business model, and all of a sudden they’re going to be paying, you know, 10,000 a month. And so that could wipe out someone all of their profit if they’re a small business.
Speaker 2
I mean, it’s pretty serious. So I think that from a financial point of view, the increase is so much, it’s not something that people can swallow. They’re forced to move to another platform that’s closer to price of what they were used to having.
Adam
Okay, and what solutions are you seeing out there? Obviously, we’re a Google cloud specialist. So the first place that we, I believe, started to look was within Google Cloud to see if there’s any solutions. Right?
Speaker 2
Yeah, I’m seeing companies that are just scrambling to find. They want the stability that VMware had. VMware, by the way, was, I don’t know, literally the first, but they’re the first virtualization stack that was produced at a large scale.
Adam
So virtualization being like the ability to take one machine, one computer, and create multiple computers from it, right?
Speaker 2
Yeah, virtual machines, yeah. They’re the ones that really ushered in the era of virtualization. And so many companies, when they got on board, they were the only choice. And of course, since then, there have been many others, like KVM is another one I hear about, and OpenStack, etcetera. Now, there’s all sorts of solutions, but they each have their own pricing. Some are open source, so customers are looking at, let’s say, KVM. Some are saying, well, it’s time to go to the public cloud, because public clouds have their own virtualization stack at Google’s is similar to KBM. I think it took that technology or borrowed it, or however they did that. I think it’s similar to that one. So there are many different flavors and types of virtualization stacks.
Speaker 2
But I think the key issue here for a business person is like, well, as long as it’s stable and works, they want to pay close to what they were used to paying, and so they’re out having to hunt around and look for where could we go? What can we do?
Adam
Okay, what are the options then, when it comes to migrating over to Google Cloud? So my understanding is that you can either proceed on the basis that you like the way the VMware setup is, but you’re not necessarily as happy with the pricing that you’ve been suddenly provided with, like the price increases, and so you want to stay with VMware, but you need to find a place where it’s more cost effective.
Speaker 2
Yeah, you’re right about that. I was looking at the Google Doc. I think you saw the same document I did, where we are looking at.
Adam
Yeah, let me pull it up here.
Speaker 2
Yeah. And I’ll explain a little bit about this. So this is the pricing that Google publishes. And you’ll see that it’s based on, I believe, on the number of units of RAm.
Adam
Here it is.
Speaker 2
Okay, maybe make that a little bit bigger, if you could. So this is basically being able to use vmware in the Google cloud. Now, the advantage is you get all of Google’s infrastructure supporting this. So you’re going to have a much more robust experience rather than being in a data center. We just have your own equipment, but you know, you’re not going to be able to use anybody else’s equipment. And it looks like this is based on an hourly price. So they’re saying hourly per node. So a node is like a ve, one standard 72. What does a node have? Well, this node, this particular node has 36 cores. That’s 72 hyper threaded cores. So hyper threaded means a virtual cores, and then the memory is 768 gigs of ram.
Speaker 2
Data is 19.2 terabytes, and the cache is three terabytes, and it includes the VMware, vsphere, the VSAN, the NxX, which is the networking, and then the HCX. So it includes all this stuff. And then you pay per hour per node. So this node, you can see it’s $5.34 if you did a three year commitment. And if you multilay, you multiply that by 24 hours in a day times 30 days in a month. And what did we come up with, Adam? It was like 3000.
Adam
It was around 3800.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Okay, 3800. So you think, well, you know, what is that? What does that mean? Well, what’s happening out in the world now is that people are complaining. Companies are complaining that they’re paying three or four times what they used to or five times more. And what were they paying? Well, I remember because we have a vmware cluster that we still run, and our price from years ago is something like five points, because VMware has a point system, five points per gigabyte of ram. So this, if you scroll up a little bit more, you’ll see that this thing has 768gb of ram. You take that times five, and. And that number, whatever that number is, would be our price. So what does that come out to be?
Adam
768 times five?
Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah.
Adam
It’s 3840.
Speaker 2
Okay, so, and then that’s similar to this one. If you take 534 times 24 hours times 30 days, you got something similar, I think.
Adam
Yeah, almost exactly the same. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Right. So the price is very similar now. But the thing is, now that’s a monthly price. So, but now what’s happening is instead of paying the 3800, people’s price has gone up two, three, four, x. That means they’re paying almost 10,000 a month. So it seems to me that this solution that you’re staying with VMware, but yet your price is similar to what you used to be paying this would be a good solution for those that want to stay with VMware, but the pricing is ridiculous where they are. And they say, well, how come the price here isn’t as high? Well, Google is Google, right? The behemoth in the industry. They’re probably have a special deal with VMware and they’re paying millions of dollars a month. And so yeah, they’re going to get a better price. Can’t compete with Google, so join them.
Speaker 2
So this seems viable, but you would, the audience has to do their own math. They have to say, well, what’s my current bill? What do I pay via more licensing? What do I pay for the power circuit? What do I pay for bandwidth? You know, all of that add up their whole bill, look at it, and then come over here and say, okay, could I put everything I have now today one of these nodes again? The node has 768 gigs of ram and 72 hyperthyroid cores. If the answer is yes, I can get it all in one system, then you do the math. Figure out if you needed two systems, you’d have to double that. Yeah, but very interesting, very easy to do this.
Speaker 2
You can go online, get your spreadsheet, do some calculations, and then see if it’s really going to save you and your business, then this might be a viable way to do this. Now, there are many advantages. If the price works out for you, then the advantages are you get lots and lots of features that you get because you’re in the Google cloud. Features like really the whole Google ecosystem, including backups, disaster recovery, all of that, all of those kinds of things, you’re going to be able to benefit from that, from being in their environment. So yeah, I think this is something that those that want to stay with VMware should consider.
Speaker 2
Now, if you’re not interested in Vmware and say, well, I don’t want anything to do with Vmware, then you could migrate to Google cloud directly and say, well, we don’t need this vMware vsphere node, we don’t need that special node.
Adam
Yeah, I’m interested in talking a little bit about that. So before we dive into that, if you’ve reached us and you know, you are in that situation where you’ve recently got a surprise on your bill or you’re about to get billed a much larger amount for your vmware setup, please let us know. You can either just drop us a comment. If you’re watching us on YouTube, let us know how similar to what those amounts we discussed are for you and what you plan to do in order to move forward. Are you thinking of sticking with the same place? Let us know in the comments below.
Adam
You can also reach out to us if you want to share a little bit more info, podcastsipavol.com and while you’re at it, subscribe and like the video so that we can reach more people and give them more information about it. So with that said, Gil, the second option would be to consider moving away from the vmware based model. Right. What does that look like? What goes into that?
Speaker 2
Well, just a little bit of background information so everyone’s on the same page. So essentially, in today’s world, everything runs on a hypervisor. What is a hypervisor? Well, the hypervisor is the platform that has the technology to divide one system into many small virtual systems. That’s what the hypervisor does. So the hypervisors that VMware uses, they have their own hypervisor technology. Aws has their own, Google has their own azure. There’s another one called KVM, Openstack. And you can make a huge list of them all. They’re all the same thing. They’re all hypervisor. They’re all trying to do the same thing, chop up the hardware resource into small segments. So keeping that in mind, I mean, at a high level, all these solutions have the same model behind them. Are some better than others? Maybe.
Speaker 2
But if you stick with the brand names, the big ones, the big public players like Google, Amazon, Azure, that’s one sector. Or you can go to a data center, a different data center that has their own equipment, and then you could say, well, what do you guys offer? They might say, well, we offer Openstack or KVM. I think it’s called KVM. I’m forgetting the initial.
Adam
Yeah, yeah, KVM. I think you’re right. Something like kernel virtualization machine.
Speaker 2
Okay, so really, if you wanted to use one of the free, you know, maybe you can find one that’s a free version that’s still out there and put it on your own equipment. But I don’t know how viable, you know, that is. Usually you want, usually you don’t want free because you want support. If there are issues from time to time, and if you can’t reach out to the vendor to get help, you could be really in a world of hurt. In other words, if your hypervisor fails and all your virtual machines and all your customers start to go under, you don’t have anyone to call you don’t have a contract. There’s nobody on the other end. You just have to start googling and hoping that you figure it out.
Speaker 2
So if you’re running a business that’s critical, you’re going to want to find one that’s got a commercial product that you’re paying for. You get support. Obviously, we’re biased towards Google because, full disclosure, we bring most of our customers to Google. But Google has a good price. Google’s price is pretty good. In fact, Google’s behind Amazon and AWS in terms of market share. So as you can imagine, Google’s trying to be very aggressive in winning business. And one way they do that is they offer less expensive resources like storage, cpu and ram. So you’re getting world class security and you’re getting a little lower price. So what’s there not to like? I mean, it’s a good thing to check out. And then, of course, Google, what we just showed in the previous screen, Google is offering the VMware node.
Speaker 2
I mean, that’s a computer, right? So you get your own server in the cloud, so you can stick with VMware. Or you could say, no, we don’t want to do that. We’re done with VMware. And that’s what we did years ago. I was saying, I’m done with VMware. Abusive for, gosh, two decades, 20 years, and I was done with it. It’s like I have time to move on. VMware has had technical issues that I experienced personally. Like, we’re on there and there’s some issues where, you know, technical issues that affect the customers. And I’m not going to bash VMware because I use them for 20 years and I think they’re a solid product. However, there were times where there were issues and we couldn’t always solve it. We’d open up tickets with them and it took a long time to solve.
Speaker 2
Sometimes they couldn’t solve it. Like they didn’t know what was the issue and causing it. And the reason for that is there’s so many moving parts. You’ve got the data center platform, you’ve got cabling fiber optics, you’ve got the storage unit, you’ve got the sand unit, the storage, and it has to have fiber optic connecting to that. I mean, I can go on and on, but it’s got moving parts everywhere. And so you don’t know. I mean, VMware doesn’t manage your storage, right? That’s a different vendor. And so now you’ve got that storage is critical. So too many moving parts, too many things, trying to work together, who knows? Sometimes they can’t solve the problem. So my opinion and my experience, it’s better to get out of that world of you managing your own hardware or a legacy data center that’s still buying equipment.
Speaker 2
It’s better to go with the public cloud because they’ve dialed it in, they know what they’re doing, and you’re going to have a lot less issues in that world when it comes to hardware and the setup and the hypervisor. So my vote is to move into the public cloud. Now, if you choose Google, we’d love to talk to you, but you could always. A lot of people love AWS or azure. They have the reasons, but I recommend checking out those solutions. Or this one’s interesting, the one Google has where you can use the VMware engine inside the Google platform. I think that’s a pretty good solution that you should review.
Adam
Well, yeah, thanks for providing that information, Gil. I think it’s going to be really helpful to people that are, you know, feel like they’re stuck when it comes to the changes in the pricing. And we’ll be sure also to link documentation as to the, you know, the pricing within Google cloud for vmware and also migration and how that can take place from private data center to Google cloud. You can also reach out to us and, you know, we can get on a scoping meeting with you and go through your inventory specifically and advise on that.
Speaker 2
You know, migration is a difficult thing. I’ve never seen any migration. That’s just super easy. They’re, they’re complicated. And when you Google this thing and you find out, well, how do I migrate? I mean, there are all these tools you can buy and applications and, you know, they, of course they always advertise, oh, they’re easy. One button push and you move all your stuff over. But I’ve not seen one work that easily. There’s always some issue and some are challenging. So it does take time, it takes preparation. You need to test everything thoroughly when it reaches your destination. So keep in mind this isn’t something that you can do super fast, especially if you’re moving from your data center to another data center. You know, the speed, the Internet connections between the two.
Speaker 2
And if you have a big server, a lot of data, it could take a long time. So be prepared for that and be aware of that so that you don’t think you can move out in an hour. You know, this could take a week of planning at least, and another few weeks or maybe a month of actually transferring things over. So something to keep in mind as you are analyzing your bill and thinking, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to solve this problem that we have where Vmware’s coming like the tax man cometh, you know?
Adam
Yeah. Well, yeah, because straightaway, I mean, I think were talking to someone the other day who’d had five days notice and so. Exactly. That they’ve got, oh, I’ve got a bill that’s three, four times what I was paying previously coming in far in five days. So I think it’s. Yeah, it’s important to note.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Adam
That it’s not going to be a, you know, instant, but it can be done fairly quickly. Right.
Speaker 2
Well, once you make the decision, and I think this solution here, we put another podcast. We can look to see how we can go into the documentation and see how the actual migration works. And maybe we even want to test it. Maybe we could, you know, install something and test it out, show. Show the audience how it works.
Adam
Absolutely. Yeah. If you’d like to watch a video like that, then let us know and we’d be happy to put something together. All right, so that’s it on VMware for today. If you have any questions, podcasthib.com, leave us a comment below. And until next time, thanks for stopping by.