 Tom here from Lawrence systems and Broadcom purchased VMware now the best thing that happened out of all of this was the shareholder meeting where they made some very clear announcements that they were going to be rapidly moving from perpetual license to subscription and pretty much ignoring everyone but 600 customers that are most profitable because it would be the hardest for them to change and By hardest to change these switching costs of moving your infrastructure They mean they're going to raise prices on those people and they're not likely to move away from them And I really appreciate that they are very upfront about their plans that most of you don't matter and those of you that are using VMware at least and that they're going to simply raise prices to Make up for the money. They want to make with the company. It's a great strategy in terms of making shareholders happy It's not the best strategy of making IT people happy There's plenty of chatter about it, but I'm not here to commiserate with all the people and the VMware and everything going wrong with Broadcom and how they're doing it I'm here to talk about an alternative solution to that problem and that is XC PNG and probably you're going but Tom That's that thing that Citrix did and I didn't have a great time with the way Citrix handled it And neither did I that's because Citrix. Well, they kind of did the same thing They actually had a point release version upgrade that changed your license on a point release to reduce features that they then decided to charge you for because Citrix, I don't know why they did that but nonetheless throw away Citrix here comes XC PNG and the team behind it That's what I wanted to talk about today is the VATES team the XC PNG Zen Orchestra how this open-source platform works how it's Licensed or actually not licensed because it's open source It's under an open-source license so the softwares all free how they charge for service delivery and support because yes That's an important factor for those of you in the home lab. You're like great I can get everything for free for those you want to test it You can test it all for free for those of you that have businesses that you can't just drop something And unless it has a support contract a level of guarantee and response times They have that too and that is what they charge for is the level of support and service delivery model Not for the software itself and that's one of the reasons. I think they're a really interesting Alternative they also are probably a lot further along than you may remember Citrix being in terms of functionality So we're gonna cover some of the details compare it directly to VMware and ultimately Let you decide because I'm not here to influence your decision I'm just here to drop some information Put some facts together and then you can ultimately decide if it's a fit for your environment And if it's a viable VMware alternative for you before we dive into the details that video Let's first are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering storage or virtualization project Is your company or internal IT team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your IT Systems operating smoothly not only would we love to help consulting your project We also offer fully managed or co-managed IT service plans for businesses in need of IT administration or IT teams in need of additional support With our expert install team We can also assist you with all of your structure cabling and Wi-Fi planning projects If any of this piques your interest fell out our hire us form at Lawrence systems comm so we can start crafting a solution That works for you if you're not interested in hiring us, but you're looking for other ways You want to support this channel there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel and Now back to our content Now the first thing I want to start with is who is vates and what does their team do and we're gonna go ahead and click on Products here, and I'll leave links to everything I mentioned in the description down below But they deliver XC PNG and they develop Zen orchestra both of these are open source and XC PNG is the actual hypervisor tool you load on each host It's very lightweight doesn't have a lot of management tools in it to do things Alternatively, you can't manage it completely from the command line if you'd like to and it's like I said a hundred percent free But does offer pro support and incident support Zen Orchestra is the really important orchestration tool that manages XC PNG Also open source also if you'd like to compile it yourself and I have videos I'll link down below so you can completely do a from source build or If you are looking for support and a service delivery model where they take care of all the build They take care of all the updates and offer you support. They sell support for Zen orchestra. The pricing is all published on their website I'm not gonna bother showing that because it dates the video because prices are always subject to change in terms of support But as far as a license fee there is not an actual license fee to get started with this This makes people who want to use it in their home lab pretty excited about it It's a really popular among home lab people It's extremely scalable and if you want those extra paid support as I said are so important for business Those are features they offer now the relationship is one to many that Zen orchestra has to the number of hosts It's not a one-to-one relationship one instance of Zen orchestra can manage many hosts hosts are grouped into resource pools One instance of Zen orchestra can manage many resource pools It can even manage them remotely and this is just something I want to point out from an architectural design of how Zen orchestra works you're actually able to take an instance of Zen orchestra and Manage your clients infrastructure in cases of the way we can set things up We can have our system remotely managing it because you're probably thinking well if it's got backups and everything in there How do you transfer that across like a VPN? Well, that's the cool part They even have an entire proxy system that allows you to have one instance one single pane of glass and then remote data centers Remote server locations where you have other hosts and resource pools put together But then they're still managed through ones and orchestra instance This is a really good way to do it and with the what they refer to as a proxy worker You can still have all your local storage local backup targets because yes Then orchestra has full backup disaster recovery including a video I did on automated disaster recovery testing where it does a backup and then restores it to another piece of your Infrastructure or the same from which it was backed up so you can validate your backups Not just with a little check some validation, but actually restore them in an automated way All of that obviously doesn't work well over a VPN unless you have the tools that they've built out for things like proxy workers So if you have a really advanced environment, you have one central location But you want to manage all of your remote locations your backup jobs They actually have an entire architecture that supports that and as I said I'll be linking to the videos where I've covered these topics in a series of videos I've done with Zen, but let's do some direct comparison here because these are the important features that you are looking for If you're using VMware, you need to know does Zen orchestra and the xcp and g together support these features Web console for VM management. Yes, this is all a web interface. That's how it's managed with Zen orchestra You can manage all the xcp and g hosts basic VMM in live VM migration, of course live VDI migration Yes, you can keep it running on a single host But then migrate between multiple storages as needed. Not a problem to do that. High availability. Yes Clustering high availability all supported. No extra licenses needed It's something that you can completely use the free version and get high availability compile everything yourself I've got videos on how to do it and videos right demo at working console view VMware ASXI xcp and g's and orchestra hyperconverged solution vSAN versus exoSAN more news coming on exoSAN soon They're working on some new versions of it. But yes, they do have a product for that tool updates Automated updates. They've actually done a great job of building in automation to updating and rolling through the pools moving and shuffling resources and Keeping the thing up to date in a very automated way. I love the way they do it They make it really easy for admins to all do through the web panels thin provisioning Yes, that's supported as well depending on the different storage types You have health check role-based administration ACLs SSO ACLs self-service or scheduling tasks These are some really clever things you can do because yes You can tie it to whatever you have for authentication So you can have multiple users managing the interface and then have access control lists So you can control what they can manage the scheduled tasks is crazy what you can do in Zen architecture real diverse in terms of resource planning and Scheduling for where you want things to shuffle around really great features They have around that This is where you have to think about the total cost of ownership Even if you were paying the subscription for the year support with that Zen orchestra next CPNG versus VMWare Basic backups is kind of what you can do in VMWare But nothing compared to the Delta backup file of restore continuous replication and load balancing all offered inside of Zen Orchestra these features are because they've wrote a really nice Backup system and having your backup integrated into your hypervisor management tool Written by all the same people means the close tight integration allows for a lot of different options Including quick Delta backups offline snapshots where you can shut down the VM. So it's in a solid state Backups with memory. I like this feature a lot because you can actually take an instance as it's running Do the backup image of it and then you can even restore it to its exact running state so that moment in time can be captured and That's that tight integration with one company writing all of the software. They know how all that works So you're not relying on the third party and all this is inclusive with these and orchestra tool the recent video I just did the other day because of the new feature they had on the Restore validation is just really impressive and shows where they're going These are ideas that came out of the interaction I have with the community The team engages a lot with the community via forums or very public being that it's all open source now my overall feelings ends in orchestra obviously very positive and I'm very bullish on it We've migrated many many people from VMware one of the clients that we did some consulting with had 2100 virtual machines and they said well the new price increases This was over about a year and a half ago when VMware did some of the up the price They said this kind of hurts our bottom line because part of their done part of their business model is selling low-cost VMs through a series of hosting options they have and it turns out it just really cut into their marketability of their product they were offering and their migration they were not only impressed with the performance they were Kind of blown away at the extra functionality and features and it actually made their management of all these VMs Substantially easier across several data centers. They have in Europe so we've absolutely seen this I'll leave links to some stories that are right on the XCPNG teams blog posts where they talk about people who migrated who moved over to different things. They've got user stories Unfortunately money of the big companies you've worked with say here's an NDA So you can't like use us as a showcase some of the larger companies we have done I'll just say that there's from very company big companies You've heard of that we've definitely helped consult with XCPNG on it's impressive Some of the hardware that the people have built it on it does scale. It has really solid support from the team So if it's something you're thinking about if the new changes of VMware really don't set well with you Or you're part of the well You're not part of I should say the 600 customers that they said they care about you're part of the several thousand people who use This and go wow, I'm not gonna get new features But I am gonna get a substantial increase with their rapid move to a subscription model And you're just not happy with it. Check out XCPNG. My recommendation is grab some servers load it up build a lab See if you like it migrate some things over it does support Import of different file formats including some of the ones that you can export from VMware alternatively when you're Setting up different platforms and different machines. You can simply clone them I've talked about doing it with clonezilla that there's plenty of commercial tools out there Or maybe even whatever backup software you're running You can just run the backup tools and restore it over to an XCPNG Oh, so it's actually not as painful migrating as you may think Well, I'll leave links all the videos I mentioned the articles from the Register that I'm kind of pull some of those quotes for they also have a link from the register over to their earnings Where they talk about it and where register sites all their sources for all the announcements for VMware Like I said, I thank them for being so forthcoming about exactly what they plan to do because no one wants to hear sunshine and rainbows Just tell us how much you're gonna raise the price and they did they said they're gonna raise the price So thank you for being clear on that and thanks everyone for watching links down below and everything I mentioned more in-depth discussion how to go to my forums and Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel Hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems calm And click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our Affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store Where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out? 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