 Tom here from Lauren systems. This is in no way brought to you by big B coffee I just like their coffee get that out of the way real quick, you know full disclosure of things This is also not sponsored by XC PNG It is just an open source product we use But I wanted to talk about it because there was a good forum post and this discussion comes up a lot I figured hey These are some good talking points that are just interesting to me and maybe interesting to you And a lot has happened since I talked about XC PNG and how we use it for clients And I still get these I don't know how else to describe them But people who work in technology who are very dismissive and say Tom just plays with things And he's just some guy who likes open source and you know That's not how the real business world works Tom You know you just like to do content for YouTube and people like free things and etc. etc I have slowly watched a lot of those people over the years Kind of go by the wayside who don't embrace some of the open source stuff And I do choose to embrace it but there's a lot of business use case and well The XC PNG story is definitely one of those wide adoption of open source for a lot of really solid reasons and that includes very much so in the enterprise space and There's a forum post that starts this off that kind of got me really thinking about it again Now I've done my previous videos on this topic and I've compared it to VMware and VMware is where XC PNG really competes and people think all the time like oh I thought it was just some little homelab project and it's not really ready for the corporate space the Zen server itself The Zen hypervisor that this is all based on is a very mature product and has been deployed in a lot of places So it is not it by any means just some hobby project Get over here to the XC PNG It is actually based on the original how Citrix was doing things Citrix proved not to be a good steward of that Project and their move in licensing changes that confuse people and kind of caught people off-guard Well, that is a business risk technology is no longer just some tooling that companies use It has become the lifeblood of how they operate. It's very integrated into large corporate processes So when you have a company that makes a change especially when the change doesn't add any value such as raising prices and this is where VMware went as well which caused tons of controversy VMware licensing hike is severely unattractive to partners to say the laces was last year when VMware is like hey These cores are going to cause problems for the way we like to monetize this So without providing any value people thought hey We could buy these extra cores and be able to run things more efficiently and VMware goes Absolutely, you could but we want to make more money and this would not make us more money So let's just throw this monkey wrench at you called. Here's your no value add But we're gonna add a lot more in fees And it's actually was kind of timely because I thought this was interesting to a window level in techs did a great job talking about the new epic processors and a Calculation that not everybody really stops to think about it is the core cost of things like sequel So now when you're buying a processor with the most cores that seems like a good idea Maybe when you're building your home lab But if you have things that are very core dependent licensing You can end up with a better value by buying something with a higher clock speed less cores because of the way the licensing works on your sequel I'll leave a link to the video it tides in a lot of the topic, but before we get too far off topic Let's talk about this right here now These are some strong reasons not just to use xdp ng, but they're also strong reasons to use open source and have a better control over Potential price hikes so that you would have no control over And these points are pretty well taken right here at least to me And I think this is something more and more large enterprises are really thinking about here and no more vendor lock-in being right off the top that is a Big problem when you have a strong vendor relationship that also turns sour because the vendor goes we're just increasing prices without increasing value and Yeah, it's just not not necessarily a good thing Easier to grow without license limitations now This is something you have to predict when you're a especially a startup and this discussion that I have with some friends The other day was about, you know, how the Apache server became very popular during the dot-com You know rush in the 90s was it was not Advantages for companies who had licensing and companies that were just starting out and trying to get everything online and put things on the web To try to figure out license models around things and this is where an open source models just kind of made sense Going wow, we can expand it as needed and the concept that people won't make money on this is obviously Just a myth that has been busted since the 90s and the 2000s and all the way into now that you can't make money with open source The value place when you have an open source product it becomes on the people it becomes on a continued value of innovation and Customization this is still how the VATES team of them make money. We'll get to more in that in a second capability to improve the platform yourself or To pay people for it. Good luck on doing that with VMware. Yeah, that's really well taken point And this is what happens There are of course some people who grab some open source code and never contact the developers and will never hire them for anything That's absolutely a thing that happens But they weren't gonna pay for anything anyways and I you can't focus on well someone used it and didn't pay me That's not a good way to look at it If you keep innovating and you keep offering services and there are enough people you know, I've done this on my channel many times I Go in depth explaining how to do something and yet people still hire me and they frequently hire me based on some of the Videos where I actually told them how to do it But they decided it would be better to hire the person and else how to do it because well That's how actual business works you outsource things I mean I could probably watch some videos on accounting But I'm gonna keep outsourcing my accounting because I did watch some videos on accounting as like I understand the complexities of it this much and The complexities grow and I would rather have someone that's a paid professional to do that And this is still how this works there people still pay for professional services and support to the people over at the XCPNG or the Zen Orchestra team and they hire them for things because they're like well, I seen it I started in my lab and it worked really well, but I realized I don't want to manage some of these complexities I'd like to be able to pay for support in so they can do so. It's pretty simple. It's a nice model They have there More control on what's going on in the lower stack unlike black box VMware This is really important is people are always wanting to know what's going on What are the things happening and being able to not saying everyone will audit the code But being able to go through the code and modify it for people who have an innovative idea This actually allows that innovation to happen faster when people want to build something on XCPNG But they go, you know what I'd like it to do this or I'd like it to do that because I have a new business idea It gives them a firm base to work on and then they'll have their idea And then they often will contract someone like the original team that wrote it to enhance it and you know This goes right into the relationship XCPNG is formed with a lot of very large hosting companies to build this into the infrastructure If you follow their blog, you'll see there's been developments with Terraform there's been developments with lots of different cloud and it systems and these are these large corporate scalable systems to make this easier to Deploy and they've announced partnerships where there's strong relationship with them working with these hosting companies to make this deployed and easier to use It's just it makes logical sense for everyone involved Avoid bad commercial practices from a quasi monopoly This is something I think about a lot because the monoculture that persists throughout technology brings us things like the exchange problem We've seen recently. I Don't understand so many people who have an absolute dedicated Relationship even if it's not the best solution to a certain product and this happens a lot where this you know You create these kind of monopolies in there And it's not good for the health of any large ecosystem because if everyone uses exactly the same software So I'm not saying that XCPNG is a solution for everything and create a monoculture around it But I think there's a lot of innovation when you look at alternatives And this is something really important that people should always be thinking about You know, I know there's the old adages No one ever got fired for using IPM and related where you could just insert that same phrase to a lot of other Very popular commercial products, but some of those commercial products have let us down They have not always been the best product to choose over time So yeah playing into some of the quasi monopolies can be kind of a pain And this is a really important decision when you start talking about how to build your infrastructure Because you become very reliant on there get rid of extremely complex licensing Oh man, this is something huge because it's not just the license. It's not like we're just trying to save money We're just trying to get something for free. No complex licensing is the enemy Being the fact that Microsoft and they're probably the biggest example of this They just have convoluted licenses on some things occasionally. They're Very, you know hard to sell and as the IT team, they're like I trying to figure this license model out You know, I I love companies if there are licensing and it's a more simplistic approach to it that obviously makes it easier to sell Easier to scale as an IT provider as a manager's provider We deal with licensing issues all the time and stuff and some of them get complicated Some of them are simple I definitely praise the simple ones because I'd rather sell that product because it scales easier It's easier to understand but when there's all these little nuances to it. Mmm. That's kind of a pain Now wider hardware support. This is something that has obviously become really a factor where you want to be able to support all the hardware and The hardware you have for the hardware that can be the best deal This is something they've worked really hard at and I'll go a step further that it wasn't really talked about in there But it's the storage hardware. That's a big piece of the pie because well Well, you start running a lot of VMs and hundreds or even thousands of them now You're going, okay, where do I store all this? How do I build out my sand? Well vendor lock ins another popular problem that you run into there if they only support a limited subset of it They have done a lot of work and a lot of tooling in Xcp and G Especially since I first started using it to include multiple different common open source formats this open source formats that they are using allow for Diversity of storage devices or even a mix and match of storage devices now the last thing I'll kind of mention because this is also where a lot of innovation has happened is Xcp and G being a more complete product in my Opinion because they offer a backup and disaster recovery solution built-in with their Zen orchestra now Zen orchestra is technically a separate product from X Xcp and G I know the nuance is not lost on me for that someone's going to be pedantic and say exactly that yes They are two separate things you're conflating them together Tom I look at them very much the same because if you run one you pretty much manage it with the other so the core project of Xcp and G and then the separate VM that runs inside of it with Zen orchestra and Vates isn't alluded to a couple times. It's not available yet But they are going to be kind of nesting the two together like a basic version for people there Don't want to run two separate products. That's future coming. That's not right now Follow some blog posts on it. He's tweeted it, but no there's not a lot of movement on that. Just yeah, that's coming I'm hoping this year But seeing all that innovation I thought I'd bring it up again that the real competitor that Xcp and G is going up against is VMware and the fact that their open source gives them all these strong advantages and open sources wide adoption Because it seems to pose a lesser business risk than it used to This is a discussion. It's you know coming up very frequently and I talked to some large corporate companies about this I have friends that work at large places And this is something they think about because they're been really unhappy many of these companies You know see the corporate opportunity and do things like just change licenses a little bit to increase revenue But then don't provide great support. Don't provide any innovation They just repackage the same product at a higher price next year because that's their way of monetizing it more and This is not something that necessarily is a good thing And it can be kind of problematic when you're trying to do budget predictions over the next couple years Especially when innovation is key because as the market changes We're hoping our product innovates with it and sometimes the innovation of product companies do it's just we're gonna innovate our Licensing because some company came out with new processors like AMD that are many more cores and more availability So that would actually hurt our revenue model So our innovation is new license model to do that and it's essentially what happened in the VMWare story I'll leave link to the level one video just because it's kind of a fun dive into that topic How cores can affect licensing and performance and the way you budget for things at scales Especially when you talk about spending a half million dollars in sequel licensing On topic is of course, I leave links or I just discussed here with XCP and G and some of the other videos I have on the topic. 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