I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box. If you think IBM and mainframe is bad, you've never lived with a technology that Broadcom has acquired.
Is there a single large tech company that doesn't fuck over the customers of their acquisitions?
As of late, probably Microsoft does it the least, unintuitively enough.
Teams enters the chat.
New Teams is actually much better imo. The way they’re murdering Outlook though…
I think it is matter of who it used to what. I was working with web version of Outlook for a long time and loved it. Now I am forced to use old one and hate it.
I was working with web version of Outlook for a long time and loved it.
As I understand it, web Outlook pioneered numerous browser innovations that we take for granted now.
New Teams is actually much better
That's such a low bar. I'm still on "classic" at work, and I can't imagine what they would have to do to make it worse.
Now I just need that on linux… They even killed the linux app and just want you to use it via prog. Webapp. Its awful.
Outlook gets my eternal disdain because it still does not understand HTML written after 2006.
It's so bad, we have a dedicated email HTML person.
Teams was built in-house, right? Whose existing customers did they fuck over?
Their own.
It's been slowly getting better though. Nowadays they have a working search function, pasting works most of the time, and it's much harder to break the input area. Took them several years, but for pretty much all of 2023 it has been an acceptable chat software
Minecraft users would disagree.
Eh, Bedrock is a much easier sell to my friends than Java was back in the day. Even the least technical manage to play together.
Remember when two decades ago even the dumbest kid could figure out how to punch an ip address into teamspeak and CS1.6?
There's a heck of a lot fewer mods, and they're far less interesting. Not to mention its redstone leaves something to be desired.
As a last resort, they can use TLauncher...
I just left my account to die, can't even be bothered to try to convert it to MS. It's dead, Jim.
Meta/Facebook. Look how instagram, WhatsApp, and oculus are doing. Even the stuff they ended up abandoning they cleaned up and open sourced (like Parse)
They helped to divide society / politics and are a cesspool for conspiracy theories but hey they open sourced some stuff.
Maybe not in the US, or in your bubble, but a lot of people still use FB to connect with friends and family, or their groups of interest. Many more use it for the marketplace, to sell and buy things. For them FB is an indispensable venue.
As for helping divide society/ politics, have you paid attention to HN front page the last few days? Wave and wave of OpenAI posts, with huge amount of ignorant, uninformed, speculative, conspiracy driven, repetitive, divisive comments that got endlessly upvoted and promoted. That reflects who the HN audience is and what we are interested in. You may say that HN also helps divide society/politics. Yet you, and I, are still here.
Ironically...
Yeah. They have done a better-than-most job of trying to default to open (for all of their other failings)
They're doing well, but at least Instagram and WhatsApp are much worse for the end user than they were pre-acquisition. To the point where I've stopped using Instagram, and have moved as many of my chats off WhatsApp as I could.
Meta really doesn't get enough credit for their open source contributions and stewardship of important tech. Of course there are very real criticisms of Facebook and their engagement strategies and such, but LLaMa has been incredible, on top of things like React of course.
HPE?
They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall.
Sadly, I have wasted many hours reading HP-UX documentation, and also hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions.
They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall.
I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required me to have a rolodex full of engineers all over the world. A tremendous amount of troubleshooting was just looking up who had committed code, then tracking them down when something blew up.
They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box
hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?
most people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox.
The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes.
The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface.
it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem.
That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for.
It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks).
As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
QEMU/libvirt can live migrate VMs without downtime. It works the same way.
Yep, happily using https://ganeti.org/ and KVM live migrations - mirrors across hosts.
can you speak to how that is vs the gui web interface goodness of proxmox? I'm interested in playign with ganeti but all the youtube walkthroughs that would motivate me more are super outdated and the website doesn't really sell the product very well.
VMware was doing live migration since 2002. Open source reimplantations are relatively recent.
vsan... a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is absolute nonsense.
vSAN pricing is all about what the sales guy is willing to do to make the rest of the sale. It has zero marginal cost if they can get you on the platform and using their ecosystem of tools and software.
In edge deployments where rack space is tight it's actually a great solution if you only have a few U to work with and have a HA requirement for a legacy app as well.
Fair bit of that can be done with Proxmox now. What esxi has going for it from what I hear is the ability to deal with 100/1000s of hosts over many many nodes and Proxmox struggles with that
You might be surprised how much of this the free Proxmox, running Qemu on Debian, can do.
Memory and storage live migration across hosts and pools is possible with Xen too.
See VM.pool_migrate and VM.migrate_send https://xapi-project.github.io/xen-api/classes/vm.html. Those features got introduced in Xenserver 4.0 (2007) and 6.1 (2012).
Disclaimer: I work at XenServer.
good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks
Actually, no, they apparently won't, because I tried and was told they are discontinuing that product. They are going full steam on their OpenShift (k8s) product though, and will be happy to inform you that you can run a VM on that, but if you press them you'll find that you're actually running a VM in a container, and that you have to specify it as a k8s deployment, so apparently you can't just throw a VM up like you can in vCenter.
Nearly every company/public service/non-profit/whatever uses vSphere/ESX somewhere. You'd be (very) surprised to see where people shoehorn ESXi hosts. VMware is EVERYWHERE, and vSphere/ESX/NSX is still the best game in town if you want to virtualize your datacenter. It's insanely rock-solid tech.
Yep. Arguably if you have Windows licensing, Hyper-V will do mostly all the same stuff "for free", but only if you want your hypervisors to be exactly as reliable as Windows machines. If you're rolling VMware, your datacenter's backbone tends to be ridiculously solid.
Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.
That’s not actually different on the Windows side, you should update your priors. There are datacenters full of Server 2019 boxes that have never been upgraded because the guest VMs are mission critical.
Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.
I mean, I work with every version of Windows Server since 2012 R2 up through Server 2022 on a daily basis...
No you don’t. It’s ok, just take the L.
Agreed. I have 20+ Hyper-V Windows Server VMs running since 2017, seeing 400-600 Mbps live video traffic - no major crashes, only due to facility power loss or annual patching reboots.
I'm the other "pro Microsoft guy" here on HN, but I have to agree with the GP comment: VMware stability puts Microsoft to shame.
These days Windows is stable if you don't touch it.
VMware is stable even if one of the disks is out of space, the fibre is flapping, some idiot misconfigured the switches, and the whole cluster has time out of sync... by seven hours.
That's not hyperbole, that's an actual cluster that I got given to look after. It was running like that for months, perfectly fine, with VMware HA just "taking care of things".
If you sneeze in the direction of a Windows Failover Cluster it'll... fail.
As explained by others the parent comment is talking about ESXi, but to answer your question: virtualbox desktop hypervisor is the spam of desktop hypervisors.
Everyone has heard of it, it's theoretically comparable to the likes of VMware/Parallels desktop hypervisors, and it's cheaper. But just like spam (compared to ham), it's also obvious to anyone that's used both that it's by far the worse option, and there's very few reasons to use it besides cost, while there are numerous reasons to use one of the better alternatives.
In general, performance is significantly better with other hypervisors, but in particular shared filesystem performance (ie sharing a directory from the host OS into the guest) and features are lacking on virtualbox.
It's the default provider used by vagrant, and even the vagrant team recommend using a different provider for "any serious work".
One caution: SPAM isn't actually cheaper than ham, it's just shelf stable without refrigeration. You can get a decent spiral ham for well under $3.29/lb (Costco earlier today), but 12oz cans of SPAM work out to around $5/lb.
I don't know if it's just a demand thing or perhaps because I don't really know what "spiral ham" is, but in Australia the only ham you're likely to find cheaper per-kilo than spam is going to be a 2+ kg leg of ham, complete with bone, fat, skin, etc. A boneless ham will be at least as expensive, and sliced/shaved ham from the deli section at a supermarket will be easily more expensive per-kilo than spam.
Of course one could argue there's an even higher percentage of inedible parts in the canned monstrosity because it's all inedible, and I wouldn't argue that view point is wrong.
Edit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’
Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things.
Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
Virtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL. In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
It's ESXi, the server class stuff, not so much the desktop VMware. So many companies have been using it for years. Now Broadcom are wanting to install spyware to "track" usage and license compliance and they're raising prices. For a lot of orgs, it'll probably take several years to move the production systems to something else.
For the desktop, VirtualBox isn't much better. At one point after Oracle purchased it, they were tracking your IP and if they found you were using their extension pack that provides essential capabilities like USB 3 support (only the core of VirtualBox is GPL) and it was for commercial use, they were hitting you up for a license [0].
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...
Never heard of Broadcom. Are they like the private equity of tech? Kind of sounds like it.
Broadcom was essentially bought by a private equity firm who took the name as the name of the umbrella corporation.
Before that Broadcom was (and still is) one of the larger communication hardware companies, making chips for cell, wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and ARM SoCs, along with telecom and data center boxes that used these chips. You almost certainly have their hardware in some device you own. But they have always had difficulty competing with Qualcomm, arguably in part due to anticompetitive behavior from the later.
After the acquisition, they have been acquiring enterprise software companies to diversify, including CA Technologies (think Atlassian/Oracle of the mainframe world), Symantec, and now VMWare.
I had totally missed CA being bought by Broadcom.
Given that CA already had the reputation of "where software goes to die", this is ... bad news for VMWare. (I'd heard that description from many in the tech field, including from a CEO who's previous venture had been acquired by CA.)
I also hadn't realised that Broadcom itself had originated at HP.
Broadcom didn't originate at HP, it was an early 90's startup. What happened is that a private equity firm bought some parts of HP that had been spun off and then that company later bought Broadcom.
Wikipedia (with cites to a Google Books link):
The company that would later become Broadcom Inc. was established in 1961 as HP Associates, a semiconductor products division of Hewlett-Packard.[12]
The division separated from Hewlett-Packard as part of the Agilent Technologies spinoff in 1999.[8][13]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom>
Citing: <https://books.google.com/books?id=WAW5DwAAQBAJ&q=1961+broadc...>
Wow, I didn't know that. They even Computer Associated Computer Associates. That is like an exponential vortex of suck.
Maybe they absorbed a bit too much of CA culture.
You almost certainly have Broadcom in your pocket.
These bits absolutely traveled through a Broadcom NIC.
Some other bits were silently discarded by same Broadcom NIC, no particular reason given and no event wasn't registered
Much to the regret of anyone trying to manage them.
Cheap is nice, but I miss the days when chips did things you wanted.
As someone who worked on SP routers at Cisco - yes to the above.
The mostly specialise in network adapters and low-performance mobile chipsets - the cheaper Kindle tables and Fire TV boxes all ran on broadcom.
Broadcom is chip maker for Raspberry Pi, among many other things, that's the one most people here probably will recognize it for.
Broadcom is the reason there are a few hundred drivers for minor variations of the networking chipset in your laptop, each of them incompatible with all of the others.
wikipedia has a great article on broadcom - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom
Its history goes back to the 1960's. It is a major semiconductor company that I would say, was part of the ecosystem that made computers and networks possible.
You haven't heard of them because they make too much of everything that makes the fabric of everyday computing.
It's like how you would never really know of the company who made the pipes for your toilet/plumbing.
Tbh I was really surprised how Workstation still got major updates after that news from 2ish years ago where they fired the whole team working on that and moved its development to India . It already seemed like they wanted to focus on the core business of ESX and switch workstation to maintenance mode, but no, we for example got major improvements in 3D pass-through, like Vulkan and d3d10/11 support.
Simple: there's devs in India who can code well and not every Western developer is an irreplaceable John Carmack so not every offshoring story ends badly.
Simple: there's devs in India who can code well
Sure, without a doubt, there are exellent devs to be found worldwide.
But let's face the reality ...
Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent.
They go outsourcing in India because they want to wield the axe on what they perceive as the expense of Western developers.
So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they !
Especially as a typical remuneration structure for senior management is that you are rewarded with a bonus based on the amount of cost-cutting you've achieved.
>So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they!
I beg to differ.
You're either ignorant or have no idea how many SW and HW you interact with regularly from big name companies, has been through the hands of skilled Indian or other offshore devs which while being cheaper than American devs, are in now way worse programmers, sometimes the opposite.
You seem to equate pay only with talent and skill, but that's rarely the case. Lower paid international devs aren't necessarily worse than their American counterparts and well paid American devs aren't always better than international talent.
Your pay is more a function of opportunities and supply/demand in your area rather then purely on your own skills. Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
For the record, I don't buy the whole "America is best thing" and I most certainly don't have a dog in the whole patriotic-flag-waving-bs fight either. And yes, I've been on the receiving end of what would be politely described as "poor" US talent, so I'm acutely aware that not everything in the garden is rosy.
I am also not disputing that there is a proportion of companies out there who go to India for all the best reasons, a genuine quest for talent.
But sadly, I think we have to accept the reality that such companies are very much in the minority. The reality, sadly, is that the majority of companies who outsource to India only do so for one reason. Aggressive cost-cutting.
>The reality, sadly, is that the majority of companies who outsource to India only do so for one reason. Aggressive cost-cutting.
Of course companies will optimize for the best bang for the buck labor the same way you optimize for the best bang for the buck products when you shop for something, that's how capitalism works, it's a two way street.
Now if the move to India, or anywhere else, lowers the development cost without lowering the product quality, why is that a problem?
I would understand this being an issue when offshoring causes the quality of the product to go to shit, but it often isn't the case anymore, so what's then problem here?
Unless of course you mean the problem is "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" which would be understandable but like I said, capitalism is a two way street.
Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
Supply and demand. American companies needed "developers, developers, developers", and when the supply is very finite and at the same time the investment markets were flush with "dumb money" that begs for at least a pittance of ROI, so in the end they ended up in bidding wars.
So now when a developer from <insert poor country here> enters the US labor market, their market value increases simply because they are now adding to the supply side of the US labor market - them being in the US is the factor.
That was a rhetorical question. The explanation you gave was the correct one but it wasn't nectary since it was obvious and self-suggested from my rant.
First of all, what traceroute66 replied. Just like China is able to manufacture high quality products.
Also, you're making it sound like the devs can do whatever they want and happened to deliver cool new features. As said, back then everything hinted at them just switching Workstation to maintenance mode and letting it slowly fade into irrelevance, so it wouldn't have mattered how brilliant that new team was.
Yup. Broadcom is the CA of our era.
Yes, and they even bought CA.
CA = Computer Associates for the youngsters.
Thank you!
Literally, since they acquired them.
Oh God... that's what the CA in CA Spectrum was?
One. NEW. CRITICAL. Alarm.
Weird I used to use broadcom chips decades ago. My new job uses Autosys - by Broadcom wtf?
IBM? Try EMC or Cisco. I ended up at the former by acquisition; many friends ended up at the second likewise. AFAICT they both have much worse records of turning acquisitions into abandonware than IBM does (not that IBM's is great). Oracle and Microsoft have already been mentioned, but Intel deserves a place on that horrible list too. Tech has been full of such fat and lazy predators for a long time.
EMC already had their go at VMware ;)
Another perfect example of a large company acquiring and killing the support and the product is Intuit"s acquisition of Tsheets.
And more recently the working progress which is Intuit's acquisition of MailChimp.
Cisco has done well with Meraki and Duo, no?
100%. I still have contacts from when I worked there, and It's worse than feared. Everything is on fire and all the best engineering/support talent has either left or is leaving. Broadcom is not only raising prices, but is set to deliver considerably worse products. It makes me sad, because it was once an incredible place to work. Now I recommend that people avoid them like the plague.
Incredible place to work or not, I recall at least as far back as 2004 they were terrible from a B2B support standpoint. Impossible to get help with buggy drivers, everything opaque and poorly documented.
And don't get me started on trying to get their chipsets working on Linux. Up until recently, it was nearly as bad as nvidia's garbage. Even now, I'm not sure if everything is well supported; I've avoided BRCM wifi like the plague for years now.
I think the commenter may have been referring to VMWare rather than Broadcom.
This is indeed sad. VMware was some of the best at one point. In my opinion, it still sort of is.
Pretty much this. I wish proxmox would get off their butts and release a better management setup to deal with multisite, as I would love to complete the move to their product for our last remaining vmware systems.
Maybe, Broadcom's strategy is 'to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box'. Broadcom spent $69B to acquire VMWare. They just need to squeeze blood for another 10 years.
VMware's revenue for 2022 is $13B, and net income about $1.8B. Trim sales department, remove duplication(HR, IT, etc), cut down development, remove many make-work projects that the middle management engages in, increase licensing/support cost. They will focus more on net income, financing costs for $69B will be taken care of by layoffs and other stuff.
They also acquired Symantec. When you think a product can't get any worse..
They have actually been pretty open that this is the plan. And all the secondary products and small customers can wither away even faster.
Proxmox and XCP-NG are well placed to take their customers and gradually add any missing functionality. Although neither have feature parity with VMWare they are adding new things all the time and are very responsive to their respective communities. XCP-NG even has a VMWare to XCP migration tool built in. However, in my experience using both I would avoid Proxmox specifically if your workloads include heavy SQL Server / Exchange usage. The bug in question affects all KVM based solutions.
Yeah, I was only ever a ‘casual’ ESXi user (we only ever had a couple of hosts and two dozen or so VMs, and nothing super mission critical), and I’m amazed at how good Proxmox is now we’ve started using it instead of ESXi given the Broadcom acquisition.
Obviously if you’re running dozens of hosts and thousands of VMs, needing live migration and things like that, then it’d probably be missing a lot of features you’d want, but for smaller stuff it’s pretty crazy how well it works.
Live migration works very well on both local and shared storage. Both products also have a hyperconverged solution if you like that sort of thing.
It live migrates fine. Done it many times to upgrade cluster nodes, moving live VMs back and forth.
I don’t see MS having any interest in VMware. They have their own virtualization tech already and it would only cannibalize Azure, which seems to be pretty much were their money is now.
While I agree Microsoft probably doesn’t want to buy VMware, they absolutely have a pretty strong “hybrid cloud” solution, which basically means running an Azure hypervisor on your on-prem servers.
Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up.
Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!
Yeah that's kind of what I was about (though probably not worded very well). For the on-prem virtualization use cases they are interested in, they already have the necessary technology with Hyper-V.
I actually thought that vSphere offers some stuff in the hyperconverged area that Hyper-V doesn't, this is where I could see it competing with Azure. However it seems Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct seems to be pretty much on par, at least on paper.
So there's even less reasons why MS would be interested in VMware. Only maybe to get rid of a competitor.
Like the village bicycle - everyone has taken it for a ride.
Hey, she has a name!
They're picking up the pieces for 69 billion. Your analysis makes it sound like VMWare is falling apart. Going by price it suggests it is going from strength to strength no?
That price is a reflection of future financial potential, not of commercial success. Very few people would pick VMWare for new stuff today unless it is a large on-prem installation (and there are still plenty of those). But they are past their peak and the bulk of recovering that will come from existing customers, not from new ones. You lock yourself in to anything related to Broadcom at your peril.
There’s a market out there for a very well designed turn key cloud with things like managed Kubernetes and Postgres you can deploy on bare metal or cheap VPSes. Too bad they aren’t looking at that. They have plenty of expertise and some of the software pieces already developed.
I bet the problem is that they are too “enterprise” and couldn’t price it low enough. If it were too expensive it wouldn’t be competitive with big cloud managed offerings.
VMware does have managed kubernetes
and each subsequent owner stripmines the company for the IP (patents) they desire.
Not to mention Pivotal interwoven into that story
It’s impressive how they’ve effective paid 81 billion for vmware, arguably making it the largest tech acquisition in history.
Says something about value vs evaluation?
We are already seeing the squeeze from this. We have recently been informed they are dropping their academic list pricing entirely, which will cause many institutions to pay double or even triple what they do now. As a result, several major universities (specifically the Big Ten but I'm sure many others are as well) are looking into alternatives to reduce license costs ahead of next year's contract negotiations.
Source: Someone higher up in my department.
Even by the standards of blind corp greed, that's a bad move - you want people to know your platform when they're done studying, so they can advocate for it in their jobs. Why would you destroy this revenue stream? Unless they have no longterm vision for VMware and just want to bleed it dry as quickly as possible.
Broadcom looks at Orcale and says "Can I have some of that business model please"...
They exist on legacy vendor lockin, and will milk customers until there is nothing left, which will take decades or more
But to me, Oracle is the canonical example of getting nerds while they're young.
In university, I had access to Oracle databases, Oracle manuals, Oracle Linux, etc. Not through some special university approved lab set up - I could just go and download them. Even their acquired software like PeopleSoft etc.
I had NONE of that for DB2 or AIX, for example.
And their respective market share, I believe based on no evidence but strong belief, belies that strategy.
(disclaimer, I guess - I work for IBM, but ironically as an Oracle consultant... the early access really did work :-)
Many people have talked about this...
People do know that oracle has ALOT more software then their DB right?
I mean their DB is the least vendor lockin thing they sell.....
Yes, as I said, I spent much of my life around oracle products. Most are freely downloadable for non production purposes.
Any student can download and use Oracle DBs and most other products for free legally right from Oracle's sites. This suggests that even Oracle understands how important this pipeline is.
This is different. Most student won't be exposed to datacenter management. It's really just system administrators who see this.
VMware is literally taught in schools. My college has a two course program in it.
That’s still entirely independent of what the school’s mainframes run on.
Yeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.
And it’s entirely plausible they make enough money from that to buy the next VMware in another decade or so to repeat the cycle. Sustainable bottom feeding as a strategy.
I always thought of Sun as the canonical example of this… why did all the dotcom era startups burn so much cash on Sun hardware? Because that’s what was in the Universities!
But on the other hand, look at how that turned out :(
you want people to know your platform when they're done studying, so they can advocate for it in their jobs. Why would you destroy this revenue stream?
That was how Adobe ran for a looooong time, up until and including CS6. They didn't give a f..k about piracy beyond something that could trivially be circumvented by a keygen and a few well-placed /etc/hosts entries, and that was what made them the utterly dominant power in anything creative - people were used to years of working with Photoshop (a friend of mine started with photography at age 13!), and so they demanded from employers that they use Photoshop. Incidentally, that also was what kept Apple afloat before the iPod/iPhone days - Adobe stuff just worked fine on Apple hardware but was a nightmare on Windows, so people also demanded Macs for their work.
The advent of CC came once Adobe had achieved that lock-in and started milking its customers for all they were worth, and additionally they opened up a load of legitimate customers as well who didn't feel like dropping a few grand on Adobe stuff but who cares about 50$ a month?
So ... for the corp/academic crowd, what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?
I don't understand orgs that deal with companies with a loooooonnnnnngggggg history of predatory pricing and sales shenanigans and not have active mitigation plans.
Who has Oracle that isn't actively planning going to Postgres or MariaDB? Of course I'd say the same thing for IBM in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1990s, and AWS today.
VMWare obviously has a lot of the same.
VirtualBox is also Oracle, which is why I switched to KVM/QEMU. But I'm also not an Enterprise user.
VirtualBox just straight up isn't reliable enough for any production situation. You never know how it'll break, and the support front release to release is unpredictable and overall sucks Cindy Stankey balls.
Does virtualbox have an equivalent to VCSA? Can I failover a datacenter with it?
virtualbox is pretty capable but I only view it as equivalent to vmware workstation.
No, you can't failover a datacenter with VirtualBox.
what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?
For my specific use case, it's display responsiveness.
My main work machine is a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3. Our development environment is Ubuntu, so when I got the machine our IT guy had helpfully installed Ubuntu on it.
There were two major problems though. I could only get my AirPods to pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone. And worse, I couldn't get my triple-monitor setup to work at all. (The ThinkPad has a 15" 4K display, and I use two 24" 4K displays with it: one in landscape mode immediately above the ThinkPad display, another in portrait mode to the left.) I could only get two displays out of the three to come up.
I did like the hardware quite a lot - I've been a huge ThinkPad fan for 25 years. So I immediately bought a similar machine for personal use. It came with Windows, and both of the above items worked "out of the box".
So I looked at the bottom of the work machine and saw that it came with a Windows license. I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Lenovo and installed Windows on it, figuring I would run Ubuntu in a VM.
I tried VirtualBox first, and it worked, but the display wasn't smooth. For example, I often use the Windows key + left/right arrow to move a window to one side of the display or the other. Ubuntu does a "sliding" animation when you do this, but it looked like it was only refreshing the display every tenth of a second or so.
So I tried VMware and it was perfect. The display is just about as responsive as running Ubuntu on the bare metal - every transition and animation is perfectly smooth.
I've had a similar experience.
VMWare Workstation (desktop edition) is faster and more polished than VirtualBox.
I'd like to try it all on top of ProxMox one day.
VirutalBox is a barebones type 2 hypervisor with only basic orchestration, backup, networking, management features, if any.
ESXi and the VMWare products built on top of it (vCenter/vSphere) are not even comparable to VB, other than that they both can run virtual machines. vSphere can move running VMs between storage or compute hosts without interruption, can failover between storage or compute, can failover between networking outages (thanks to virtual switches and the ecosystem of hardware support around it), and provides a platform for additional third party add ons for automated backups and recovery. Not to mention easy role based SSO access. My entire university's infrastructure was virtualized on VMWare aside from a few domain controllers and the Netapp storage clusters it all ran on, and the equally large Linux/KVM infrastructure and the HPC datacenter that ran a bunch of other stuff for...reasons (higher ed is fun). And as an added bonus, desktop type 2 hypervisors like Workstation or Fusion integrate perfectly into it. I used to manage a dozen Windows and Linux VMs straight from VMWare Fusion on my Mac and still do at home in my little VMUG cluster.
It's like comparing a Chevy Spark to an aircraft carrier, except you built an entire medium to large sized organization's infrastructure on top of it. You can't just switch overnight unless you want to stop making money for a while. For most orgs who can justify the already steep price, moving away from VMWare onto something else will mean multiple years long projects requiring thousands of person-hours to complete, redundant efforts (as the old stuff can't just go away until the new stuff is battle tested), on top of probable hardware purchases since VMWare and its demands have shaped on-site datacenter spend, layout, and networking for years.
The actual VMs are the easiest part to move since they are just some virtual disks and a config file. It's all the other supporting stuff and high availability that need to configured and battle tested that will take forever. It's not something you can plan to do ahead of needing to do it because doing so would mean doing the same job twice for years for a bet that you can't just weather some higher costs for a year or two before you can move stuff onto cheaper platforms (and train/hire for expertise).
Servers and enterprise.
Can you create a High availability cluster that does automatic failover with virtual box?
VMware Workstation has much better USB support (especially USB NIC support) than VirtualBox.
It's also licensable individually. If you want to use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business environment, you need to buy a per-user license. It's only $40, but Oracle has a minimum order quantity of 100, so you're spending at least $4000.[1] i.e. in a business, for about 20-30 users, VMware Workstation is cheaper.
[1] https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=dstore:product:257141221156...
First, VirtualBox is an Oracle product, so I'm not sure which side you're advocating :)
More to the point, I think VirtualBox is the equivalent, broadly, of VMWare Workstation/VMWare Player; which is a specific individual product that runs on desktop as type 2 hypervisor and a teeny tiny bit of the broader VMWare ecosystem (probably neglible part of their revenue).
I don't know if VirtualBox has any product or share in server/datacentre space? Whereas, VMware is absolutely positively huge. The core ESXi product, sure; but again the ecosystem around it, from vSPhere/vCenter to vRealize and Orchestrator and nsx and vSan and everything else, the management and automation flows are pretty well integrated (externally; I'm sure it's a acquired/developed mess internally as every other IT product ever:).
It's a bit like... I don't know, "what does Window Explorer have that File Commander doesn't"? It's a valid question that has a rational answer which is useful for limited use cases, but it misses the very very big forest (Windows and Office and Azure etc) for very minor trees inside of it
Hope that helps a bit?
VMware is notorious for continuously changing SKUs and licensing models to make things more expensive. I would suspect that Broadcom will continue putting the squeeze on customers. If hyper-V (or whatever it's named now) was a viable alternative, I suspect you'd see tons of folks fleeing VMware.
Azure runs on basically hyper-v I hear (which would make sense, right?), so it can't be that bad?
HyperV is fine for the basic stuff, but it's missing a lot of the other stuff that makes ESX so appealing (no direct vSAN or NSX equivalents, and you _need_ Windows to run Hyper-V vs ESX supporting liveboot on USB or CD). Also, I think ESX VMs are way faster than HyperV ones, but it's been a few years.
Isn't Storage Spaces Direct an equivalent to vSan?
Storage Spaces Direct is a sure plan to have data loss. Such a piece of %#(
HyperV has been overlooked by Microsoft for awhile in favor of Azure. You can get a basic HyperV host up and running pretty easily (even for free with the Core edition), but I would not call it great. My experience with HyperV is not a pleasant one as it struggles a lot and the error messages are often extremely cryptic. Similarly, there are some pretty outstanding bugs that existed for years that Microsoft didn't bother to fix -- for example, since HyperV 2019, there has been an impactful RCT bug† that can be triggered if you upgraded your HyperV hosts in a specific path (2016-2019) and any backup solution used HyperV's RCT. The result of the bug is extremely poor performance on any VM using RCT. Supposedly there was a patch last or this month that addressed it, but I've not heard any positive news from clients about this patch. Nevermind that Windows updates have frequently broken core HyperV functionality (as recent as December 2022 there were bugs where you couldn't start Virtual Machines or even create new ones due to bad Windows updates)
From my perspective, Microsoft doesn't want to deal with HyperV anymore, they want your machines up on Azure. I'd actively advise against HyperV simply because I don't see that Microsoft cares about on-premises.
† RCT == Changed Block Tracking for HyperV, basically faster backups by allowing the backup application to know exactly which blocks of the virtual disks have changed since the last backup and the backup application can do fast incrementals via this means.
Azure runs on a modified HyperV, right? Or are you saying they are using some other hypervisor there?
it does but i cannot tell why the azure performance is so different than on premises hyperv. i simply don’t know but the issues i’m describing here afaik did not affect azure instances. i do not know why but i thjnk it means there is a difference between on premises hyperv and azure hyperv or they do something to ensure the same issues don’t affect azure instances
but i simply don’t know why there is a difference
edit: if you search “hyperv rct bug” you will find forum posts fasts showing the timeline of this issue lasting years and many clients complaining that microsoft would not even acknowledge the issue publicly (or even in ms support cases) until very very recently
There's bad tech, there's bad user/admin experience, and there's bad licensing/costs. They might just mean that ex. the costs are awful, which I expect Azure wouldn't care about. (Disclaimer: I haven't used hyper-v, I don't know if any of these apply)
Well there’s a difference between a hypervisor and the infrastructure around it - even if they use the same hypervisor, it’s very likely that the rest of the system is completely different.
Migrate to proxmox.. it’s great
or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.
How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?
I'm sure that SmartOS is great, but being based on Illumos, I'd be hesitant to switch. Illumos doesn't have the most expansive community or hardware support as far as I know.
How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?
By doing on-prem private installation of it [0]. Support contract is not necessary. We run illumos on HPe hardware from Gen6 to Gen10 and there are no issues. Even have GPU compute going via passthrough to ubuntu bhyve HVM.
Now this is very interesting and I'm excited to read up on it. Thanks for the link!
How does it compare to Proxmox, if you don't mind? Both seem to have distributed VM and storage and VM/CT support, software network support... if Triton has better SDN I may be interested in it.
I remember taking a quick hobbyist look at JoyentOS or something like that about five years ago, but I thought the project died... I'm shocked to hear it's still alive.
Without knowing almost anything about it, I run Proximo on a box at home.
Is it at all comparable to ESX?
I kind of assumed the Proxmox was just the free and cheap and bare bones option.
In terms of features, they match on the simple / broad features. When it comes to scale, reliability, defined compatibility, and supporting tools that is a big no.
I have worked on VMWare stack in previous jobs. but I run proxmox at home now.
Free ESXi without VMware tools is somewhat harder actually. Still far better reliability.
XCP-NG
i thought i heard kvm was winning, is there still a good reason to go with xen?
The tooling is really mature. Amazon used xen for ages. kvm wins for hardware passthrough and performance, but if your willing to sacrifice a little performance the advanced admin features are competitive.
XCP-NG + Xen Orchestra is a winning combo. If I had a large VM infra, that's the stack I would select. All open source too!
All are good choices.
or proxmox
I think it's a pretty smart move. Educational institutions don't have the engineering capacity to change their datacenters overnight. They'll be paying the higher fees for years to come.
We certainly dont. Though half our infra was already on Hyper-V anyway. Lets hope MSFT is watching and wants to put effort into HVS.
I'm in the process of trying to convert to openstack at my university. but so far its been slow going. I've got a few smaller clusters online currently running it
They're pulling entirely out of some countries, too, so here in New Zealand they're apparently going to send comms on the 27th, have a seven day 'consultation' and then probably give everyone the date they don't have a job.
What is the enterprise virtualization alternative?
Is everyone on Hyper V already? Does Citrix still exist?
Are SuSE or Red Hat offering an 'open source' alternative? Surely people aren't using Proxmox in production?
OpenStack was all the rage some years ago, but I rarely hear about it these days. It does seem like a mature, viable option.
You never hear about it because it’s mostly dead.
Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there and mostly it just is useful to provide some negotiating leverage when talking to your VMware rep.
OVH uses OpenStack to power a large a amount of it's offering afaict, and they're a pretty large provider
OVH uses OpenStack to power a large a amount of it's offering afaict,
YMMV, but I think one of the main drivers of OpenStack is that it can be modified, because it's open source.
IE, if you're Verizon / AT&T / T-Mobile, it's valuable to be able to modify the product to suit your needs. I did some work on an OpenStack project a couple of years ago where the client wanted to leverage some hardware that was absolutely cutting edge. Literally so new, that engineers from the hardware vendor were involved in tweaking and optimizing things.
Try doing that with VMWare; it's impossible. With OpenStack, there's nothing stopping you from modding the product to suit your needs.
Obviously, this works particularly well if you're running hundreds or thousands of servers and you can justify the investment. If I were only running a few dozen VMs, OpenStack is probably overkill.
You never hear about it because it’s mostly dead.
Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there
I've been doing OpenStack continuously for 10+ years, and it's never been more popular than today.
It's bizarre how people think it's dead.
The biggest difference between OpenStack in 2013 and OpenStack in 2023 is that in 2013 there were a dozen different vendors promoting it, and in 2023 it's basically Canonical and RedHat.
The CEO of Canonical wrote an editorial years ago, basically arguing that the implosion that happened in 2017-ish, when Cisco/VMWare/HPE/Pistoncloud/etc threw in the towel would be good for OpenStack. And I think that was true.
It's very similar to what happened to Linux, remember how there was a period where there were 20+ distros vying for supremacy?
It's bizarre how people think it's dead.
Lots of reasons:
- the Python 2-3 migration clusterfuck (which is when I got to play around with it) burned a lot of people
- the learning curve just to get it set up and running is absolutely and horribly insane. It's understandable given its history of being open-source and because of that loved by universities who could shoehorn their existing crap infrastructure/hardware/designs into it. But that makes setting it up very very tedious and annoying, because there's countless options in the depths of its configuration files that you all need to go over so you don't miss anything.
- related: the effort required to set up clusters is soooo much higher for OpenStack vs VMware. VMware ESXi? A day or two, including racking and wiring, and I got something to show to my boss. OpenStack? Talk about three weeks until the myriad of its services are running without crashing under your feet twice an hour. Been there, done that, for both.
- the amount of people and skillsets you need to keep an OpenStack production cluster alive are, I'd say, double the headcount required for the usual VMware+Cisco+Netapp "standard" environment.
- there's barely any commercial support for OpenStack. And that's not "just" the usual vendor support side, but also the management side... finding freelancers or staff that has experience with VMware+Cisco+Netapp is easy, there's tons of people and MSPs with certifications on the market, but for OpenStack? Whoops.
Basically, even a small shop can't go wrong with a basic VMware setup, but OpenStack just doesn't make financial sense unless you're either an university (where you can hand over parts of the ops and support to students, and that has large enough demand for homegrown QEMU-KVM libvirt setups just being Not Enough anymore) or a huge institution (ISP, hosting provider, telco, large multinational megacorp) that wants to save the fuckton of money to VMware for licenses and has enough scale that the headcount for ops staff + Python developers is cheaper than VMware licenses.
What also killed a lot of demand for OpenStack (and a lot of other on-prem) was the general availability of reasonably-good-enough cloud providers. Why invest into an OpenStack environment and all the effort associated, when you can just rent servers on AWS?
> Does Citrix still exist
Yes, https://www.xenserver.com/ and French OSS derivative https://xcp-ng.org
Citrix is now a private company run by former Broadcom head of software who negotiated VMware acquisition, https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/citrix-tibco-new-ceo-tom-krau...
Xenserver is not part of Citrix anymore. It is a sibling business unit, part of its parent company Cloud Software Group. See https://cloud.com and https://www.xenserver.com/story
Disclaimer: I work here
Keep the eyes open on https://oxide.computer/ - they are building hyperscalar racks with open source components. Using bhyve as the hypervisor, API as a first class citizen, Terraform/Opentofu, live-migration. Can't wish for much more
Why... bhyve, there's 0 advantages to kvm.
Red Hat has/had Red Hat Virtualization but has transitioned that to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as a successor. I think RHV is set to phase out in 2026, and I'm not sure if they're currently selling new subs or just servicing existing customers with other folks pointed to RHOV.
The oVirt community's most recent release is from last December, so I'm not sure whether that project is going to thrive now that Red Hat has largely stepped away. (Last blog update is also December 2022.)
RHV is dead, they're trying to move people over to (the much more expensive) OpenShift. Support for it has gotten predictably worse.
I don't expect Ovirt to survive, the vast majority of development was RH.
"The market" seems to "deciding" that in-house virtualization will be insanely expensive, and otherwise you need to rent OCP.
Surely people aren't using Proxmox in production?
Lot's do, e.g., the Austrian domain registry:
https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/stories/story/nic-at
And many others (albeit the big ones aren't listed there, a bit harder to get real testimonials from them, and we do not pester everybody):
Hyper-V server is killed by Microsoft, though you can of course install Windows Server in Core mode and install the Hypervisor component.
XCP-NG + Xen Orchestra is a solid combo. XCP-NG is based on Xen.
Hyper-V isn't dead by any means, however I would have a very difficult time recommending it in a greenfield environment. Microsoft's focus is clearly not A) Windows Server and B) Hyper-V.
Red Hat used to offer Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) - based on oVirt - but they killed that at approximately the same time this VMware deal was announced (supposedly coincidentally).
Now they bolted on virtual machines onto their OpenShift container platform and are pushing that.
RedHat and a couple other companies will sell you OpenStack clusters, up to a certain size.
Containers containers containers ;)
In all seriousness, I think it is a hot topic in Enterprise Architecture (tm) meeting rooms ever since the merger was announced (I know it was in ours). But even if you find an alternative, you need to move, and a lot of companies have a lot of hard to modernize workloads which are skillfully managed by a lot of VMware trained personnel. No easy task.
Hyper-V as most people actually use it is more like single-host VMware ESXi.
VMware's true magic is with vCenter. While Microsoft has an equivalent to that (SC VMM), nobody seems to use it because it is virtually unusable. I've never seen a successful production cluster of VMM running.
My picks would be - Proxmox 8 if you predominately run Linux workloads - XCP-NG + XOA - XenServer
OpenNebula is what my current employer is looking at for our next move.
Everyone's VMWare licenses are gonna go up so much it'll be hilarious. I wonder if any large shops will jump ship to something else, but to what is the question.
RedHat / IBM had a huge opening to take some of this market share... but then for some inexplicable nonsensical move (common with IBM owned Redhat to be honest) they made the choice to just exit the Onprem Hypervisor space to focus on "Cloud".
I know a few organizations and vendors (like Veeam) were looking to RHV to be a good replacement, the announcement to discontinue the product seems to catch everyone by surprise.
I am still hoping Veeam will add support for a good 3rd option, proxmox, XCP, direct KVM, something...
Red Hat didn't exit, they moved from RHEV to OpenShift Virt. Now it's kubernetes scheduling KVM VMs instead of ovirt-engine scheduling KVM VMs.
I can't imagine anyone would pay for such a thing. It's a product without a market. People want the VMWare experience, Red Hat just refuses to build it.
Red Hat built it in RHEV (or rather, bought it from Qumranet and rebuilt the .net in JBoss), but struggled in the market. They had an arguably better product than VMware, and better pricing, but VMware customers were hard to move, and Microsoft priced Hyper-V for Windows guests at cheaper than free.
>>but VMware customers were hard to move
were being the key phrase. Timing is everything, they Announced they were shutting down RHEV. AFTER broadcom announced they were buying vmware, seems like a terrible move in that light given that many vmware customers will be looking for a replacement in the next couple of renewal cycles.
As a former potential RHEV customer, we had been warned about it 3 years ago by RH themselves. It is not like it was a huge secret and the decision was made a long time before broadcom's announcement.
Maybe has customers but it did not seem to be widespread knowledge outside, if it was known for year widely then I can not image why Veeam would have devoted developer time to support a product that announced its EOL just a few months after they released their support for it.
Seems odd.
Virtualization is a multi-billion dollar market. Even if you're a distant #2, it should be financially viable. The reality was, it was an awful product that nobody wanted. It could be free and it's worse than rolling your own solution directly on top of libvirt.
Sorry, nothing Red Hat built was ever better than VMWare in the virtualization space. They never built a cohesive product experience, they could not get out of their own way.
Yes, this. I generally quite like RH stuff but RHEV was nowhere near VMware. I think it was the right move to shut it down and push Openshift VMs for hybrid workloads.
OpenShift Virt is not RHEV with K8s add, it is a completely different thing, and running Traditional VM workloads on it is troublesome.
I have no use for kubernetes, I will never use kubernetes, I do not want kubernetes anywhere near me.
Most vmware customers I suspect have the same feelings
I have no use for kubernetes, I will never use kubernetes, I do not want kubernetes anywhere near me.
I never got this religious approach to tech when it comes to work. I have my preferences but ultimately I'll do whatever pays well.
Set up a VM based workflow and it can run fairly well with minimal intervention for years.
Set up a k8s deployment and you're fiddling with deprecated APIs every couple months - if you don't pay close attention the whole deployment spec falls apart within two years.
The VM stuff works for the majority of companies - you can even sprinkle containers in fairly easily.
It's still a massive if mature market that needs some attention and care, it's a shame it's going to get squeezed and abused by broadcom.
If Nutanix were smart, they'd decouple the hypervisor from their garbage storage layer and make hay. But they won't... too much pride to swallow that pill.
I'll never forgive Nutanix for murdering EdgeFS. I have not used any of their products, and hopefully never will.
EdgeFS was pretty much a direct ripoff of multiple open-source projects, including one I worked on, so I'm not going to shed a tear for them. IIRC they even cribbed some of the material for manuals.
multiple open-source projects
interesting, which ones?
The on-prem VMWare enthusiasts who've been warning for decades about vendor lock-in on the cloud are perhaps about to gain some new perspective.
I can't say any names but one very large shop is already jumping. But the jump is chaotic and poorly executed.
What are the alternatives?
Does anyone knows good alternative with GPU passthrough for homelab? Hyper-V is not going to fly since it won't do passthrough on consumer windows. Also not proxmox.
Is there anything wrong with ESXi?
they do not allow you to use more than 8 cores for VM for example
Not unless you get a basic VSphere Essentials for 3 hosts. $500 I know, but you get it once, use it with 3 servers, and control it all from one portal. Moving Vms is super easy with Vsphere too. Of course, you get unlimited cores with it.
Xen and KVM will both do this iirc. Requires a bit of work to make it work though.
To add on this when considering what to use: You first want to decide if you want full virtualization (KVM/QEMU) or paravirtualization (Xen).
Then you will probably use some operations layer on top of that (e.g. QubesOS and XCP-NG are only Xen; Proxmox is only KVM/containers; libvirtd does both). Then based on that you pick your actual host OS (in case it's not already set).
I have GPU passthrough of the iGPU on a Ryzen 4000U working with kvm/qemu+libvirtd on an Alpine base. So the hypervisor runs headless (booting in blind mode) and the guest OS takes over the iGPU entirely. The caveats are explained in that arch Wiki article, IIRC. I think the least obvious part for me was sourcing and loading of the microcode/firmware.
Also had success with hybrid graphics (Ryzen APU + AMD RX GPU with one passed through and one on host) on an otherwise similar hypervisor setup on Arch BTW.
Even more so than usual, the more recent and obscure your hardware, the higher chance you'll get to compare different kernel versions, incant random undocumented parameters you found in some forum comment, or even reach for out-of-tree patches to get running smoothly.
Why is this comment being down-voted?
XCP-ng (OSS subset of Citrix Hypervisor, both based on Xen). As always, requires GPU and BIOS which supports IOMMU passthrough.
Small nitpick: Next version of Citrix Hypervisor is now called Xenserver again, see https://www.xenserver.com/story
Disclaimer: I work here
Why not ProxMox?
Between Xen, KVM, BHyve, Hyper-V, the use cases for VMware vanished well over a decade ago. They'll bleed out their remaining customers until there is no one left.
What's a good solution for regular users trying to run a Linux VM on Windows? Looks like Hyper-V doesn't have great hardware acceleration support.
is WSL2 with GPU acceleration not an option?
Honesr questions, is WSL intended to run a full desktop environment, and does it still require workarounds to get systemd working?
WSL2 supports systemd out of the box for some time now. By default it is turned off.
In WSL2 you can run GUI applications as well.
Right, but "running GUI applications" isn't the only goal, I want to run a full desktop environment, in full screen.
I don’t think WSl is the choice of tool then.
In my case it wouldn’t be because I use VMWare Player to keep work stuff separate on my personal laptop. If I ever need to, I can just delete the VM and know that 100% of all work stuff has been removed.
Did China give the go ahead?
Why would an American company need China's go-ahead to acquire another American company's American subsidiary?
Because they do business in China?
But yes, they have got it..
Wouldn't be shocked if this is part of a deal Xi and Biden made.
That is almost a certainty. That, or it was more likely done one or two tiers down during the APEC conference.
I think this also has something to do with the whole OpenAI debacle
but I can only guess....
See also Intel and Tower Semi
Yes according to the press release yesterday, didnt give any details.
The only reason I'm sticking with VMware ESXi is because of Veeam, it's like the only solidly working piece of backup software for VMs. Otherwise I wouldn't doubt to go with Proxmox.
Proxmox seems to be working great, including backups
Built in backups that work are a big reason I ended up on Proxmox at home.
Are you talking about using it AIO? It seems preferable to me in general to have VMs live on external storage like a NAS. Proxmox, KVM, Xen and I assume everything else all support using iSCSI at least. Then your storage layer can focus on that and handle all the backing up, data integrity etc itself. I guess that does raise cost for the same performance vs a single box so it'll depend on budget/needs, but it's getting pretty affordable with a bit of shopping to do some serious storage devices these days.
I hated Veeam because of the slowness and difficulty of live snapshots. We purchase synology nas solutions and even use the nas for host redundancy. Works perfectly and super fast. Also, get C2 from Synology to backup your vms on the cloud.
Proxmox Backup Server is rock solid in the 2 years I've used it. It does a great job of dedup keeping hundreds of backup points as space efficient as you could hope for. And file restores or full VM restores are painless.
I've even used the Linux client to virtualize physical boxes.
Doesn't Proxmox have a builtin backup? You could also use Hyper-V with Veeam.
Since KVM already exists, who would renew their ESXi licenses?
Broadcom would surely rise license costs while at the same time disinvesting.
Also, what will happen with VMWare’s Kubernetes investments? I am guessing all of their open source work will cease to exist?
For proper business infrastructure. We are using VSphere for all our clients and it works very well. We can't really deal with half-baked solutions which never translate to the corporate environment.
kvm/libvirt are the industry standard solutions for enterprise linux based distros, and I know for a fact, that multiple mega-corps use it at scale. Pretty much anything Linux based is going to have the best support path in 2023 vs. something made by a company that's being sold over and over again.
SMB do not use Linux. Business owners do not even know what Linux is. In the real world, Linux is nonexistent. Business software runs on Windows.
There may be other hypervisors out there but that's not the hard thing to replace. It's all the junk on top that enterprises will have to replace somehow.
Off the top of my head they have:
- Carbon black for what used to be called antivirus but has metastasized into XDR, an all encompassing endpoint security/detection/response tool
- A whole automation framework (vRA/vRO) that companies use for automating deploying VMs and other stuff. Probably straightforward to replace with other automation frameworks but migrating existing playbooks will take time and expertise ($$$)
- A whole virtual desktop management suite (Horizon) including SaaS IDP/Mobile Device Management (Workspace One/VMware identity manager). Can probably patch together a replacement with stuff like Jamf, your SaaS IDP of choice, and Microsoft's hosted VDI but it won't be quick and again device migrations might suck
- Software defined networking with NSX. This could be difficult to quickly replace if you have a whole system built around automating network segmentation/management with it. It seems like your choice is either go with a network vendor and lose tight VM integration or go with a lower tier virtualization platform and get a bunch of hacked together Apache/Linux native stuff and no support
- SDWAN stuff. Probably relatively easy to replace unless you have a huge number of branches or edge devices that need to be physically updated by rolling trucks
- VMware cloud where ESXi/vSphere run on public clouds. To replace it you need to stand up a whole datacenter/colo hypervisor environment/network/storage and staff up to manage them
I could go on but suffice it to say I don't envy the enterprise management types having to consider untangling their dependencies on VMware right now.
They've announced NSX and SD-WAN is a core business unit under the new VMware as Broadcom offering.
EUC, Aria and Carbon Black are still up in the air.
What does this means for the development of the Spring Framework ecosystem (including Spring Boot et al).
VMware was a pretty good steward from my limited perspective. Does anyone have any experience with successful open source projects under Broadcom? They don't seem to have a good track record with driver support, at the least...
I am very concerned too, we rely on Spring and RabbitMQ heavily. I’m going to call a halt on Spring and Rabbit for all new projects until the M&A fog dissipates. We run our own tech radar, likely to set the entire VMware stack on hold for now. If any of the prolific Spring contributors leaves, we’ll consider moving altogether. Spring is such a complex framework, if Broadcom gets to reshuffle the team, pieces will start to crumble.
One might argue that if "Spring is such a complex framework" you never should have been using it in the first place?
The framework is complex, not its use. It’s actually extremely easy to use. If a project builds a framework that tries to cover every case in an opinionated way, they’re going to end up with a complex framework. Why should the fact that the framework externalises most complexities mean that it shouldn’t be used?
I would like to know as well. I am worried about RabbitMQ.
I am also concerned about this. VMWare have been great stewards of the Spring framework / boot libraries.
That's an interesting development. Since the ransomware outbreak earlier this year, there has been an increase in security concerns about VMware. I've heard more complaints about the lateness of security patches and the difficulties people have had installing them, etc. I'm curious if this has anything to do with that.
I haven't had any trouble installing VMware security patches (I've done plenty).
As to why there seems to be such an increase in security patches, its like the quote from Willie Sutton. That's where the money is.. The largest target gets the most attention.
Everybody has bugs. While you may hide under the radar with using some lesser known things, don't fool yourself thinking that there aren't holes the hackers can weave their way through.
this has been in the pipe for more than a year
vCenter is a huge target. VMware docs differ from the the Crowdstrike recommendations, with security vendors saying basically to lock it down to the 9th degree or suffer the consequences.
I guess the practical question for me is: in case Fusion goes abandonware, is there a viable desktop-focused hypervisor for the Mac other than Fusion or Parallels that runs Windows relatively well? I'm on Fusion, and I've always kind of viewed Parallels with suspicion. There's Vimy and LTM but as far as I can tell, they don't do Windows or GUI's all that well, since their focus seems to be linux and Mac OS X VMS, unless newer versions have improved...
I’ve had a pretty good experience with UTM, and it’s free.
There's also Lima (CLI only) for macOS which has worked better for me than UTM.
Better in what ways?
RIP CloudHealth customers.
Former CloudHealth early engineer here. That's nothing new. This started almost in tandem with the VMware acquisition - the company culture had been all about small- to medium-size customers, up through the point where due diligence started with VMware. We were told in no uncertain words that VMware would roll the red carpet out for big names, and that our platform needed to be ready for it. I stuck it out for about a year and a half, post-acquisition, where we tried to figure out and build a "CloudHealth Enterprise Edition" of sorts.
I was surprised that VMware kept the "CloudHealth" branding as long as they did, - it turned out that the brand actually had some cache that VMware wanted to hang on to. But it was formally dropped last year, in favor of "VMware Aria Cloud Cost Control", or some equally overdescribed thing.
It's now VMware Tanzu CloudHealth. Tanzu is where they're putting their public cloud bets.
I guess this is really CA buying VMWare. This is a standard move by CA. Buy an entrenched software company that isn't growing but has a lot of customers and milk it.
Buy an entrenched software company that isn't growing but has a lot of customers and milk it.
This is textbook management 101, and not just for software companies.
Ahh damn! Now carboblack has to be renamed again. One product of theirs has already been renamed 4 times at least lol. It's like a game of snake with these companies.
I wish an MBA can explain to me the value of rebranding and losing brand loyalty/familiarity.
I swear the corporate swag manufacturers are in on it somehow. I usually don't even get the shirt from the most recent rebranding before the brand is changed again.
Is QEMU a practical alternative?
Can QEMU+KVM be made to replicate most of ESXi features? Sure. Does it do it out of the box? Not even close.
Case in point: QEMU now has support[0] for live migrating VM's RAM (like vMotion) and disk images (like Storage vMotion). But I'm not aware of any publicly-released cluster orchestration layer that does it for you - so you may need to build your own.
Happy to be proven wrong.
[0] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/03/24/live-migrating...
I see people suggesting alternatives in the comments, I just wanted to give a small hands-on experience of running XCP-ng at work and Proxmox at home.
1. XCP-ng is a bit more polished and stable than Proxmox. Both are supposedly level 1 hypervisors, but while XCP-ng separates the hypervisor from the rest of the OS, Proxmox bumps it all together. Meaning that if something goes wrong with other part of the base OS, it will affect Proxmox.
2. It's simpler to do hardware pass-through on Proxmox (there's a GUI for that), but XCP-ng is more stable. There were occasions in which I couldn't pass through a device on Proxmox, but it worked perfectly fine on XCP-ng.
3. Xen Orchestra is the new manager for XCP-ng, the old Windows utility (which was great and had more functionality) is now EOL. But the creators from Xen Orchestra are too focused on getting VMWare clusters to migrate to their product and fail to add much needed functionality.
4. XCP-ng doesn't allow you to start VMs at boot in a certain order.
5. XCP-ng doesn't auto-mount shares when they come online.
6. XCP-ng doesn't have vGPU functionality for Nvidia or for newer Intel GPUs.
7. XCP-ng makes it much easier to create clusters than Proxmox.
8. Proxmox has a big community behind, meaning you can do some nifty hacks like: install MacOS, install Synology NAS software, do vGPU unlock (don't confuse this with proper vGPU support).
Bottom line: - I really want to like XCP-ng, but I'm migrating the work machines to Proxmox. Points 4, 5 and 6 are a big no-go, and it became a hassle to live with them. Unfortunately the developers, although polite, show no interest in improving those areas.
Damn it, I just purchased an workstation license too.
They deserve each other. Two makers of terrible products.
good riddance. thank god for qemu & KVM
I wonder how this will affect Spring.
Always a little scary from an employee perspective, good luck (sincerely)!
This is very bad news for careers of so many ESXi SMEs at all major corporations. Several employers will put a hard stop on all private cloud (on-prem) investments and move everything to public cloud. We recently pulled the plug on another s/w acquired by Broadcom.
I can't use it to run MacOS and e.g. test stuff in Safari, anyway.
It's ok, I've already migrated all of our VMware clusters over to XCP-ng.
Vmware changing hands between corporate overlords like it’s hot potato.
VMware under EMC $625M acquisition lasted ‘04-‘15
Dell acquires EMC for $58B in ‘15 which includes previously acquired VMware.
Now Dell is trying to balance their books and sells entire stake of VMWare in ‘21.
Broadcom now picks up the pieces of VMware with acquisition completed this year (‘23).
I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
Maybe Oracle or MS will be the next to bag hold.