Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
xyst
tw04
>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.
MrDrMcCoy
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.
kelnos
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.
junon
This is indeed sad. VMware was some of the best at one point. In my opinion, it still sort of is.
darkclouds
[dead]
raincom
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.
notacoward
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.
rammer
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.
Unfrozen0688
Cisco has done well with Meraki and Duo, no?
steve1977
EMC already had their go at VMware ;)
snapplebobapple
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.
iforgotpassword
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.
FirmwareBurner
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.
lokar
They have actually been pretty open that this is the plan. And all the secondary products and small customers can wither away even faster.
lhoff
Funnily enough, I know of two instances where companies got rid of their mainframe driven by the license cost for Gen[1] which was bought by Broadcom in 2020. I heard they were only issuing 5 year licenses now.
Spooky23
Yup. Broadcom is the CA of our era.
thedougd
Yes, and they even bought CA.
worewood
Literally, since they acquired them.
unethical_ban
Oh God... that's what the CA in CA Spectrum was?
One. NEW. CRITICAL. Alarm.
rr808
Weird I used to use broadcom chips decades ago. My new job uses Autosys - by Broadcom wtf?
locusm
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.
stephen_g
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.
locusm
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.
ikidd
It live migrates fine. Done it many times to upgrade cluster nodes, moving live VMs back and forth.
steve1977
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.
brirec
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!
steve1977
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.
scandox
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?
jacquesm
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.
hinkley
I am really disappointed that Dell did not accomplish enough with VMWare to hit my radar outside of a couple of fans at tech meetups.
I really thought there was a strong play there to do a major private cloud play as part of Dell's 'come back story' and then nothing.
But maybe that's exactly the problem. For a container based solution you still need a hypervisor but if you invite hypervisor people to the table, to they really want to champion linux containers or do they want to try to reach a local maximum by squeezing all of the fat out of VMs.
Even the Java to an extent 'got it' more than Dell+VMWare. I abandoned Java as a platform right around the time Docker went from whispers in dark corners to a quiet ping on people's radars. Within a couple years of that, the JVM team had increased their level of effort to shrink the system footprint from what I would label bet-hedging to aggressively. You need a small JVM if you're going to pack five services and/or ten JVMs onto the same host. Initially J2EE imagined itself to be multitenant, and it did a poor job of re-implementing half of Erlang, poorly. Containers were clearly on their radar.
strangemonad
Not to mention Pivotal interwoven into that story
api
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.
UtahDave
VMware does have managed kubernetes
daddylongstroke
Like HPE GreenLake's Private Cloud?
saltminer
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.
rf15
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.
phpisthebest
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
NikolaNovak
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 :-)
tsimionescu
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.
mschuster91
> 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?
sturadnidge
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 :(
dehrmann
This is different. Most student won't be exposed to datacenter management. It's really just system administrators who see this.
ocdtrekkie
VMware is literally taught in schools. My college has a two course program in it.
warriormonk5
Yeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.
rrdharan
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.
brohoolio
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.
baq
Azure runs on basically hyper-v I hear (which would make sense, right?), so it can't be that bad?
csydas
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.
nunez
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.
yjftsjthsd-h
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)
stephen_g
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.
depereo
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.
linuxftw
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.
notesinthefield
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.
jbverschoor
Migrate to proxmox.. it’s great
SV_BubbleTime
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.
ThinkBeat
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.
undefined
NexRebular
or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.
MrDrMcCoy
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.
unethical_ban
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.
jetbalsa
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
undefined
undefined
Alupis
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...
jmaker
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.
cdent
One might argue that if "Spring is such a complex framework" you never should have been using it in the first place?
kdtsh
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?
cendyne
I am also concerned about this. VMWare have been great stewards of the Spring framework / boot libraries.
ssd532
I would like to know as well. I am worried about RabbitMQ.
gigatexal
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.
phpisthebest
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...
suprjami
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.
phpisthebest
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
linuxftw
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.
steve1977
Lol that sounds crazy, like when you would have an operating system with a web browser and then would be running complete applications in that brows… oh wait…
tw04
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.
MrDrMcCoy
I'll never forgive Nutanix for murdering EdgeFS. I have not used any of their products, and hopefully never will.
notacoward
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.
INTPenis
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?
moduspol
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.
bluedino
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?
tlamponi
> 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):
jzb
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.)
_jal
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.
transpute
> 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...
edwintorok
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
tonoto
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
0dayz
Why... bhyve, there's 0 advantages to kvm.
keep_reading
Massive IO performance over KVM due to the emulated NVME driver. Bhyve may be juvenile compared to KVM but it seems to have a better design and a better license.
https://klarasystems.com/articles/virtualization-showdown-fr...
edit: also bhyve runs on SmartOS too, and I think Bryan is going to be more comfortable with a Solaris OS under the hood
tonoto
The question was "What is the enterprise virtualization alternative?"
..and your answer is kvm? KVM in itself is enterprise? ..or was it in context to my response referring to Oxide as an enterprise alternative? Well, in that case I can tell that there are only advantages to bhyve as the code base of kvm fork is old and all focus shifted to bhyve which build with todays hardware in mind.
steve1977
Not being GPL might be one
noinsight
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.
mvdwoord
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.
sebazzz
Hyper-V server is killed by Microsoft, though you can of course install Windows Server in Core mode and install the Hypervisor component.
merlyn
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.
thaanpaa
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.
merlyn
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.
thaanpaa
I don't remember exactly, but there were some issues where a security update would remove support for certain common (HP?) RAID controllers or something to that effect. So, if you're not careful, a security patch could potentially brick a server.
brohoolio
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.
convolvatron
this has been in the pipe for more than a year
caycep
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...
presbyterian
I’ve had a pretty good experience with UTM, and it’s free.
totallywrong
There's also Lima (CLI only) for macOS which has worked better for me than UTM.
avtar
Better in what ways?
micromacrofoot
Always a little scary from an employee perspective, good luck (sincerely)!
manishsharan
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.
badrabbit
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.
tarxvf
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.
dramm
As employee 10 (or 11, we were not great at counting), I hope folks still there get the fuck out, and go do something productive. Broadcom is a sad sad way for a company to die.
didip
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?
dopylitty
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.
merlyn
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.
system2
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.
softirq
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.
system2
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.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
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.