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VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition
- mgarfias 11y agoA little late. I got the call yesterday
- thewarrior 11y agoAre there more layoffs than usual now or am I just imagining things ?
- jeffjose 11y agoWhat departments/roles are these targeted at? Are they more support roles - HR/Training/IT or are they more engineering/products - engineers, PMs etc?
- awalton 11y agoWell, for starters... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10976579
- venomsnake 11y agoThat is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so far. But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision. Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.
- chipx86 11y agoWorkstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really. I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years. I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen. In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated. That came out in 2011. Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can't remember. Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support. I left around this time to focus on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/ https://www.reviewboard.org/) full-time. Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex. There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout. So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7. We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was not a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.
- zachrose 11y agoIt could be that end of the year numbers have come in and some firms need to cut costs.
- Swannie 11y agoNot sure why the downvote. This is common practice in many major, non-growth, global companies. The past two eyars, MSFT have cut a large number of people annually. CSCO have been cutting a large number annually since 2011 (though this is more of a migration of staff to lower cost economies/newer focus areas). HP have a long history of annual staff cuts. Even Google has been cutting staff on an off for the last 4 years (mostly post acquisition).
- zachrose 11y agoHa, the company doesn't even have to be major or global. Non-growth is sufficient.
- rplnt 11y agoIn general, what is the layoff policy and practice in US? How much the company has to pay, how much IT sector usually pays? Also, what are the usual time limits in the industry?
- Amezarak 11y ago> How much the company has to pay, how much IT sector usually pays? In most of the country (California is probably an exception), the company does not have to pay anything at all. I don't know about "usually". A lot of these big SV companies seem to usually pay some severance. > Also, what are the usual time limits in the industry? What time limits do you mean? As in, what notice do they have to give you? In much if not most of the country, none.
- rplnt 11y agoYep, I meant notice. Thanks. Was just wondering as this might screw up with someone if they are short on money, have mortgage, etc. In EU, there is some minimum notice time (I think two weeks?). In practice (from what I've seen) it's usually two to three months, but layoffs would be done immediately by agreement (basically pay for that period anyway). Minimum severance is one-month-pay (average, so bonuses included) for each year worked, limited to three. So in real life, one would get 5-6 months pay when being laid off. Depending on the situation (reason for the lay off), one might not be able to spend their vacation and that would have to be paid off as well. On top of that you might apply for unemployment benefit (which you paid for, so I'm not sure how relevant it is).
- jwn 11y agoIn the US you have no such guarantee, it's completely at the pleasure of your employer. I could walk into work this morning, get laid off, and escorted out of the building without notice. That's it, done, no more salary. To make it even worse, you also lose the subsidized health insurance. My employer pays about 60% of the cost for my family, so my monthly premiums would jump from $800 to nearly $2000 a month at the same time my income drops to near zero. Sure there's unemployment payments, but they're usually only a fraction of your previous salary, and are often capped to a maximum by your individual state. Welcome to capitalism ;)
- hkmurakami 11y agoInflated and leveraged equity assets seem to be driving a M&A spree. This isn't limited to domestic affairs in scope, as Chinese companies with high earning multiples are leveraging their equity to buy out assets abroad (ex: one such company bough a GE business unit for ~$2b). Ee should expect more such events to come. I wonder how much of the Yahoo! Workforce will be laid off once they spin off their core assets.
- chdhchchf 11y agoFound a post on another website today that sums up the developing economic landscape quite well (edited to be more appropriate for HN): >The [austerity/ free market advocates] need to quit [complain]ing and just accept that we need to stimulate the demand side of the economy. The US and Europe are currently headed down the same course that Japan went down, and they're stuck in an inescapable stagnation. We've implemented the same QE and austerity policies that they did years before us, and now we're beginning to experience the same stagnation and gradual decline they did. Just like Japan we're propping up large, [poorly managed], decaying businesses at the expense of everything else in our economy, all while starving our economy's consumers of money. >We've printed tons of money to fund big business, and cut back on social services so businesses won't have to pay as many taxes, and yet we only have a worsening economy to show for it. Unless you want the stock market to be the only segment of the economy that doesn't collapse, quit [explative] complaining and just hand people money.
- Altay- 11y agoYour blurb seems to contradict it self. It claims we need stimulus then it says the West & Japan tried this already and it hasn't worked. Maybe we need to allow the free market to function. Who cares if house prices drom from $250,000 -> $50,000 and the Dow from 16,000 -> 3,000? They will eventually be snapped up by someone at some price, thus fulfilling 'demand.' So much debt will be wiped out through defaults in this process as well, it will be great for the average person who will finally be able to afford to meaningfully participate in the investment world. Dividends yields of 2-6% mean nothing to a small time investor, but 20% is something that we could very well see in a liquidation market.
- 0xFFC 11y agoI am so curious why dell is buying EMC/VMware. What position/product do they hope to achieve ?
- nness 11y agoI suppose Dell already has a chunk of the server hardware space, makes sense to get into virtualisation since its a closely related industry and probably represents a big use-case for their hardware.
- jngreenlee 11y agoIt also gets them into a "hybrid cloud OS", IaaS model...lines up well for competition with BYO Datacenter+OpenStack, or Windows 2016+Azure. VMware owns many, many assets beyond vSphere and has a strong chance (IMO) at becoming an incumbent hybrid SDDC provider with Virtustream, vCloud Air, VCloud Air networking, etc.
- pfarnsworth 11y agoThey would own the datacenter, theoretically. People could come to Dell, and Dell would supply all of the hardware, from the storage to the virtualization to the servers. With VMWare owning Nicira, I guess that also including the virtual networking as well. It could be a compelling story, except IBM has already talked about how datacenter sales have dropped, so the US at least is probably overcapacity at this point. Bad timing, but not unexpected for a company like Dell, some this knuckle-headed is expected more from HP. The funny thing is, virtualization is dying. All of the large private datacenters these days are non-virtualized bare metal on commodity hardware. Virtualization is an unnecessary overhead when it comes to datacenters these days. And enterprise storage is also not "web scale" since it's faster to shard data across 100k servers than have a single huge database with a single point of failure.
- colechristensen 11y agoI disagree with your second paragraph. What I see Dell doing is consolidating products in a space that is shrinking while offering a unified datacenter product which has two target customers: * Bringing dinosaurs into the modern age with a "private cloud" * Bringing maturing organizations into the physical realm offering the advantages and alternatives to public cloud offerings
- ilvnvtoomuch 11y agoUgh...DELL! I was working alongside their sales engineering team. One guy just sat there and played the guitar the entire time. Goodbye VMWare!
- asfaf244 11y agoGood news for Ericom?
- jakeogh 11y agoWhy use vmware's stack over proxmox?
- raverbashing 11y agoThe first version of VMWare server was great Then apparently version 2.0 was handed for the Java and XML fetichists to be developed and it was a huge bloated mess. It worked, but badly. It looked like they knew what they were doing at first, but today we have virtualization services built into the processors and in the OS, making things easier
- nailer 11y agoThe founders (who were married) left the company, the staff went to other startups: there's a few at ElasticBox and some went to Microsoft IIRC. They 'won' virtualisation, but then virtualisation changed to 'cloud' and they never hung on.
- chipx86 11y agoIf you mean VMware Server, the GSX replacement, and not the ESX products, then oh boy do I have stories to tell :) I was one of the, hmm, 5 or 6 people who threw that together in a span of months. It was more of a mess than it appeared, under the hood :) We called it the Frankenstein Project. But it worked, and it worked well. More a testament to the infrastructure we had built for Workstation, and our team's ability to work hard and work well together.
- jacquesm 11y agoMissed opportunity for HP.
- Swannie 11y agoMaybe, but they have their own storage lines, and have been investing heavily in OpenStack. HPE may have been free'd from some restrictions, but I think many would have drawn HP-EDS-Compaq-Digital comparisons, and rightly so.
- dogma1138 11y agoOuch I have a friend that works for VMWare (didn't lose his job, well yet) but he was complaining that the restricted stocks he was getting (and well paying for because it's under the Employee Stock Purchase Plan) lost 60% of it's value already. Unlike stock options there isn't a guaranteed buyback price you just get the stock at 15% discount based on the market value at either the beginning or the end of the ESPP purchase cycle (the lowest of the 2) so while he hasn't lost actual money yet he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit of stock which might be impossible to offload and very well be worthless by the end of the ESPP.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- frostmatthew 11y ago> he most likely will get stuck with quite a bit of stock which might be impossible to offload and very well be worthless by the end of the ESPP Neither of those are possible. The worst case scenario is a 15% return on your money, even if the stock does nothing but tank over the entire period. You purchase the stock at a 15% discount at the lower of the price at either the beginning or end of the period. If the stock was at $100 at the beginning and $120 at the end and you put in $1000 you would get 11.7 shares of VMW stock (purchased at $85 each) with a current market value of $1411, you can sell that on the open market the next day for a 41% return. Likewise if you put in $1000 and the stock went from $100 to $80 over the period you would get 14.7 shares (purchased at $68) with a market value of $1176, a 17% return. It doesn't matter how much the stock goes down, you're still buying a thousand dollars worth of stock at 15% less than market value, even if the stock went from $100 to $10 you'd buy 117.6 shares for $8.5 (which would be worth $1176 at $10 a share).
- FullyFunctional 11y agoFactually false. I know people who lost money on ESP, granted it's rare. There is a non-zero delay between determining purchase price and when you can actually sell it. Stocks can and have fallen more than 15% in this window.
- plg 11y agofor VMs on a personal computer, is there any reason to use VMWare over Virtualbox?
- Perceptes 11y agoI haven't seen any benchmarks recently, but it's historically been noticeably faster. Vagrant's VMware plugin page has a general overview, although it's marketing material and not very technical: https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware/ https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware/
- arca_vorago 11y agoMostly serial or usb interface speed and driver issues when running windows hosts. Virtualbox is certainly getting better and better in that regard though. There is also better gpu support from anedotal experience.
- i336_ 11y agoRelated question: What about VMware/VirtualBox vs qemu-kvm? Obviously its UI etc is much more raw - I'm curious how it compares performancewise.
- Hupriene 11y agoI develop on linux vm running on a windows host, I've found VMWare to be considerably more stable and slightly more performant than virtualbox.
- jazzyb 11y agoMy personal experience: It depends on the guest OS. I'm on a Mac. VMWare Fusion runs Windows 7 and 8 with noticeably less lag than VirtualBox. For Linux (Ubuntu Trusty) and FreeBSD 10, I've never noticed a difference.
- jk563 11y agoNested virtualisation. To my knowledge VirtualBox does not yet support this, and has been steadfast in its refusal for years[1]. [1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4032 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4032
- jordigh 11y agoI wonder if the GPL lawsuit had anything to do with this? I guess it's not a good sign when a company will not fulfill its GPL obligations. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vmware-lawsuit...
- boynamedsue 11y agoThe notion of Dell acquiring EMC (and VMW as a result) is a little misleading. This is private equity acquiring EMC because that was the company's last resort and it should color one's perspective appropriately.
- leejoramo 11y agoOn the Mac, I will be looking into Veertu and xhyve to replace Fusion. http://veertu.com http://veertu.com https://github.com/mist64/xhyve https://github.com/mist64/xhyve
- miesman 11y agovScrew 1.0