4 ms·

Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscale

by acd 4y ago

Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines.

kasey_junk 4y ago
I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V, AFAIK.
- wildfire 4y ago
  AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro. Which is based upon KVM - AIUI. https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-system/ https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
mountainriver 4y ago
Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations
iKevinShah 4y ago
VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that. Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
voidfunc 4y ago
Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Okay, yes, Microsoft Azure running Microsoft Windows virtualization isn't shocking. They have to dogfood, or they'll be laughed at hard.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Nobody laughs when MS uses Linux.
    - temac 4y ago
      Would it be to compete with one of their own product in such a major way and despite the integration MS did for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, yeah people would laugh. Not about them using Linux. About them having Hyper-V. Like we laughed about Visual SourceSafe.
JeremyNT 4y ago
> Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines. It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people. You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help. Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.
- fomine3 4y ago
  So looks like they could be the last player on premise, like mainframes by IBM
- rdp36 4y ago
  This is basically were I work and probably 80% of small and medium enterprises. We bought a lot of licenses once and maintenance license cost is minimal so far.
hnarn 4y ago
> Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved". The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.
dehrmann 4y ago
I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that specializes in network chips.

by acd 4y ago

kasey_junk 4y ago

I was under the impression each of those had custom hypervisors? While perhaps still Linux that doesn’t seem like a commodity.

sithadmin 4y ago
They're 'custom', but are heavily derivative of KVM in the case of AWS (Nitro) and GCP. Azure runs a fork of Hyper-V, AFAIK.
wildfire 4y ago
AWS' Hypervisor is Nitro. Which is based upon KVM - AIUI. https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-system/ https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...

mountainriver 4y ago

Not a fan of vmware (I used to work there) but pretty much no one currently can compete with VMware’s full product line and optimizations

iKevinShah 4y ago

VMware used to be centered around Virtualization until 2015-16 or so. Since then it has moved / expanded to Software defined Datacenters (technically virtualization, yes), Automation, Security (Carbon Black) and lately, K8s (with Tanzu). That does not mean a good chunk of revenue might still be from virtualization - FWIW, I do not have any idea on that. Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.

voidfunc 4y ago

Azure uses Hyper-V under the hood not kvm. Its also not built on Linux.

seanw444 4y ago
Okay, yes, Microsoft Azure running Microsoft Windows virtualization isn't shocking. They have to dogfood, or they'll be laughed at hard.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Nobody laughs when MS uses Linux.
  - temac 4y ago
    Would it be to compete with one of their own product in such a major way and despite the integration MS did for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, yeah people would laugh. Not about them using Linux. About them having Hyper-V. Like we laughed about Visual SourceSafe.

JeremyNT 4y ago

> Ponders if it will payoff as an investment. Hyper visors are nowdays commodity. Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. Hyperscalers AWS,Google and Azure running the cloud are running work loads on Linux KVM kernel based virtual machines. It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people. You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help. Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.

fomine3 4y ago
So looks like they could be the last player on premise, like mainframes by IBM
rdp36 4y ago
This is basically were I work and probably 80% of small and medium enterprises. We bought a lot of licenses once and maintenance license cost is minimal so far.

hnarn 4y ago

> Workloads are moving from enterprise onsite datacenters to the cloud. This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved". The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.

dehrmann 4y ago

I also don't see any obvious synergies with a company that specializes in network chips.