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VMware is now part of Broadcom
- rkagerer 3y agoIt's a shame, VMware was always one of the best virtualization products. I worry the quality will fall off a cliff after all these corporate migrations.
- dramm 3y agoAs 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.
- thaanpaa 3y agoThat'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.
- brohoolio 3y agovCenter 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 3y agothis has been in the pipe for more than a year
- merlyn 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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.
- saltminer 3y agoWe 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 3y agoEven 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.
- warriormonk5 3y agoYeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.
- rrdharan 3y agoAnd 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.
- phpisthebest 3y agoBroadcom 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
- tsimionescu 3y agoAny 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.
- boiler_up800 3y agoRIP CloudHealth customers.
- don-code 3y agoFormer 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.
- parasubvert 3y agoIt's now VMware Tanzu CloudHealth. Tanzu is where they're putting their public cloud bets.
- xyst 3y agoVmware 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.
- tw04 3y ago>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 3y ago100%. 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.
- darkclouds 3y ago[dead]
- kelnos 3y agoIncredible 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.
- bluedino 3y agoWhat 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?
- navaati 3y agoRedHat and a couple other companies will sell you OpenStack clusters, up to a certain size.
- mvdwoord 3y agoContainers 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.
- tlamponi 3y ago> 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 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): https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/stories?f=7 https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/stories?f=7
- jzb 3y agoRed 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 3y ago
- akmarinov 3y agoDid China give the go ahead?
- advisedwang 3y agoWhy would an American company need China's go-ahead to acquire another American company's American subsidiary?
- mvdwoord 3y agoBecause they do business in China? But yes, they have got it.. https://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=22439649&gfv=1 https://www.streetinsider.com/dr/news.php?id=22439649&gfv=1
- xxpor 3y agoWouldn't be shocked if this is part of a deal Xi and Biden made.
- Patrick_Devine 3y agoThat is almost a certainty. That, or it was more likely done one or two tiers down during the APEC conference.
- Nthringas 3y agoI think this also has something to do with the whole OpenAI debacle but I can only guess....
- xxpor 3y agoSee also Intel and Tower Semi
- justincormack 3y agoYes according to the press release yesterday, didnt give any details.
- gigatexal 3y agoEveryone'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.
- tw04 3y agoIf 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 3y agoI'll never forgive Nutanix for murdering EdgeFS. I have not used any of their products, and hopefully never will.
- notacoward 3y agoEdgeFS 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.
- awiesenhofer 3y ago> multiple open-source projects interesting, which ones?
- phpisthebest 3y agoRedHat / 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...
- RedShift1 3y agoThe 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.
- jbverschoor 3y agoProxmox seems to be working great, including backups
- doubled112 3y agoBuilt in backups that work are a big reason I ended up on Proxmox at home.
- BadBadJellyBean 3y agoDoesn't Proxmox have a builtin backup? You could also use Hyper-V with Veeam.
- xoa 3y agoAre 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- system2 3y agoI 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.
- ikidd 3y ago
- spullara 3y agoI 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.
- mr_toad 3y ago> 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.
- smcleod 3y agoThey deserve each other. Two makers of terrible products.
- caycep 3y agoI 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 3y agoI’ve had a pretty good experience with UTM, and it’s free.
- totallywrong 3y agoThere's also Lima (CLI only) for macOS which has worked better for me than UTM.
- avtar 3y agoBetter in what ways?
- manishsharan 3y agoThis 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.
- _8j50 3y agoAhh 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 3y agoI 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.
- thedaly 3y agoDamn it, I just purchased an workstation license too.
- chungy 3y agoBetween 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.
- c-hendricks 3y agoWhat'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.
- toby0897 3y agois WSL2 with GPU acceleration not an option?
- c-hendricks 3y agoHonesr questions, is WSL intended to run a full desktop environment, and does it still require workarounds to get systemd working?
- k8sToGo 3y agoWSL2 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.
- c-hendricks 3y agoRight, but "running GUI applications" isn't the only goal, I want to run a full desktop environment, in full screen.
- k8sToGo 3y agoI don’t think WSl is the choice of tool then.
- Alupis 3y agoWhat 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...
- cendyne 3y agoI am also concerned about this. VMWare have been great stewards of the Spring framework / boot libraries.
- ssd532 3y agoI would like to know as well. I am worried about RabbitMQ.
- jmaker 3y agoI 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 3y agoOne might argue that if "Spring is such a complex framework" you never should have been using it in the first place?
- kdtsh 3y agoThe 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?
- ex3ndr 3y agoDoes 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.
- freeqaz 3y agoXen and KVM will both do this iirc. Requires a bit of work to make it work though. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF
- 3np 3y agoTo 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.
- igravious 3y agoWhy is this comment being down-voted?
- transpute 3y agoXCP-ng (OSS subset of Citrix Hypervisor, both based on Xen). As always, requires GPU and BIOS which supports IOMMU passthrough. https://docs.xcp-ng.org/compute/#pci-passthrough https://docs.xcp-ng.org/compute/#pci-passthrough
- didip 3y agoSince 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?
- system2 3y agoFor 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 3y agokvm/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 3y agoSMB 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.
- dopylitty 3y agoThere 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.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoAlways a little scary from an employee perspective, good luck (sincerely)!
- Suffocate5100 3y agoIt's ok, I've already migrated all of our VMware clusters over to XCP-ng.
- amelius 3y agoIs QEMU a practical alternative?
- pzmarzly 3y agoCan 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-qemu-kvm-virtual-machines https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/03/24/live-migrating...
- amelius 3y agoI can't use it to run MacOS and e.g. test stuff in Safari, anyway.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y agogood riddance. thank god for qemu & KVM
- pjmlp 3y agoI wonder how this will affect Spring.
- wtcactus 3y agoI 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.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoRIP entire hosting and MSP business
- mountainriver 3y agoThis may sound harsh, but VMware needed to lose about half its staff. It’s a dumpster fire inside there. Too bad Broadcom will also destroy the good parts.
- BaldwinGeorge 3y ago[dead]