11 ms·

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 instit

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 3y ago
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.
- warriormonk5 3y ago
  Yeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    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.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  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
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    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.
  - NikolaNovak 3y ago
    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 :-)
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      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.....
      - NikolaNovak 3y ago
        Yes, as I said, I spent much of my life around oracle products. Most are freely downloadable for non production purposes.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  This is different. Most student won't be exposed to datacenter management. It's really just system administrators who see this.
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    VMware is literally taught in schools. My college has a two course program in it.
    - callalex 3y ago
      That’s still entirely independent of what the school’s mainframes run on.
dangerboysteve 3y ago
XCP-NG
- smegsicle 3y ago
  i thought i heard kvm was winning, is there still a good reason to go with xen?
  - dangerboysteve 3y ago
    All are good choices.
  - remir 3y ago
    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!
  - thinkyfish 3y ago
    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.
- stock_toaster 3y ago
  or proxmox
depereo 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
brohoolio 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Azure runs on basically hyper-v I hear (which would make sense, right?), so it can't be that bad?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    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)
  - csydas 3y ago
    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.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
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.
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  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.
  - X-Istence 3y ago
    No, you can't failover a datacenter with VirtualBox.
- tiernano 3y ago
  Servers and enterprise.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  VirtualBox is also Oracle, which is why I switched to KVM/QEMU. But I'm also not an Enterprise user.
  - metadat 3y ago
    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.
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  > 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.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Migrate to proxmox.. it’s great
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
- NexRebular 3y ago
  or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.
  - MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
    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.
    - NexRebular 3y ago
      > 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. [0] https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install
linuxftw 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
jetbalsa 3y ago
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
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rf15 3y ago

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.

warriormonk5 3y ago
Yeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  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.
phpisthebest 3y ago
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
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  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.
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  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 :-)
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    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.....
    - NikolaNovak 3y ago
      Yes, as I said, I spent much of my life around oracle products. Most are freely downloadable for non production purposes.
mschuster91 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
This is different. Most student won't be exposed to datacenter management. It's really just system administrators who see this.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  VMware is literally taught in schools. My college has a two course program in it.
  - callalex 3y ago
    That’s still entirely independent of what the school’s mainframes run on.

dangerboysteve 3y ago

XCP-NG

smegsicle 3y ago
i thought i heard kvm was winning, is there still a good reason to go with xen?
- dangerboysteve 3y ago
  All are good choices.
- remir 3y ago
  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!
- thinkyfish 3y ago
  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.
stock_toaster 3y ago
or proxmox

depereo 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

brohoolio 3y ago

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 3y ago
Azure runs on basically hyper-v I hear (which would make sense, right?), so it can't be that bad?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  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)
- csydas 3y ago
  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.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

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.

jabroni_salad 3y ago
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.
- X-Istence 3y ago
  No, you can't failover a datacenter with VirtualBox.
tiernano 3y ago
Servers and enterprise.
mr_mitm 3y ago
VirtualBox is also Oracle, which is why I switched to KVM/QEMU. But I'm also not an Enterprise user.
- metadat 3y ago
  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.
Stratoscope 3y ago
> 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.

jbverschoor 3y ago

Migrate to proxmox.. it’s great

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
NexRebular 3y ago
or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.
- MrDrMcCoy 3y ago
  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.
  - NexRebular 3y ago
    > 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. [0] https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install

linuxftw 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

jetbalsa 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]