5 ms·

>They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box hmm, why would people still use VMWare?

>They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
Edit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’ Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things. Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
- p3n1s 3y ago
  Virtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL. In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
barkingcat 3y ago
most people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox. The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes. The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface. it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem. That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for. It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks). As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
- scottjg 3y ago
  i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software. 1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion. 2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application. 3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance. there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
  - barkingcat 3y ago
    good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
  - lima 3y ago
    QEMU/libvirt can live migrate VMs without downtime. It works the same way.
    - erkkie 3y ago
      Yep, happily using https://ganeti.org/ https://ganeti.org/ and KVM live migrations - mirrors across hosts.
lsllc 3y ago
It's ESXi, the server class stuff, not so much the desktop VMware. So many companies have been using it for years. Now Broadcom are wanting to install spyware to "track" usage and license compliance and they're raising prices. For a lot of orgs, it'll probably take several years to move the production systems to something else. For the desktop, VirtualBox isn't much better. At one point after Oracle purchased it, they were tracking your IP and if they found you were using their extension pack that provides essential capabilities like USB 3 support (only the core of VirtualBox is GPL) and it was for commercial use, they were hitting you up for a license [0]. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_merula/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...
nunez 3y ago
Nearly every company/public service/non-profit/whatever uses vSphere/ESX somewhere. You'd be (very) surprised to see where people shoehorn ESXi hosts. VMware is EVERYWHERE, and vSphere/ESX/NSX is still the best game in town if you want to virtualize your datacenter. It's insanely rock-solid tech.
- ocdtrekkie 3y ago
  Yep. Arguably if you have Windows licensing, Hyper-V will do mostly all the same stuff "for free", but only if you want your hypervisors to be exactly as reliable as Windows machines. If you're rolling VMware, your datacenter's backbone tends to be ridiculously solid. Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.
  - c0pium 3y ago
    That’s not actually different on the Windows side, you should update your priors. There are datacenters full of Server 2019 boxes that have never been upgraded because the guest VMs are mission critical. Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.
    - pavelstoev 3y ago
      Agreed. I have 20+ Hyper-V Windows Server VMs running since 2017, seeing 400-600 Mbps live video traffic - no major crashes, only due to facility power loss or annual patching reboots.
    - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
      I mean, I work with every version of Windows Server since 2012 R2 up through Server 2022 on a daily basis...
      - c0pium 3y ago
        [flagged]
stephenr 3y ago
As explained by others the parent comment is talking about ESXi, but to answer your question: virtualbox desktop hypervisor is the spam of desktop hypervisors. Everyone has heard of it, it's theoretically comparable to the likes of VMware/Parallels desktop hypervisors, and it's cheaper. But just like spam (compared to ham), it's also obvious to anyone that's used both that it's by far the worse option, and there's very few reasons to use it besides cost, while there are numerous reasons to use one of the better alternatives. In general, performance is significantly better with other hypervisors, but in particular shared filesystem performance (ie sharing a directory from the host OS into the guest) and features are lacking on virtualbox. It's the default provider used by vagrant, and even the vagrant team recommend using a different provider for "any serious work".
- fencepost 3y ago
  One caution: SPAM isn't actually cheaper than ham, it's just shelf stable without refrigeration. You can get a decent spiral ham for well under $3.29/lb (Costco earlier today), but 12oz cans of SPAM work out to around $5/lb.
  - stephenr 3y ago
    I don't know if it's just a demand thing or perhaps because I don't really know what "spiral ham" is, but in Australia the only ham you're likely to find cheaper per-kilo than spam is going to be a 2+ kg leg of ham, complete with bone, fat, skin, etc. A boneless ham will be at least as expensive, and sliced/shaved ham from the deli section at a supermarket will be easily more expensive per-kilo than spam. Of course one could argue there's an even higher percentage of inedible parts in the canned monstrosity because it's all inedible, and I wouldn't argue that view point is wrong.
    - fencepost 3y ago
      A spiral ham is actually a spiral sliced ham. This is the butt end or shank end of a whole ham and yes, typically probably 3kg at a minimum. The 'spiral' part is that during processing it's been sliced in a spiral that leaves slices roughly 5-7mm thick. These are typically a little more expensive than unsliced bone in hams, but the convenience factor is huge. Hams like that often go on sale around US Thanksgiving and Christmas, with prices for them around US$4.50-6.50/kg last week and probably as 'loss leaders' around US$2-3/kg the week before Christmas. Ham is a regular part of 'traditional Thanksgiving' but not as much as turkey, whereas the 'Christmas ham' is definitely a thing.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

Edit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’ Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things. Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.

p3n1s 3y ago
Virtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL. In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

barkingcat 3y ago

most people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox. The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes. The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface. it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem. That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for. It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks). As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.

scottjg 3y ago
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software. 1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion. 2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application. 3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance. there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
- barkingcat 3y ago
  good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
- lima 3y ago
  QEMU/libvirt can live migrate VMs without downtime. It works the same way.
  - erkkie 3y ago
    Yep, happily using https://ganeti.org/ https://ganeti.org/ and KVM live migrations - mirrors across hosts.

lsllc 3y ago

It's ESXi, the server class stuff, not so much the desktop VMware. So many companies have been using it for years. Now Broadcom are wanting to install spyware to "track" usage and license compliance and they're raising prices. For a lot of orgs, it'll probably take several years to move the production systems to something else. For the desktop, VirtualBox isn't much better. At one point after Oracle purchased it, they were tracking your IP and if they found you were using their extension pack that provides essential capabilities like USB 3 support (only the core of VirtualBox is GPL) and it was for commercial use, they were hitting you up for a license [0]. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_merula/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...

nunez 3y ago

Nearly every company/public service/non-profit/whatever uses vSphere/ESX somewhere. You'd be (very) surprised to see where people shoehorn ESXi hosts. VMware is EVERYWHERE, and vSphere/ESX/NSX is still the best game in town if you want to virtualize your datacenter. It's insanely rock-solid tech.

ocdtrekkie 3y ago
Yep. Arguably if you have Windows licensing, Hyper-V will do mostly all the same stuff "for free", but only if you want your hypervisors to be exactly as reliable as Windows machines. If you're rolling VMware, your datacenter's backbone tends to be ridiculously solid. Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.
- c0pium 3y ago
  That’s not actually different on the Windows side, you should update your priors. There are datacenters full of Server 2019 boxes that have never been upgraded because the guest VMs are mission critical. Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.
  - pavelstoev 3y ago
    Agreed. I have 20+ Hyper-V Windows Server VMs running since 2017, seeing 400-600 Mbps live video traffic - no major crashes, only due to facility power loss or annual patching reboots.
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    I mean, I work with every version of Windows Server since 2012 R2 up through Server 2022 on a daily basis...
    - c0pium 3y ago
      [flagged]

stephenr 3y ago

As explained by others the parent comment is talking about ESXi, but to answer your question: virtualbox desktop hypervisor is the spam of desktop hypervisors. Everyone has heard of it, it's theoretically comparable to the likes of VMware/Parallels desktop hypervisors, and it's cheaper. But just like spam (compared to ham), it's also obvious to anyone that's used both that it's by far the worse option, and there's very few reasons to use it besides cost, while there are numerous reasons to use one of the better alternatives. In general, performance is significantly better with other hypervisors, but in particular shared filesystem performance (ie sharing a directory from the host OS into the guest) and features are lacking on virtualbox. It's the default provider used by vagrant, and even the vagrant team recommend using a different provider for "any serious work".

fencepost 3y ago
One caution: SPAM isn't actually cheaper than ham, it's just shelf stable without refrigeration. You can get a decent spiral ham for well under $3.29/lb (Costco earlier today), but 12oz cans of SPAM work out to around $5/lb.
- stephenr 3y ago
  I don't know if it's just a demand thing or perhaps because I don't really know what "spiral ham" is, but in Australia the only ham you're likely to find cheaper per-kilo than spam is going to be a 2+ kg leg of ham, complete with bone, fat, skin, etc. A boneless ham will be at least as expensive, and sliced/shaved ham from the deli section at a supermarket will be easily more expensive per-kilo than spam. Of course one could argue there's an even higher percentage of inedible parts in the canned monstrosity because it's all inedible, and I wouldn't argue that view point is wrong.
  - fencepost 3y ago
    A spiral ham is actually a spiral sliced ham. This is the butt end or shank end of a whole ham and yes, typically probably 3kg at a minimum. The 'spiral' part is that during processing it's been sliced in a spiral that leaves slices roughly 5-7mm thick. These are typically a little more expensive than unsliced bone in hams, but the convenience factor is huge. Hams like that often go on sale around US Thanksgiving and Christmas, with prices for them around US$4.50-6.50/kg last week and probably as 'loss leaders' around US$2-3/kg the week before Christmas. Ham is a regular part of 'traditional Thanksgiving' but not as much as turkey, whereas the 'Christmas ham' is definitely a thing.