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> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Whether that counts as "the cloud" or not is up t

> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Whether that counts as "the cloud" or not is up to you, but virtualization within datacenter is pretty standard. For what it's worth, every experience I've ever had with Broadcom in the embedded space has been negative. So this came initially as a disappointment, and now I'm disheartened to see my expectations were accurate.

depereo 3y ago
I don't know if it's 'most' but there's plenty of large private-cloud B2B setups offering vm-as-a-service / esxi-as-a-service or something frontended by vmware cloud director. Definitely to the tune of billions of annual revenue worldwide.
bastardoperator 3y ago
I worked at some fairly large hosting companies before cloud took over and never once saw vmware. It was almost always virtuozzo/openvz
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  There are two classes of hosting companies, enterprise and small business. Enterprise hosting companies serve enterprise fortune500 customers. They are VMWare. The ones catering to small business are using everything but VMware because of costs. They are not typically large, digital ocean and linode aside.
  - bastardoperator 3y ago
    I still disagree. Verizon serves every fortune 500 company in existence and our enterprise compute offering was not vmware. Not a single vmware node in all 100+ pops. I also worked at Godaddy, zero vmware, even after IPO, and they most certainly have B2B customers too.
    - grepfru_it 3y ago
      I have never used a non VMware environment at a Fortune 500.
mianos 3y ago
I worked at one of the biggest private cloud providers in Australia. It was VMWare VCentre/VSphere end to end for all private clients. There were some great GUIs and great management but if you wanted serious API access it was the one of the most hacked up thing I have ever seen in my career.
- gemstones 3y ago
  Oh my lord, I remember dealing with a VSphere API early in my career. They didn't have a concept of service accounts so the official advice for our nightly automation was: Pay a sysadmin to be up at night, then before your job is meant to run, have them log into the VSphere GUI, open devtools, click refresh to trigger a GET request, copy the cookie, paste the cookie into our custom software, and send it in the cookies of our API requests. When we asked if there was an easier way, they said that we could probably use Selenium to automate that. Needless to say, we did not sign the contract, and moved wholesale into AWS.
  - mianos 3y ago
    That's about it. Although, instead of using Selinium, you could work out the XML that the GUI runs from and `POSTS`, then make scripts pretend to be the GUI. Then maybe going into the internal postgres database that runs it to get the data that is not on the GUI. Not funny. :)
    - gemstones 3y ago
      Oh haha I forgot how much information was not exposed in the API at all. I remember having to bring in a senior engineer because I thought I was going crazy. I could only ever find like half of the useful data on a server I just provisioned.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    As someone with a vast amount of experience automating vsphere, this is made up bullshit. API access got a lot better once they introduced the powershell API (which can also be used via C#) but the solution you're describing is the result of people not knowing what they're doing.
jSully24 3y ago
In my experience in these situations (I was always being acquired), the acquiring company is at least partially counting on cost saving from getting rid of departments like finance, marketing, sales and legal as they believe they can do that with their own teams. The acquiring company also will have their own metrics for proper sizing (employee count and spend) for engineering, support, product, etc which is likely lower than the company being acquired. But in this case VMWare is pretty mature so those metrics maybe ok Can’t say I support this, but the bean counters love it. Edit: “ Broadcom has not returned CRN’s request for comment about the job cuts. The company, which closed its acquisition of VMware Wednesday, had previously stated it could find $250 million in synergies once it completed the deal.” Synergies is code for the redundancies I mentioned above.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Synergies Also: Less competition.
antod 3y ago
> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Out of date info, but last time I really looked there used to be 3 tiers of VPS provider: * VSphere with SAN and blades (I think there was an HP reference implementation for this - many providers seemed to use it). These were by far the most expensive, and not really very good performance for the money due to SAN speeds and ESX not cpu scheduling multi core VMs that well. * Xen/KVM. Mid range in terms of cost, and less fault tolerant than the SAN backed VSphere stuff. But usually out performed it. * VServer / OpenVZ at the very cheap end. These were more like early LXC containers than VMs. The price point meant that you got what you paid for, and there were tech limitations with what you could do with the kernel (they were sharing the host kernel). Security wasn't great either. I doubt the VMWare providers are as common now as they were 15yrs ago though. Even back then, they weren't the most common though.
1letterunixname 3y ago
VPSes use Xen and such, not VMware because of $. VMware was born out of the need to increase utilization of expensive enterprise servers by putting many virtual machine guests on fewer physical hosts.
redundantly 3y ago
> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. This is highly unlikely. VMware is too expensive for a VPS provider to achieve profitability.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  It seems highly unlikely they're not successful and selling for $64 billion. I don't get it either :/
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    F500 companies are paying them millions in licenses to save 10x their hardware cost.
- swozey 3y ago
  It's usually proxmox or virtuozzo, or some other kvm front end. I've worked at 4 huge webhosts and they never used vmware for vps/shared servers. Only our dedicated customers paying for support (think RAX) used vmware and that was their own.
  - parasubvert 3y ago
    VMware is extremely common in hosted solution providers. This is not just web hosting, this is hosting stuff like your payroll or ERP systems.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - redundantly 3y ago
      There a big difference between hosted solutions and VPS services. VMware might be used a lot in the former, but in the latter it's mostly KVM or Xen.

depereo 3y ago

I don't know if it's 'most' but there's plenty of large private-cloud B2B setups offering vm-as-a-service / esxi-as-a-service or something frontended by vmware cloud director. Definitely to the tune of billions of annual revenue worldwide.

bastardoperator 3y ago

I worked at some fairly large hosting companies before cloud took over and never once saw vmware. It was almost always virtuozzo/openvz

grepfru_it 3y ago
There are two classes of hosting companies, enterprise and small business. Enterprise hosting companies serve enterprise fortune500 customers. They are VMWare. The ones catering to small business are using everything but VMware because of costs. They are not typically large, digital ocean and linode aside.
- bastardoperator 3y ago
  I still disagree. Verizon serves every fortune 500 company in existence and our enterprise compute offering was not vmware. Not a single vmware node in all 100+ pops. I also worked at Godaddy, zero vmware, even after IPO, and they most certainly have B2B customers too.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    I have never used a non VMware environment at a Fortune 500.

mianos 3y ago

I worked at one of the biggest private cloud providers in Australia. It was VMWare VCentre/VSphere end to end for all private clients. There were some great GUIs and great management but if you wanted serious API access it was the one of the most hacked up thing I have ever seen in my career.

gemstones 3y ago
Oh my lord, I remember dealing with a VSphere API early in my career. They didn't have a concept of service accounts so the official advice for our nightly automation was: Pay a sysadmin to be up at night, then before your job is meant to run, have them log into the VSphere GUI, open devtools, click refresh to trigger a GET request, copy the cookie, paste the cookie into our custom software, and send it in the cookies of our API requests. When we asked if there was an easier way, they said that we could probably use Selenium to automate that. Needless to say, we did not sign the contract, and moved wholesale into AWS.
- mianos 3y ago
  That's about it. Although, instead of using Selinium, you could work out the XML that the GUI runs from and `POSTS`, then make scripts pretend to be the GUI. Then maybe going into the internal postgres database that runs it to get the data that is not on the GUI. Not funny. :)
  - gemstones 3y ago
    Oh haha I forgot how much information was not exposed in the API at all. I remember having to bring in a senior engineer because I thought I was going crazy. I could only ever find like half of the useful data on a server I just provisioned.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  As someone with a vast amount of experience automating vsphere, this is made up bullshit. API access got a lot better once they introduced the powershell API (which can also be used via C#) but the solution you're describing is the result of people not knowing what they're doing.

jSully24 3y ago

In my experience in these situations (I was always being acquired), the acquiring company is at least partially counting on cost saving from getting rid of departments like finance, marketing, sales and legal as they believe they can do that with their own teams. The acquiring company also will have their own metrics for proper sizing (employee count and spend) for engineering, support, product, etc which is likely lower than the company being acquired. But in this case VMWare is pretty mature so those metrics maybe ok Can’t say I support this, but the bean counters love it. Edit: “ Broadcom has not returned CRN’s request for comment about the job cuts. The company, which closed its acquisition of VMware Wednesday, had previously stated it could find $250 million in synergies once it completed the deal.” Synergies is code for the redundancies I mentioned above.

throwaway2037 3y ago
Synergies Also: Less competition.

antod 3y ago

> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Out of date info, but last time I really looked there used to be 3 tiers of VPS provider: * VSphere with SAN and blades (I think there was an HP reference implementation for this - many providers seemed to use it). These were by far the most expensive, and not really very good performance for the money due to SAN speeds and ESX not cpu scheduling multi core VMs that well. * Xen/KVM. Mid range in terms of cost, and less fault tolerant than the SAN backed VSphere stuff. But usually out performed it. * VServer / OpenVZ at the very cheap end. These were more like early LXC containers than VMs. The price point meant that you got what you paid for, and there were tech limitations with what you could do with the kernel (they were sharing the host kernel). Security wasn't great either. I doubt the VMWare providers are as common now as they were 15yrs ago though. Even back then, they weren't the most common though.

1letterunixname 3y ago

VPSes use Xen and such, not VMware because of $. VMware was born out of the need to increase utilization of expensive enterprise servers by putting many virtual machine guests on fewer physical hosts.

redundantly 3y ago

> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. This is highly unlikely. VMware is too expensive for a VPS provider to achieve profitability.

refulgentis 3y ago
It seems highly unlikely they're not successful and selling for $64 billion. I don't get it either :/
- brianwawok 3y ago
  F500 companies are paying them millions in licenses to save 10x their hardware cost.
swozey 3y ago
It's usually proxmox or virtuozzo, or some other kvm front end. I've worked at 4 huge webhosts and they never used vmware for vps/shared servers. Only our dedicated customers paying for support (think RAX) used vmware and that was their own.
- parasubvert 3y ago
  VMware is extremely common in hosted solution providers. This is not just web hosting, this is hosting stuff like your payroll or ERP systems.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - redundantly 3y ago
    There a big difference between hosted solutions and VPS services. VMware might be used a lot in the former, but in the latter it's mostly KVM or Xen.