5 ms·

Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software

83 points by gslin 3y ago

wmf 3y ago
Previous discussion of primary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348037
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  [dupe] And some more today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 3y ago
So, what's the most likely FOSS candidate to replace it?
- hnbear 3y ago
  Proxmox https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...
  - aranaur 3y ago
    Ran Proxmox for years before switching the homelab to esxi. Switching back has been in the cards for a while now. Not quite as polished, but wholly sufficient.
    - Saris 3y ago
      In my mind Proxmox is more polished, not the UI itself necessarily, but it has built in (and good) backups, container support, built in ZFS, BTRFS, ZFS over iSCSI, GlusterFS, CephFS, etc... You can also do a cluster with live failover without needing any third party like vCenter. It also is just running on Debian and using KVM and LXC under the hood so you can easily interact with things via scripts or other automation. I used to use ESXi and it felt very limited, vCenter added more but running that was absolutely ridiculous in system requirements, and it was slow as molasses.
- nanibot 3y ago
  Honestly, just plain kvm+libvirt+cockpit works great for a single machine. There's a terraform provider which works well. But I guess when you have multiple machines Proxmox, Harvester or KubeVirt (on top of your k8s cluster) makes more sense.
pxeboot 3y ago
Didn't everybody see this coming when the acquisition was first announced? VMware is a dead product at this point, but Broadcom will still be able to extract significant license fees from slow-to-change customers for a long time.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > Didn't everybody see this coming when the acquisition was first announced? If I didn't frequent certain resources I wouldn't have known about even the aquisition yet.
- jve 3y ago
  We use the real VMware Enterprise stuff as a service provider. We have multiple shared clouds and customer dedicated clouds. What I heard from management we won't have further option to pay for support and are scratching our heads on what are the option to migrate to...
neilv 3y ago
> Software's free version was a good fit for tinkerers and hobbyists. A better fit for tinkerers and hobbyists, collectively, is open source software. And the proprietary thing being shut down is just one of many reasons why.
- kraquepype 3y ago
  Agreed, but it was indispensable when I was learning VMWare over a decade ago for work. Having a free version I could tinker with at home was very useful. This is just going to kill whatever hobbyist user base they did have, and make it harder to learn the platform.
  - misswaterfairy 3y ago
    And cost VMWare any 'soft influence' they had. People tinker with free stuff in their own time a lot. Some of those people would have sway in what products a business purchases in future, like virtualisation software for example. People go with what they know.
    - Already__Taken 3y ago
      it's already costing them, dropped 40k on servers and avoided them like the plague.
- heroprotagonist 3y ago
  Not _really_, due to a number of things around automation that you needed vCenter to run. Or at least that's how it was for a very long time. In the early to middle days of virtualization, when corps had huge datacenters that were split between bare metal and virtualized solutions, I needed test labs of my own to more quickly and easily test different scenarios, then pause and save them to reduce use in the future. The software chop shop I was working at had some solutions for lab provisioning but they were inefficient. Plus, I wanted spare machines for personal use too. Not really ideal to use personal resources to enhance my capabilities at work, but they were truly test-only with no customer data entering them. I used ESX for a long time. Even kludged together a little automation. Then I uh borrowed a vCenter license for a long while. I changed jobs and decided that since most of the environments were useless I should really kick VMware to the curb. I tried OpenStack, but it was too painful of a setup for a single hard node or even two nodes. Ovirt, on the other hand, was PERFECT. This is the open source upstream to RHV. Great integration with Ansible and a number of other tools, and there's very little configuration effort required after the base install, unlike with VMware. I enjoyed that for a while through the orchestration wars, spinning up 6 and 8 node clusters of Kubernetes, mesosphere, and Swarm just to have a clean environment to test things out. Then it was just kubernetes, and configuration changed and improved a bit. At one point I even got kubernetes autoscaling to work, where load levels on a cluster would trigger calls to Ovirt to spin up additional nodes and add them to the cluster. The first of my servers ran about 13 years until I put it into storage last year. It still runs great. I calculated out costs once for equivalent 24/7 resources on AWS, and they would have run $300-400k to have equivalent computer power at my disposal. For an investment of around $6k on that server plus a small monthly bump to my electric costs. Of course, that doesn't count labor. But really, there was relatively little labor involved after moving to Ovirt compared to the ESX ecosystem, where there are a lot of frequently recurring decisions to be made between spending your time or paying ridiculous licensing costs to ease the workflow, both for the platform itself and for anything that integrates with it. https://www.ovirt.org/ https://www.ovirt.org/ NOTE: RedHat seem to make the open source page look ugly and dated on purpose. Don't let it fool you. I speculate this is because RHV has traditionally been a _very_ thin skin over the top of Ovirt. Over the past several years, though, they seem to have significantly added value to their downstream RHV by merging with OpenShift to create Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as the primary value-add on top of Ovirt. But I've only used Ovirt since anything requiring me to test OpenShift necessitated licensing and therefore not-my-own-resources for proper reproduction and testing scenarios. One might check out how well OKD integrates with Ovirt, though, if they want a similar experience to OpenShift at home without the price tag.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RecycledEle 3y ago
I had earning VmWare certification near the bottom of my to do list since 2014. I got unlimited access to VmWare products and Windows licenses through my employer last week. I was finally about to start really getting into VmWare, but this kills that. If my students can not get free hypervisors, learning VmWare has no value to me.
egberts1 3y ago
Called it ... all ... 72 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483309
White_Wolf 3y ago
I used to teach all my apprentices ESXI along with Proxmox and XCP-NG. Looks like it's down to Promox and XCP-NG now. I'm a bit crossed since some of my previous ones ended up getting jobs as juniors because they had ESXI basics.
soneil 3y ago
I'm actually pretty excited by this. VMWare has been the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" in this space for a while, and Broadcom abandoning and alienating large segments of the market could finally open up some ground for alternatives to grow into.

83 points by gslin 3y ago

wmf 3y ago

Previous discussion of primary source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39348037

ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] And some more today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359534

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lenerdenator 3y ago

So, what's the most likely FOSS candidate to replace it?

hnbear 3y ago
Proxmox https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...
- aranaur 3y ago
  Ran Proxmox for years before switching the homelab to esxi. Switching back has been in the cards for a while now. Not quite as polished, but wholly sufficient.
  - Saris 3y ago
    In my mind Proxmox is more polished, not the UI itself necessarily, but it has built in (and good) backups, container support, built in ZFS, BTRFS, ZFS over iSCSI, GlusterFS, CephFS, etc... You can also do a cluster with live failover without needing any third party like vCenter. It also is just running on Debian and using KVM and LXC under the hood so you can easily interact with things via scripts or other automation. I used to use ESXi and it felt very limited, vCenter added more but running that was absolutely ridiculous in system requirements, and it was slow as molasses.
nanibot 3y ago
Honestly, just plain kvm+libvirt+cockpit works great for a single machine. There's a terraform provider which works well. But I guess when you have multiple machines Proxmox, Harvester or KubeVirt (on top of your k8s cluster) makes more sense.

pxeboot 3y ago

Didn't everybody see this coming when the acquisition was first announced? VMware is a dead product at this point, but Broadcom will still be able to extract significant license fees from slow-to-change customers for a long time.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
> Didn't everybody see this coming when the acquisition was first announced? If I didn't frequent certain resources I wouldn't have known about even the aquisition yet.
jve 3y ago
We use the real VMware Enterprise stuff as a service provider. We have multiple shared clouds and customer dedicated clouds. What I heard from management we won't have further option to pay for support and are scratching our heads on what are the option to migrate to...

neilv 3y ago

> Software's free version was a good fit for tinkerers and hobbyists. A better fit for tinkerers and hobbyists, collectively, is open source software. And the proprietary thing being shut down is just one of many reasons why.

kraquepype 3y ago
Agreed, but it was indispensable when I was learning VMWare over a decade ago for work. Having a free version I could tinker with at home was very useful. This is just going to kill whatever hobbyist user base they did have, and make it harder to learn the platform.
- misswaterfairy 3y ago
  And cost VMWare any 'soft influence' they had. People tinker with free stuff in their own time a lot. Some of those people would have sway in what products a business purchases in future, like virtualisation software for example. People go with what they know.
  - Already__Taken 3y ago
    it's already costing them, dropped 40k on servers and avoided them like the plague.
heroprotagonist 3y ago
Not _really_, due to a number of things around automation that you needed vCenter to run. Or at least that's how it was for a very long time. In the early to middle days of virtualization, when corps had huge datacenters that were split between bare metal and virtualized solutions, I needed test labs of my own to more quickly and easily test different scenarios, then pause and save them to reduce use in the future. The software chop shop I was working at had some solutions for lab provisioning but they were inefficient. Plus, I wanted spare machines for personal use too. Not really ideal to use personal resources to enhance my capabilities at work, but they were truly test-only with no customer data entering them. I used ESX for a long time. Even kludged together a little automation. Then I uh borrowed a vCenter license for a long while. I changed jobs and decided that since most of the environments were useless I should really kick VMware to the curb. I tried OpenStack, but it was too painful of a setup for a single hard node or even two nodes. Ovirt, on the other hand, was PERFECT. This is the open source upstream to RHV. Great integration with Ansible and a number of other tools, and there's very little configuration effort required after the base install, unlike with VMware. I enjoyed that for a while through the orchestration wars, spinning up 6 and 8 node clusters of Kubernetes, mesosphere, and Swarm just to have a clean environment to test things out. Then it was just kubernetes, and configuration changed and improved a bit. At one point I even got kubernetes autoscaling to work, where load levels on a cluster would trigger calls to Ovirt to spin up additional nodes and add them to the cluster. The first of my servers ran about 13 years until I put it into storage last year. It still runs great. I calculated out costs once for equivalent 24/7 resources on AWS, and they would have run $300-400k to have equivalent computer power at my disposal. For an investment of around $6k on that server plus a small monthly bump to my electric costs. Of course, that doesn't count labor. But really, there was relatively little labor involved after moving to Ovirt compared to the ESX ecosystem, where there are a lot of frequently recurring decisions to be made between spending your time or paying ridiculous licensing costs to ease the workflow, both for the platform itself and for anything that integrates with it. https://www.ovirt.org/ https://www.ovirt.org/ NOTE: RedHat seem to make the open source page look ugly and dated on purpose. Don't let it fool you. I speculate this is because RHV has traditionally been a _very_ thin skin over the top of Ovirt. Over the past several years, though, they seem to have significantly added value to their downstream RHV by merging with OpenShift to create Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as the primary value-add on top of Ovirt. But I've only used Ovirt since anything requiring me to test OpenShift necessitated licensing and therefore not-my-own-resources for proper reproduction and testing scenarios. One might check out how well OKD integrates with Ovirt, though, if they want a similar experience to OpenShift at home without the price tag.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RecycledEle 3y ago

I had earning VmWare certification near the bottom of my to do list since 2014. I got unlimited access to VmWare products and Windows licenses through my employer last week. I was finally about to start really getting into VmWare, but this kills that. If my students can not get free hypervisors, learning VmWare has no value to me.

egberts1 3y ago

Called it ... all ... 72 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483309

White_Wolf 3y ago

I used to teach all my apprentices ESXI along with Proxmox and XCP-NG. Looks like it's down to Promox and XCP-NG now. I'm a bit crossed since some of my previous ones ended up getting jobs as juniors because they had ESXI basics.

soneil 3y ago

I'm actually pretty excited by this. VMWare has been the "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" in this space for a while, and Broadcom abandoning and alienating large segments of the market could finally open up some ground for alternatives to grow into.