4 ms·

VMware is to virtualization as windows is to computing. Essentially this is broadcom turning a cash cow into a milk truck for a handful of large megacorps that

VMware is to virtualization as windows is to computing. Essentially this is broadcom turning a cash cow into a milk truck for a handful of large megacorps that cannot evolve past a dead product and will pay handsomely for licenses without question. No one but VMware administrators legitimately consider esx for virtualization, instead the market is cloud providers or onprem kvm/cockpit/proxmox/lvs/anything else open source that doesn't bleed quarterly earnings dry for a chance to spin up a SQL server.

nunez 3y ago
VMware is _everywhere_. Every big company you can think of has a significant VMware estate somewhere. This is going to accelerate as companies move back on-premise. And for good reason. ESX is by far the most performant hypervisor out there and it's dead easy to use.
- IcePic 3y ago
  But being 95% performant compared to native speed is not worth a lot if the "only 85% performant" alternative costs millions less, since you can often spend half of those millions on more or better hw and still come out with a decent profit. It's cool and great to have the best product, but if the "only" edge is that if you spend a million bucks on license, you save 10s or 100s of K in hw expenses, the business proposition is actually not that great. I get that the whole ESX ecosystem has a lot going for it, but as some of the VM loads are getting more and more dumbed down, being the one with most features and some more percent better perf is not going to win out in the end, as I see it.
  - nunez 3y ago
    That 15% gap matters a lot for the kinds of companies that Broadcom is targeting (and many others that they are not), and they are okay with spending millions to get it. Also, you get support with those millions. That's a requirement for these kinds of companies as well. That said, I agree that there are many shops that will migrate to something like Ryzen, throw KVM on that and call it a day (or do what I did and use Graviton spot instances for anything stateful and small Graviton Lambdas for the rest). Those suckers are fast. And that's before we touch software-defined networking a la NSX and virtualized storage a la vSAN. NSX, ESX and vSAN work together to provide near-line-rate networking and networked storage performance with a really nicely packaged frontend. Yes, you can use paravirt-io and ceph and get nearly there, but it's "nearly" and setting this up has a significantly higher skill bar for sysadmins. That alone is a dealbreaker for small shops that aren't tech forward.

nunez 3y ago

VMware is _everywhere_. Every big company you can think of has a significant VMware estate somewhere. This is going to accelerate as companies move back on-premise. And for good reason. ESX is by far the most performant hypervisor out there and it's dead easy to use.

IcePic 3y ago
But being 95% performant compared to native speed is not worth a lot if the "only 85% performant" alternative costs millions less, since you can often spend half of those millions on more or better hw and still come out with a decent profit. It's cool and great to have the best product, but if the "only" edge is that if you spend a million bucks on license, you save 10s or 100s of K in hw expenses, the business proposition is actually not that great. I get that the whole ESX ecosystem has a lot going for it, but as some of the VM loads are getting more and more dumbed down, being the one with most features and some more percent better perf is not going to win out in the end, as I see it.
- nunez 3y ago
  That 15% gap matters a lot for the kinds of companies that Broadcom is targeting (and many others that they are not), and they are okay with spending millions to get it. Also, you get support with those millions. That's a requirement for these kinds of companies as well. That said, I agree that there are many shops that will migrate to something like Ryzen, throw KVM on that and call it a day (or do what I did and use Graviton spot instances for anything stateful and small Graviton Lambdas for the rest). Those suckers are fast. And that's before we touch software-defined networking a la NSX and virtualized storage a la vSAN. NSX, ESX and vSAN work together to provide near-line-rate networking and networked storage performance with a really nicely packaged frontend. Yes, you can use paravirt-io and ceph and get nearly there, but it's "nearly" and setting this up has a significantly higher skill bar for sysadmins. That alone is a dealbreaker for small shops that aren't tech forward.