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I know of a large company that are moving their whole VMWare setup (thousands of VMs) to an OpenShift solution, now that VMWare has raised prices significantly,

by tacker2000 2y ago

I know of a large company that are moving their whole VMWare setup (thousands of VMs) to an OpenShift solution, now that VMWare has raised prices significantly, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones.

simonjgreen 2y ago
Many of my peers in the ISP community shuttered their hosting operations entirely in the wake of Broadcoms move, putting a mountain of effort and cost on themselves and their customers in the process. This is sad for many reasons, least of all because it drives further consolidation of the Internet towards the hyper scalers. I dread to think of the real economic cost of Broadcoms moves with VMWare.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  I'm honestly a bit shocked to hear that anyone has been using VMWare to provide hosting. I thought it was for internally running stuff that is expensive anyway.
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    It's standard practice to run all your physical servers as ESX cluster. Doesn't matter if for hosting, internal needs or whatever. Nobody sane would just install Ubuntu on a physical server and edit the nginx config. Running virtualized makes it much easier to have standard backups, restores, upgrades, failovers and so on.
  - baq 2y ago
    What else would they be running? VMWare abstracts the machine from the hardware in a very literal sense, with live migrations between hosts, etc. so you can work with your boxen without interrupting any customer services. If that capability suddenly costs 10x-100x more due to licensing, the margins stop being there - you'd need to rise prices above whatever aws/azure/gcp is doing and that's obviously not going to fly with customers. Shutting down is the only reasonable choice; unreasonable choices like develop your own vmware alternative or use an existing open source solution don't make sense for anything above micro and below hyperscale. The mid-market has been rugged, gutted and driven over by a Buick.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      > What else would they be running? Anything that doesn't cost licensing money is what I was thinking. Isn't there some FOSS and also gratis alternative?
      - throwaway48540 2y ago
        No, not really. Proxmox is slowly improving, but not a replacement yet.
  - simonjgreen 2y ago
    It has been incredibly common for the last maybe 15 years in the managed hosting industry. It wasn’t even especially expensive compared to the revenue density. Most would be on service provider licensing paying per GB of RAM.
rahen 2y ago
OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP. It enables you to create a fully API-driven data center that includes elastic compute, elastic network, and elastic storage resources. The key difference is that, unlike a public cloud where you consume APIs (OPEX), with OpenStack, you own and manage them (CAPEX). OpenStack is not ideal for provisioning static workloads like you would with vCenter. It works best as an orchestrator for elastic, API-driven workloads. It also simplifies hybrid cloud integration: link your SDN networks, then use Heat to manage deployments based on predefined rules and affinities. Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  I don't follow the difference between static and elastic workloads. OpenStack can create a VM just like VMware, and has more features that would otherwise be implemented as a K8s cluster running on VMs.
  - rahen 2y ago
    In a cloud environment like OpenStack, virtual machines are a means to provide compute resources, not an end goal like in VMware. Elastic workloads typically scale horizontally, unlike the vertical scaling or static provisioning seen in environments such as VMware. Elastic workloads are usually stateless, declaratively provisioned, have short uptimes, and are designed to fail gracefully rather than relying on high availability. Kubernetes (K8S) can achieve similar capabilities, but is still distinct from what OpenStack offers: an open-source, private AWS providing multi-tenant, API-driven infrastructure for storage, networking, and compute. If you don't care about working with elastic APIs, OpenStack/AWS is probably not for you, use VMware/ProxMox + Kubernetes.
    - throwaway48540 2y ago
      Thank you!
- throw0101c 2y ago

simonjgreen 2y ago

Many of my peers in the ISP community shuttered their hosting operations entirely in the wake of Broadcoms move, putting a mountain of effort and cost on themselves and their customers in the process. This is sad for many reasons, least of all because it drives further consolidation of the Internet towards the hyper scalers. I dread to think of the real economic cost of Broadcoms moves with VMWare.

ahartmetz 2y ago
I'm honestly a bit shocked to hear that anyone has been using VMWare to provide hosting. I thought it was for internally running stuff that is expensive anyway.
- throwaway48540 2y ago
  It's standard practice to run all your physical servers as ESX cluster. Doesn't matter if for hosting, internal needs or whatever. Nobody sane would just install Ubuntu on a physical server and edit the nginx config. Running virtualized makes it much easier to have standard backups, restores, upgrades, failovers and so on.
- baq 2y ago
  What else would they be running? VMWare abstracts the machine from the hardware in a very literal sense, with live migrations between hosts, etc. so you can work with your boxen without interrupting any customer services. If that capability suddenly costs 10x-100x more due to licensing, the margins stop being there - you'd need to rise prices above whatever aws/azure/gcp is doing and that's obviously not going to fly with customers. Shutting down is the only reasonable choice; unreasonable choices like develop your own vmware alternative or use an existing open source solution don't make sense for anything above micro and below hyperscale. The mid-market has been rugged, gutted and driven over by a Buick.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    > What else would they be running? Anything that doesn't cost licensing money is what I was thinking. Isn't there some FOSS and also gratis alternative?
    - throwaway48540 2y ago
      No, not really. Proxmox is slowly improving, but not a replacement yet.
- simonjgreen 2y ago
  It has been incredibly common for the last maybe 15 years in the managed hosting industry. It wasn’t even especially expensive compared to the revenue density. Most would be on service provider licensing paying per GB of RAM.

rahen 2y ago

OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP. It enables you to create a fully API-driven data center that includes elastic compute, elastic network, and elastic storage resources. The key difference is that, unlike a public cloud where you consume APIs (OPEX), with OpenStack, you own and manage them (CAPEX). OpenStack is not ideal for provisioning static workloads like you would with vCenter. It works best as an orchestrator for elastic, API-driven workloads. It also simplifies hybrid cloud integration: link your SDN networks, then use Heat to manage deployments based on predefined rules and affinities. Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.

throwaway48540 2y ago
I don't follow the difference between static and elastic workloads. OpenStack can create a VM just like VMware, and has more features that would otherwise be implemented as a K8s cluster running on VMs.
- rahen 2y ago
  In a cloud environment like OpenStack, virtual machines are a means to provide compute resources, not an end goal like in VMware. Elastic workloads typically scale horizontally, unlike the vertical scaling or static provisioning seen in environments such as VMware. Elastic workloads are usually stateless, declaratively provisioned, have short uptimes, and are designed to fail gracefully rather than relying on high availability. Kubernetes (K8S) can achieve similar capabilities, but is still distinct from what OpenStack offers: an open-source, private AWS providing multi-tenant, API-driven infrastructure for storage, networking, and compute. If you don't care about working with elastic APIs, OpenStack/AWS is probably not for you, use VMware/ProxMox + Kubernetes.
  - throwaway48540 2y ago
    Thank you!
throw0101c 2y ago