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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 themse

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.

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.