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Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and e

by d3Xt3r 18d ago

Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure. So yeah, plenty of folks out there using omprem gear, it's kinda the reason why Broadcom is able to what it's doing - lots of suckers out there who're married yo vmware and can't get a divorce.

JoeBOFH 18d ago
Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh
- deltoidmaximus 18d ago
  I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!
  - JoeBOFH 18d ago
    I’ll be honest it’s been over 10 years at this point. But we had to virtualize a dying Gateway 2000 that had Windows XP on it. As part of that we needed ISA to keep working. I found some USB ISA adapters and ordered them. It took a lot of messing around with Workstation, the host Windows 7 and drivers on the VM. I can’t remember all the details at this point :(
kjs3 18d ago
Couple of things (having lived in this world). The people running this stuff aren't by default stupid (well, not always), and not assuming they are helps with understanding. First, someone has to pay to migrate apps, and as often as not the resources to do that aren't available. Sometimes you do the math and it doesn't make finacial sense to allocate those resources. And sometimes you just can't move apps. The vendor might not support vm/cloud/web deployment. Or, very common in manufacturing, you have an app that runs a machine and requires a very, very specific hw/sw environment to be supported. Next, there's that whole regulated thing. We spend a lot of time in front of federal/national regulators explaining how we do things so that we don't screw up your mortgage or whatever. And those regulators take careful notes. So if I've spent the last 10 years explaining how we have this amazing VMWare deployment that ticks all the boxes, they're going to want some very, very detailed explanations of how HP VME or Proxmox or whatever is going to tick all the same boxes at least as good as VMWare did. And we're inviting a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years to make sure we did it right. It's a lot of work. Sometimes you weigh everything, not just 'it costs less' or 'Broadcom are a bunch of assholes' or 'we don't want bros on HN to think we're suckers', and the answer is legitimately "the divorce isn't worth it".

by d3Xt3r 18d ago

JoeBOFH 18d ago

Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh

deltoidmaximus 18d ago
I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!
- JoeBOFH 18d ago
  I’ll be honest it’s been over 10 years at this point. But we had to virtualize a dying Gateway 2000 that had Windows XP on it. As part of that we needed ISA to keep working. I found some USB ISA adapters and ordered them. It took a lot of messing around with Workstation, the host Windows 7 and drivers on the VM. I can’t remember all the details at this point :(

kjs3 18d ago

Couple of things (having lived in this world). The people running this stuff aren't by default stupid (well, not always), and not assuming they are helps with understanding. First, someone has to pay to migrate apps, and as often as not the resources to do that aren't available. Sometimes you do the math and it doesn't make finacial sense to allocate those resources. And sometimes you just can't move apps. The vendor might not support vm/cloud/web deployment. Or, very common in manufacturing, you have an app that runs a machine and requires a very, very specific hw/sw environment to be supported. Next, there's that whole regulated thing. We spend a lot of time in front of federal/national regulators explaining how we do things so that we don't screw up your mortgage or whatever. And those regulators take careful notes. So if I've spent the last 10 years explaining how we have this amazing VMWare deployment that ticks all the boxes, they're going to want some very, very detailed explanations of how HP VME or Proxmox or whatever is going to tick all the same boxes at least as good as VMWare did. And we're inviting a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years to make sure we did it right. It's a lot of work. Sometimes you weigh everything, not just 'it costs less' or 'Broadcom are a bunch of assholes' or 'we don't want bros on HN to think we're suckers', and the answer is legitimately "the divorce isn't worth it".