VMware under EMC $625M acquisition lasted ‘04-‘15
Dell acquires EMC for $58B in ‘15 which includes previously acquired VMware.
Now Dell is trying to balance their books and sells entire stake of VMWare in ‘21.
Broadcom now picks up the pieces of VMware with acquisition completed this year (‘23).
I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
Maybe Oracle or MS will be the next to bag hold.
There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box. If you think IBM and mainframe is bad, you've never lived with a technology that Broadcom has acquired.
VMware's revenue for 2022 is $13B, and net income about $1.8B. Trim sales department, remove duplication(HR, IT, etc), cut down development, remove many make-work projects that the middle management engages in, increase licensing/support cost. They will focus more on net income, financing costs for $69B will be taken care of by layoffs and other stuff.
hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?
Obviously if you’re running dozens of hosts and thousands of VMs, needing live migration and things like that, then it’d probably be missing a lot of features you’d want, but for smaller stuff it’s pretty crazy how well it works.
Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up.
Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!
I really thought there was a strong play there to do a major private cloud play as part of Dell's 'come back story' and then nothing.
But maybe that's exactly the problem. For a container based solution you still need a hypervisor but if you invite hypervisor people to the table, to they really want to champion linux containers or do they want to try to reach a local maximum by squeezing all of the fat out of VMs.
Even the Java to an extent 'got it' more than Dell+VMWare. I abandoned Java as a platform right around the time Docker went from whispers in dark corners to a quiet ping on people's radars. Within a couple years of that, the JVM team had increased their level of effort to shrink the system footprint from what I would label bet-hedging to aggressively. You need a small JVM if you're going to pack five services and/or ten JVMs onto the same host. Initially J2EE imagined itself to be multitenant, and it did a poor job of re-implementing half of Erlang, poorly. Containers were clearly on their radar.
I bet the problem is that they are too “enterprise” and couldn’t price it low enough. If it were too expensive it wouldn’t be competitive with big cloud managed offerings.
Source: Someone higher up in my department.
They exist on legacy vendor lockin, and will milk customers until there is nothing left, which will take decades or more
That was how Adobe ran for a looooong time, up until and including CS6. They didn't give a f..k about piracy beyond something that could trivially be circumvented by a keygen and a few well-placed /etc/hosts entries, and that was what made them the utterly dominant power in anything creative - people were used to years of working with Photoshop (a friend of mine started with photography at age 13!), and so they demanded from employers that they use Photoshop. Incidentally, that also was what kept Apple afloat before the iPod/iPhone days - Adobe stuff just worked fine on Apple hardware but was a nightmare on Windows, so people also demanded Macs for their work.
The advent of CC came once Adobe had achieved that lock-in and started milking its customers for all they were worth, and additionally they opened up a load of legitimate customers as well who didn't feel like dropping a few grand on Adobe stuff but who cares about 50$ a month?
But on the other hand, look at how that turned out :(
Is it at all comparable to ESX?
I kind of assumed the Proxmox was just the free and cheap and bare bones option.
I don't understand orgs that deal with companies with a loooooonnnnnngggggg history of predatory pricing and sales shenanigans and not have active mitigation plans.
Who has Oracle that isn't actively planning going to Postgres or MariaDB? Of course I'd say the same thing for IBM in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1990s, and AWS today.
VMWare obviously has a lot of the same.
More to the point, I think VirtualBox is the equivalent, broadly, of VMWare Workstation/VMWare Player; which is a specific individual product that runs on desktop as type 2 hypervisor and a teeny tiny bit of the broader VMWare ecosystem (probably neglible part of their revenue).
I don't know if VirtualBox has any product or share in server/datacentre space? Whereas, VMware is absolutely positively huge. The core ESXi product, sure; but again the ecosystem around it, from vSPhere/vCenter to vRealize and Orchestrator and nsx and vSan and everything else, the management and automation flows are pretty well integrated (externally; I'm sure it's a acquired/developed mess internally as every other IT product ever:).
It's a bit like... I don't know, "what does Window Explorer have that File Commander doesn't"? It's a valid question that has a rational answer which is useful for limited use cases, but it misses the very very big forest (Windows and Office and Azure etc) for very minor trees inside of it
Hope that helps a bit?
ESXi and the VMWare products built on top of it (vCenter/vSphere) are not even comparable to VB, other than that they both can run virtual machines. vSphere can move running VMs between storage or compute hosts without interruption, can failover between storage or compute, can failover between networking outages (thanks to virtual switches and the ecosystem of hardware support around it), and provides a platform for additional third party add ons for automated backups and recovery. Not to mention easy role based SSO access. My entire university's infrastructure was virtualized on VMWare aside from a few domain controllers and the Netapp storage clusters it all ran on, and the equally large Linux/KVM infrastructure and the HPC datacenter that ran a bunch of other stuff for...reasons (higher ed is fun). And as an added bonus, desktop type 2 hypervisors like Workstation or Fusion integrate perfectly into it. I used to manage a dozen Windows and Linux VMs straight from VMWare Fusion on my Mac and still do at home in my little VMUG cluster.
It's like comparing a Chevy Spark to an aircraft carrier, except you built an entire medium to large sized organization's infrastructure on top of it. You can't just switch overnight unless you want to stop making money for a while. For most orgs who can justify the already steep price, moving away from VMWare onto something else will mean multiple years long projects requiring thousands of person-hours to complete, redundant efforts (as the old stuff can't just go away until the new stuff is battle tested), on top of probable hardware purchases since VMWare and its demands have shaped on-site datacenter spend, layout, and networking for years.
The actual VMs are the easiest part to move since they are just some virtual disks and a config file. It's all the other supporting stuff and high availability that need to configured and battle tested that will take forever. It's not something you can plan to do ahead of needing to do it because doing so would mean doing the same job twice for years for a bet that you can't just weather some higher costs for a year or two before you can move stuff onto cheaper platforms (and train/hire for expertise).
For my specific use case, it's display responsiveness.
My main work machine is a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3. Our development environment is Ubuntu, so when I got the machine our IT guy had helpfully installed Ubuntu on it.
There were two major problems though. I could only get my AirPods to pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone. And worse, I couldn't get my triple-monitor setup to work at all. (The ThinkPad has a 15" 4K display, and I use two 24" 4K displays with it: one in landscape mode immediately above the ThinkPad display, another in portrait mode to the left.) I could only get two displays out of the three to come up.
I did like the hardware quite a lot - I've been a huge ThinkPad fan for 25 years. So I immediately bought a similar machine for personal use. It came with Windows, and both of the above items worked "out of the box".
So I looked at the bottom of the work machine and saw that it came with a Windows license. I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Lenovo and installed Windows on it, figuring I would run Ubuntu in a VM.
I tried VirtualBox first, and it worked, but the display wasn't smooth. For example, I often use the Windows key + left/right arrow to move a window to one side of the display or the other. Ubuntu does a "sliding" animation when you do this, but it looked like it was only refreshing the display every tenth of a second or so.
So I tried VMware and it was perfect. The display is just about as responsive as running Ubuntu on the bare metal - every transition and animation is perfectly smooth.
It's also licensable individually. If you want to use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business environment, you need to buy a per-user license. It's only $40, but Oracle has a minimum order quantity of 100, so you're spending at least $4000.[1] i.e. in a business, for about 20-30 users, VMware Workstation is cheaper.
[1] https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=dstore:product:257141221156...
virtualbox is pretty capable but I only view it as equivalent to vmware workstation.
Is everyone on Hyper V already? Does Citrix still exist?
Are SuSE or Red Hat offering an 'open source' alternative? Surely people aren't using Proxmox in production?
Lot's do, e.g., the Austrian domain registry:
https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/stories/story/nic-at
And many others (albeit the big ones aren't listed there, a bit harder to get real testimonials from them, and we do not pester everybody):
The oVirt community's most recent release is from last December, so I'm not sure whether that project is going to thrive now that Red Hat has largely stepped away. (Last blog update is also December 2022.)
I don't expect Ovirt to survive, the vast majority of development was RH.
"The market" seems to "deciding" that in-house virtualization will be insanely expensive, and otherwise you need to rent OCP.
Yes, https://www.xenserver.com/ and French OSS derivative https://xcp-ng.org
Citrix is now a private company run by former Broadcom head of software who negotiated VMware acquisition, https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/citrix-tibco-new-ceo-tom-krau...
Disclaimer: I work here
Now they bolted on virtual machines onto their OpenShift container platform and are pushing that.
In all seriousness, I think it is a hot topic in Enterprise Architecture (tm) meeting rooms ever since the merger was announced (I know it was in ours). But even if you find an alternative, you need to move, and a lot of companies have a lot of hard to modernize workloads which are skillfully managed by a lot of VMware trained personnel. No easy task.
VMware's true magic is with vCenter. While Microsoft has an equivalent to that (SC VMM), nobody seems to use it because it is virtually unusable. I've never seen a successful production cluster of VMM running.
Would love to hear a counter argument or evidence otherwise but my impression is there are very few successful openstack deployments out there and mostly it just is useful to provide some negotiating leverage when talking to your VMware rep.
Disclaimer: I work here
Then you will probably use some operations layer on top of that (e.g. QubesOS and XCP-NG are only Xen; Proxmox is only KVM/containers; libvirtd does both). Then based on that you pick your actual host OS (in case it's not already set).
I have GPU passthrough of the iGPU on a Ryzen 4000U working with kvm/qemu+libvirtd on an Alpine base. So the hypervisor runs headless (booting in blind mode) and the guest OS takes over the iGPU entirely. The caveats are explained in that arch Wiki article, IIRC. I think the least obvious part for me was sourcing and loading of the microcode/firmware.
Also had success with hybrid graphics (Ryzen APU + AMD RX GPU with one passed through and one on host) on an otherwise similar hypervisor setup on Arch BTW.
Even more so than usual, the more recent and obscure your hardware, the higher chance you'll get to compare different kernel versions, incant random undocumented parameters you found in some forum comment, or even reach for out-of-tree patches to get running smoothly.
I know a few organizations and vendors (like Veeam) were looking to RHV to be a good replacement, the announcement to discontinue the product seems to catch everyone by surprise.
I am still hoping Veeam will add support for a good 3rd option, proxmox, XCP, direct KVM, something...
What are the alternatives?
I've even used the Linux client to virtualize physical boxes.
VMware was a pretty good steward from my limited perspective. Does anyone have any experience with successful open source projects under Broadcom? They don't seem to have a good track record with driver support, at the least...
As to why there seems to be such an increase in security patches, its like the quote from Willie Sutton. That's where the money is.. The largest target gets the most attention.
Everybody has bugs. While you may hide under the radar with using some lesser known things, don't fool yourself thinking that there aren't holes the hackers can weave their way through.
Broadcom would surely rise license costs while at the same time disinvesting.
Also, what will happen with VMWare’s Kubernetes investments? I am guessing all of their open source work will cease to exist?
Off the top of my head they have:
- Carbon black for what used to be called antivirus but has metastasized into XDR, an all encompassing endpoint security/detection/response tool
- A whole automation framework (vRA/vRO) that companies use for automating deploying VMs and other stuff. Probably straightforward to replace with other automation frameworks but migrating existing playbooks will take time and expertise ($$$)
- A whole virtual desktop management suite (Horizon) including SaaS IDP/Mobile Device Management (Workspace One/VMware identity manager). Can probably patch together a replacement with stuff like Jamf, your SaaS IDP of choice, and Microsoft's hosted VDI but it won't be quick and again device migrations might suck
- Software defined networking with NSX. This could be difficult to quickly replace if you have a whole system built around automating network segmentation/management with it. It seems like your choice is either go with a network vendor and lose tight VM integration or go with a lower tier virtualization platform and get a bunch of hacked together Apache/Linux native stuff and no support
- SDWAN stuff. Probably relatively easy to replace unless you have a huge number of branches or edge devices that need to be physically updated by rolling trucks
- VMware cloud where ESXi/vSphere run on public clouds. To replace it you need to stand up a whole datacenter/colo hypervisor environment/network/storage and staff up to manage them
I could go on but suffice it to say I don't envy the enterprise management types having to consider untangling their dependencies on VMware right now.
EUC, Aria and Carbon Black are still up in the air.
I was surprised that VMware kept the "CloudHealth" branding as long as they did, - it turned out that the brand actually had some cache that VMware wanted to hang on to. But it was formally dropped last year, in favor of "VMware Aria Cloud Cost Control", or some equally overdescribed thing.
I wish an MBA can explain to me the value of rebranding and losing brand loyalty/familiarity.
This is textbook management 101, and not just for software companies.
Case in point: QEMU now has support[0] for live migrating VM's RAM (like vMotion) and disk images (like Storage vMotion). But I'm not aware of any publicly-released cluster orchestration layer that does it for you - so you may need to build your own.
Happy to be proven wrong.
[0] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/03/24/live-migrating...
1. XCP-ng is a bit more polished and stable than Proxmox. Both are supposedly level 1 hypervisors, but while XCP-ng separates the hypervisor from the rest of the OS, Proxmox bumps it all together. Meaning that if something goes wrong with other part of the base OS, it will affect Proxmox.
2. It's simpler to do hardware pass-through on Proxmox (there's a GUI for that), but XCP-ng is more stable. There were occasions in which I couldn't pass through a device on Proxmox, but it worked perfectly fine on XCP-ng.
3. Xen Orchestra is the new manager for XCP-ng, the old Windows utility (which was great and had more functionality) is now EOL. But the creators from Xen Orchestra are too focused on getting VMWare clusters to migrate to their product and fail to add much needed functionality.
4. XCP-ng doesn't allow you to start VMs at boot in a certain order.
5. XCP-ng doesn't auto-mount shares when they come online.
6. XCP-ng doesn't have vGPU functionality for Nvidia or for newer Intel GPUs.
7. XCP-ng makes it much easier to create clusters than Proxmox.
8. Proxmox has a big community behind, meaning you can do some nifty hacks like: install MacOS, install Synology NAS software, do vGPU unlock (don't confuse this with proper vGPU support).
Bottom line: - I really want to like XCP-ng, but I'm migrating the work machines to Proxmox. Points 4, 5 and 6 are a big no-go, and it became a hassle to live with them. Unfortunately the developers, although polite, show no interest in improving those areas.
Too bad Broadcom will also destroy the good parts.
