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?
The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes.
The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface.
it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem.
That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for.
It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks).
As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
See VM.pool_migrate and VM.migrate_send https://xapi-project.github.io/xen-api/classes/vm.html. Those features got introduced in Xenserver 4.0 (2007) and 6.1 (2012).
Disclaimer: I work at XenServer.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is absolute nonsense.
Actually, no, they apparently won't, because I tried and was told they are discontinuing that product. They are going full steam on their OpenShift (k8s) product though, and will be happy to inform you that you can run a VM on that, but if you press them you'll find that you're actually running a VM in a container, and that you have to specify it as a k8s deployment, so apparently you can't just throw a VM up like you can in vCenter.
Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.
Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.
Everyone has heard of it, it's theoretically comparable to the likes of VMware/Parallels desktop hypervisors, and it's cheaper. But just like spam (compared to ham), it's also obvious to anyone that's used both that it's by far the worse option, and there's very few reasons to use it besides cost, while there are numerous reasons to use one of the better alternatives.
In general, performance is significantly better with other hypervisors, but in particular shared filesystem performance (ie sharing a directory from the host OS into the guest) and features are lacking on virtualbox.
It's the default provider used by vagrant, and even the vagrant team recommend using a different provider for "any serious work".
Of course one could argue there's an even higher percentage of inedible parts in the canned monstrosity because it's all inedible, and I wouldn't argue that view point is wrong.
Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things.
Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
For the desktop, VirtualBox isn't much better. At one point after Oracle purchased it, they were tracking your IP and if they found you were using their extension pack that provides essential capabilities like USB 3 support (only the core of VirtualBox is GPL) and it was for commercial use, they were hitting you up for a license [0].
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...
