Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
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VMs in general
There are a variety of options available with near feature parity. Killing the free version effectively cut out lab users which may as well say: we sure would like people to start training on a new platform. People use what they are comfortable with… and tend to carry a hatchet for companies that burn them.
This was a short sighted play which ultimately will result in the platform dying slowly as the workforce changes. They cut off new blood: less people will be proficient with their platform and more will be pushing for a switch to the competition. In addition to the loss of the free version they massively ramped prices. They won’t last. Right now the companies that are too big to pivot are already starting to weigh the costs of transitioning vs the squeeze. The C-suite are idiots.
With infrastructure as code, vm management has become even more easy. A lot of companies are standardizing their vm park based on new deployment and management techniques e Sometimes in IaaS platforms (a fancy name for externally managed, rented hardware) but the VM has a long life ahead.
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Sounds like terraform with extra steps.
Terraform is VMs you dumbass
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What.
Not even remotely related.
N… no…
VMs have many applications outside the cloud
One of those is running the cloud or being the cloud
Yeah, but most of that runs on Hyper-V, KVM or Xen/XCP.
True, but it was more of a reply to this.
RIP VMware.
VMs in general
One of the applications outside the cloud is running the cloud?
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You are either going all in with VMware or you’re dead to them. Full suite or nothing, take your pick.
Perhaps I’ll try it out for a while before making such a huge commitme… oh, i see…
For the cost, SMB is going to walk away. There are millions of SMB’s.
They are planning to tolerate losing 95% of their customers. Of about 100,000 customers, they only care about 600 of them much, and about 6 thousand kind of, if they want to stick around, but not too much. The rest are fully expected to bail.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/
SMBs are not the target. Companies with a sizeable vSAN investment, huge amounts of VMware based automation and the fortune 1000 are. MSRP on the cheap license is going to be around $275/core, minimum 16 cores per socket.
That’s simply short sighted.
So they ignore the Fortune 1000+1 (the up-and-coming 1000). They also stop providing a learning/familiarity path.
I’m already seeing SMBs looking at KVM, Proxmox, Xen, etc. When these young engineers/managers/architects grow and move to Enterprise, what are they going to recommend when VMware is $300/core?
I’m all for (as in I push) recognizing the value of (even expensive) licensing when it reduces engineering costs and complexity, but that’s what I’d call a “metric shitload”.
A mid-size business could easily justify transitioning to just about any other VM solution when faced with that kind of increase. One 16-core host is now $5k in licensing, practically doubling the cost - and that’s an annual cost for years - saddling “future IT” with that cost that can now no longer be invested elsewhere.
Now imagine you have 10 such boxes.
LOL was about to implement esxi, on a rather beefy surplus server, to run all my students’ PCs on since win 11 won’t boot on their hardware from 24h2… Guess my students won’t get to use VMware and the purchase approval I just got for a few workstation pro licenses wasn’t needed.
Proxmox for baremetal hypervisor, or? I’ve got a bunch of windows server licenses as well, I think some for hyper-v server as well. What would you implement?
I’m happy with proxmox in a non-production environment/homeLab. Stable and straightforward.
Just found out from your comment that windows is shutting the door completely on CPUs that don’t support POPCNT. There’s config settings to install Windows 11 on legacy hardware (old CPU, tpm chips, etc) but who knows when they’ll pull the plug on that.
Proxmox is really good, same with XCP-ng. You could also run something like Debian server and roll your own KVM based platform if you have the chops.
Overall, lots of solid choices in the Open Source realm. I would avoid proprietary solutions, since that’s largely the reason the whole VMWare situation happened in the first place.
Check xcp-ng with xen-orchestra.
Here’s a really nice guide to XCP-NG vs Proxmox (Video creator’s preference is for XCP, so there’s an acknowledged bias there, but it’s still a solid rundown of the two).
Personally, I just run straight KVM on Debian or Ubuntu servers, but that’s not for everyone. Web based management for KVM is still kind of rough. Cockpit is getting there, but it’s missing key features, and the web based graphical console absolutely sucks.
Hyper-V or nutanix community. those will be the dominant hypervisors in the near future. I can see nutanix really taking off soon if they cant reach some of the features that VMware had. Hyper-v is sort of stuck since their host OS layer sucks, but it’s also pretty cheap.
They’ve “redone” hyper-v a bit with the Azure HCI stack, but yeah, the OS layer sucks. Even more so than normal windows server.
I know internally Broadcom is screwing over VMware employees with new contracts. I’ve heard of staff pushing back three times so far to get contracts changed.
They also poached all of the biggest customers from a bunch of their resellers, from what I hear. I’m guessing the reseller market is pretty dead.
And everyone clapp… oops not that kind of story
And everyone saw that coming
And everyone saw that coming
I wonder where all the “wE jUSt GoTTa WAiT aNd SEe” people are now?
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