Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B
reuters.com
reuters.com
Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects.
Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware
Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh
Should Broadcom do all those things, they run a substantial risk of degrading the products offered by VMware, which is a poor business decision.
Given the very profitable state of VMware, it's a lot more likely that they will only introduce minor changes.
Disclaimer: forced Broadcom customer here
It used to be Product X becomes Websphere Product X, then disappears from their salespeople's lips about 5 years later.
Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street considers important.
Expect major cuts in R&D, receptionists, travel expenses, general benefits, and virtually no hiring of college grads or interns. You’ll be on the phone in a queue for hours to get outsourced IT support.
Support of open source should be the least of your worries.
Stock price might go up though…
In the sysadmin world, Backup Exec and Norton products are meme's at this point, examples of the worst kind of software
so I am not sure how it could have gone down in quality
Norton never had any real bearing on SEP.
The consumer side of Symantec was not sold to Broadcom and became Norton Lifelock.
Not sure if that was a typo, eggcorn, or pun on truth and fiction post-acquisition...
You argued the exact opposite? You're saying it's all about EBITDA...
https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-vsph...
Yet OpenShift is making bank. You'd be surprised how much money they make on AWS, Azure, and Google.
Upgrades within major versions are totally painless, one-click affairs.
It is slick, but niche. Incredibly rock solid - in ways K8S is not - and you pay for it.
It is on its way out as a product.
Again, referring to what used to be PCF. Hence why the more modern Tanzu is K8s based.
Unfortunately there’s no real equivalent (OpenShift is not really “it”) on K8s unless you’re assembling several products together with a lot of glue. Which is what everyone does, with varying quality.
I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as long as it continues to be free for home use.
One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware, whereas VMware has all the usual enterprise-level support commitments and so you're very much on your own if you try to force it to run on hardware that isn't on their official compatibility list.
That was my first (and last) hurdle when wanting to try out ESXi...
I booted up the installer only to be greeted by a "not enough RAM" message. I believe it's 4GB minimum, which my tiny machine had, but ESXi read it as 3.9GB instead of 4.0GB and refused to budge.
Very happy with Proxmox on the other hand! Having access to the underlying Debian is also quite nice if you need to do something that's not supported by the interface.
The ZFS Filesystem is a nice feature
These were what i was thinking of yeah.
Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.
That is hardly true.
The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.
Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.
Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.
Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.
Things like Monitoring Platforms, Backup Solutions (veeam), Automation tool kits (powershell), etc.
I like Proxmox, I use it personally, but in its current form I do not see how any medium or large enterprise that has is management tooling around VMWare could just drop in proxmox.
- the core vSphere hypervisor and management software
- Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service.
- cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap
- endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was AirWatch
- management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and Cloud Health
- workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)
- virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix
- software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5, Cisco, Juniper etc.
- modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source... containers & developer tools & data services & agile consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum, Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)
(Everyone was fired after that season, except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.)
On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.
What’s up with this? Did their company steal the name of the tool rsync?
I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.
[1] "JohnCompanies"
I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.
The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.
For some reason I could not edit my post so I had to reply to my post.
One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.
Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware
Kubernetes is fine.
The ecosystem is thriving and because the k8s platform was built to be pluggable; it is an actual platform. Docker (the company) tried to monopolize and monetize when they built Swarm, and that’s why they lost the cluster orchestrator space IMO. Docker (the tool) is just a tool, not really something you can monetize easily. Docker (the image format) is where most of the value lives, there isn’t much value to extract there as it’s an open protocol.
Docker (the tool) was commoditized by k8s, and now there isn’t really any way to charge for a differentiated implementation. Providing a registry and a best-in-class Docker for Desktop experience isn’t going to be a huge TAM.
I want to "Integrationware" software that just exists for various vendors to cut deals and piggy-back with oneanother.
Of course, this is pretty much what ended up destroying OpenStack outside a few niches. HP OpenStack that only worked with 3PAR SANs was a great example - every finger in the OpenStack pie was trying to push OpenStack to have corners that they could monopolise and tie to their proprietary products.
Docker failed because they tried to compete with Kubernetes, lost and then didn't have a clue how to find a niche where they could enrich the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Taking driver code out of Linux and just running it inside the hypervisor has to be the most brazen violations possible.
If you mean, did they remove the vmkLinux layer from their product? Yes, they did, back in 2019 soon after they won the lawsuit on procedural grounds (the court ruled the person who brought the suit didn't have standing, and it was upheld on appeal).
For those reading along at home, that's a shim layer to link GPLed code into the closed source hypervisor.
It's absurd that the company responsible for some of the most blatant license violations in the industry (and is still actively continuing to violate after a decade) is trying to push itself as open source friendly.
I understand why you might want to, I just don’t understand what the rule would be.
Additionally they didn't publish the source to even the GPLed drivers they shipped as binaries, before even talking about the core hypervisor itself.
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/381190-windows-tcpip-stac...
My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem.
Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver SDK and hardware vendors wrote native drivers for it.
To me this seems very similar to the way Linux had for a while a way to run Wifi drivers originally written for NT, though it didn’t lead to the year of the Linux desktop as some of us might have hoped for at the time.
The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.
The relationship between the Console OS and the Vmkernel / hypervisor was very similar to the relationship between Windows/Linux/macOS and VMware Workstation/Fusion, which were also proprietary software not derived from any of those OSes.
Also, does 'they' actually include 'you'? Googling your username seems to connect you with vmware code pretty intimately.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/04/18/how-wall...
https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud/amazon-shocker-ceo-jas...
[1] Andy Jassy is my skip^9 manager.
> My hope is that Michael Dell vetos this merger, from my accounts of Michael and the people I know who are employed by Dell, Michael is a great leader and a good human being and that is the most important thing, not profit at any cost.
I don't know if the author is serious. This deal has Michael Dell financial engineering written all over it. He's not going to veto anything. Dell is all about enriching himself with moves like this rather organically grow a company.
The vast majority of why people are VMware proponents is down to their virtualisation software. It's why we were big resellers for a while. But for the last few years, their own sales people have only wanted to talk about security products, quite plainly acknowledging stagnant growth in on premise virtualisation.
But virtualisation is in my view the only place they've made it big. You've just linked a Reddit post in /r/cybersecurity talking about security products and every reply is about how to replace ESXi. It'll be interesting to see how their future pans out.
VMware Workstation blew my mind when I saw it demoed in (I think) mid-2000 [1]. I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop. I wonder whether VMware's problem nowadays is that, having basically invented the technology, they've become almost synonymous with the category of virtualisation tech - kind of like "Hoover" for home appliances - and their other products get less attention.
(I know that VMware didn't invent the idea of virtual machines. But my perception is that at that time, virtualised OSs were mostly found in mainframes.)
That's called emulation. That's not what VMWare does.
> I genuinely couldn't believe what I was seeing - it seemed that revolutionary, running an OS inside an OS on a desktop
SoftPC was in fact “running an OS inside an OS on the desktop “
IBM, actually, on mainframes.
Yes, I noted that in my post. I guess I meant general purpose virtualisation running on general purpose, commodity hardware.
Back in the late 80s spent 18 months in a role where I was developing scientific software on an IBM System/36 under VM/CMS. While this system actually had a hypervisor (CP) running on the physical hardware, and itself running virtualised instances of the CMS OS, it never felt (in hindsight) like I was in a virtualised environment. It seemed more like being logged into a multi-user unix box where everything ran in the same kernel - perhaps because the mainframe virtualisation layer was completely invisible to me, and everyone on the mainframe saw the same OS.
But point taken.
When people think of virtualisation, they think VMware as a key player in building and pushing the technology.
Like when you think of the first smartphone you think of the Apple iPhone, despite there being "smartphones" prior to its release.
I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so.
Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to docker or another open source solution anyway.
It's been a few years since I've worked with bare metal, but doesn't Docker require a hypervisor for the containers?
You could swap to KVM or Hyper-V, but transitioning an org's hypervisor on bare metal is a massive task any way you cut it.
I was on a team that ran performance critical stuff for a reasonable sized ecommerce business - moving from vmware to bare metal was fantastic on every level from api’s to performance and reliability.
The enterprise spirit is stong in vmware.
When you refer to smaller company and mention docker, or open source, it's only those that are tech startups, or close to the field with the skill to operate in this fashion. The majority of small and medium companies don't have the skills or resources to do this. Over time that changes, but it's completely unrealistic to think that they can get away quickly from VMware (even when their overworked IT person would like to.)
You can run Windows in a docker container so this would support legacy applications.
I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not insurmountable. If all else fails, Virtual box is open source
I would argue that there are more Docker containers running on a VM, running on top of VMware than there are Docker containers running on bare metal servers.
Both VMs and containers can be used and misused in a number of ways, but rarely can you replace a VM on VMware ESXi with Docker. There's still a massive business case for VMware and the only real competitors are Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer (if it's still called that).
You also have to remember that there's a crazy big Microsoft world out there, Docker and containers still aren't of much use here. While this could run on Hyper-V, many just pick ESXi because it's what they know (No one was ever fired for choosing VMware).
Ether figure it out now, or in 2 years when VMware starts to suck.
Then again, all the big companies I know put things off until the last moment.
If I was a better developer I'd be putting together a project right now that allows you to run all your happy legacy Windows software with Docker.
Shouldn't be hard to raise a bit of funding for such a project assuming you have the right background.
... on Windows. So it doesn't really mesh with a typical server environment.
Or use Virtual Box on Ubuntu
But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.
If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of your “parent” hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-migrate to healthy hosts?
And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here. That is very different. You don’t roll your own VMware alternative. You just use VMware.
> Seems like their software strategy is to buy a business which doesn't have much room to grow but is extremely entrenched, and then reduce staffing and raise prices as much as possible.
- xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.
- proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available.
- The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]
[1] - https://xcp-ng.com/
[2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware
[3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
[4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox...
[5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support
[6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/
[7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware
Which is based upon KVM - AIUI.
https://www.kovarus.com/blog/deep-dive-into-the-aws-nitro-sy...
Disclaimer: I am an ex-employee of VMware.
It's not the lower level primitives here that are valuable from VMware, it's the higher level abstractions built on top of them that facilitate easier management and use by (relatively) less technical people.
You can give a "good at Windows" type technician a few hours of training and they can put together a usable vCenter deployment, including things like corporate SSO and such. They can drag and drop things around and it'll mostly work. And when things go wrong and this person is confused about what to do, they can call up support for help.
Obviously, this is centered on-prem, which is indeed shrinking - but a lot of orgs have a lot of investment in stuff running on site, and there are still plenty of cases where having e.g. lots of storage and enough compute to "process" it in some way physically close to office users can speed up their workflows.
This is something that the HN crowd repeats as if it were an obvious axiom where no scrutiny is needed. While I'm sure it's true that there's a general movement towards cloud-based infrastructure, there is a very real and non-trivial part of the IT infrastructure of any country that will not move to the cloud in the coming decade, if it ever will. This general movement is not the same thing as "everything will eventually have moved".
The hypothesis that on-site virtualization somehow is an obviously dying technology assumes that it must be true that on-site hosting will stop existing, which I have a very hard time believing. If nothing else (and there are plenty of "elses"), strict data security and privacy concerns will keep on-site hosting moated for a long time.
The current solution to business management feels suboptimal. If companies are like persons maybe they should be organized with a more integrated 'body', where the 'head' doesn't have total power to sell out the rest of the integrated parts for its own gain. Co-op like organizational structures might avoid this issue, for example.
Just like analysts said IBM brought RedHat mainly for Openshift platform and I think there is some truth to it. Seems Broadcom has brought VMWare for their Tanzu platform which is direct competitor of Openshift. It is less about virtualization in corporate data centers which many agree here is legacy business at this point.
Why does a chipmaker want/need to expand into enterprise software? Shouldn't they be expanding to making different chips?
The web page for their software offerings is at https://software.broadcom.com/ . The interesting thing you'll notice is that they do not list any specific software they offer (e.g. Symantec for enterprise security, which by the way is separate from Norton now). Rather they sell you on their ability to deliver on four specific enterprise functional needs.
They won't answer your call to buy their suite unless you're in the Fortune 500. They will try to sell you on their whole suite. They will upsell you on any new acquisition, eg VMWare.
They might renew my personal VMWare Fusion license for another year but would probably close that down soon for not being core. On the M1 I've moved on anyway to UTM.
EDIT: word choice
The cool thing about UTM is that it runs hardware virt and emulation, so you can run x86 on M1, which Vmware Fusion cannot do.
You’re thinking that Broadcom acts as a company with a technological vision. This is a totally not the case and the CEO is very open about that.
Today’s Broadcom is a company that optimizes the financial performance of technology assets.
There are no long term plans.
Can someone more financially literate (or with direct experience in the stock market) explain this discrepancy to me?
(comment made at ~9:33am ET, stock market opened a few minutes ago)
1. The deal might not go through, or the terms might change.
2. You might not be able to get 100% cash for your shares.
[1] https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/e...
As the deal becomes increasingly likely to go through, the stock price will likely gradually shift up to match the deal price.
Especially from the Pivotal portfolio such as RabbitMQ, GreenPlum, Spring, Hibernate, etc... although I'm sure most here couldn't care less about Spring related projects.
I feel like Pivotal has been doing a great job lately - especially with Spring. I'd hate to see Broadcomm mess with this, but it feels highly possible.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and used to be part of the Hibernate team
I had concerns that Vertx was bundled into that portfolio too, but RH to rescue again.
The ordering/renewal process was so messed up by the transition that for approximately 18 months it was almost impossible to get a quote or place an order, even to renew an existing subscription, long enough that Symantec started just giving out subscription extensions to tide people over until the order process worked again.
Probably. 6 months ago they were looking at acquiring SAS (which didn't go anywhere). The core competencies for that of those companies are even less related to what Broadcom does.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/market...
But at the time virtualization was considered as something "to keep that old Windows NT server/software running" - not foundational for all cloud services ever.
A broken clock is right twice a day, and even EMC CEO Joe Tucci was right once in his lifetime.
But don't look at his other acquisitions.
I have no idea if the 1 in 4 number is correct, but it feels reasonable.
It depends on what you mean by "end up well" and who, exactly, is meant by "acquirer" and "acquired". Yes, they're lucrative and worthwhile from the point of finance people, a rarified sliver of stake-holders and the law firms who buzz around to service all these. If they weren't you would not be seeing them as much.
From the point of view of technology advancement, the professionals who want to actually WORK in these domains, and the customers who depend on the products? No. These mergers/acquisitions are at best a mixed bag and more often a downgrade, or worst of all, a career-derailing adjustment.
That said, acquisitions can work if there is due diligence. I'm in a company that has acquired several companies in a related field. Each of the companies have had complementary products, and the cultures were vetted to be similar ours before purchase, ie small groups (30-50 people) who have demonstrated high skill, high trust, and low ego. Finally, there has been an effort keep groups generally autonomous while finding ways to synergize employees and services. There has been a strong feeling of working together. Groups have been willing to share their expertise and experience with other.
I guess in other words: the acquisition is a good idea, even if a product is subsumed into another product, there is plenty of real work to go around for employees to do. If you have to promptly fire people "because redundancy," it wasn't being done to improve your position in the field.
It's just a gut feeling, I have no data to back it up.
If you mean recession, as defined by two consecutive quarters of dropping GDP - if GDP drops, stock markets drop. Not sure the directionality there, but the two are usually part and parcel.
If stock prices drop, it's a great time for acquisitions if you're sitting on cash.
I suspect any time stock markets drop sufficiently, you'll see increased M&A activity, regardless of whether it is prolonged enough to count as a recession.
To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly
Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Since software isn't their core business, they pay an external company to keep their software running. Like it or not, cloud providers are for software companies, and most companies have no interest in becoming a software company. They might have some small groups that do analytics or software in-house, and those groups might use cloud providers, but all the essential software will be run by a company you can call when something breaks, or if you're big enough embeds some staff in your office.
It's just good sense to outsource non-core functions. Software companies outsource hosting and datacenter stuff to AWS, etc. Why should enterprises deal with Linux directly?
I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up.
If these (and the endless examples of paying professionals) are a tax for stupidity and laziness, then everyone is lazy and stupid. If you're not a software company, there's a good chance it's worth it to save the time to pay someone to set it up for you. Also, if Joe's Fish Market wants a POS system and needs a server for it and he decides to set it up himself, if he gets it up and running, what are the chances it'll stay up to day and not have a firewall issue? Probably pretty low compared to if a professional did it.
Joe wants to focus on selling fish. That's where he's a pro. I don't know anything about fish, but I could set up a server for him. We all have our own skills, and it's often worth while to leverage other people's skills, because they'll do it faster, better, and it will likely end up cheaper after time and security are taken into consideration.
Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies:
Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant.
You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you need one.
You pay a barber to cut your hair? Why not just wear a wig!
And so on ...
For some — but not all — people, that’s a preferable option.
For some — but not all — companies, enterprise tech is a preferable option.
"Inevitable repairs after 4 years" is just a delusion, and silly.
Might I suggest you be honest with yourself and say you like the new car feel? Maybe even like it as a status symbol? Don't want to think about what tires to buy to replace worn-out ones?
I'm the opposite. I like having a scuffed-up car (or in this case, jeep), with dogs climbing all over the seats and sand everywhere from going off road. I'd rather use the thing and have fun on the trip.
Even if I drove my jeep off a cliff, called it a total loss, and got nothing back from insurance, I'd lose less money than you lost in 3 years of leasing -- and I've already had the thing longer than that.
Dead wrong.
I lease the cheapest car that is practical for my situation. I consider cars completely utilitarian tools. I get no joy from them, I hate driving and take public transit whenever I can.
I had very little money until I was in my late 20s when my career prospects finally took off. Cheap cars that failed frequently were a constant source of anxiety because I couldn’t get far enough ahead to maintain savings. When my career improved and I could afford small luxuries, I spent the money on leasing because I wanted to avoid the anxiety of cars breaking down. It was a gift to myself to lower my stress level.
EDIT: also, in northern Minnesota where the winters are hard and everything is covered in salt, car trouble DOES start after 4 years. Sometimes before.
Yes, they don't want to think about what tires to buy. Or whether it needs to be fixed or not. The fact that repairs are not in inevitability but a possibility is part of the point.
The parent is making the point that they're rather throw money at the problem and not have to think about it, not that they've precisely run the numbers on all of the possibilities and decided their outcome is the most cost-effective.
The OP prob doesn’t want to enjoy the car. It’s a car. I don’t care about cars either. I don’t enjoy them as much as use them for their purpose of transportation.
Also literally everyone and every company relies on someone else to provide some services or hardware to enable people to do their job and live. Even this conversation could not even happen without other people making sure internet connections are kept stable. This whole "one person is an island" ideology is not something a lot of people subscribe to.
Some companies don't want to spend time doing software things that are not core to their business, so they pay other companies which sometimes do it better. Most definitely not always, but for some companies it would still be better than some in-house hodgepodge.
And many, many people don’t own a car, not because they can’t afford one but because it makes more sense to rent one or hire a car service when needed. Frankly, my dream scenario is to have enough money to hire a personal driver who is on-demand and at the ready when I need to go out and do things. For plenty of people, that’s anathema. But for me, I don’t like driving (or cooking) and I’d much rather pay someone to do it for me.
The same is true for software. I like tinkering with a lot of my own software, but if I was building my own business, I sure as shit would rather pay for an established company to handle some of the grunt work, rather than hiring dedicated teams that in aggregate would cost a lot of money.
The rise of SaaS and PaaS isn’t just laziness. It’s a recognition that for a lot of people, even developers, we’d rather entrust a lot of the operations and IT work to someone else.
My point is that none of the analogies are arguments for (or against) SaaS, or in this case "brand name" enterprise software.
Whenever any of these comically banal analogies are brought out to sell something, the intention always seems to be to suspend critical thinking.
There exists many legitimate arguments, for many things. They never begin with "why would anyone need a frying pan".
And when putting in the well, why would you pay someone else to dig it for you? Just laziness. Dig it yourself!
And then when digging the well, why would you rent the drill? Just laziness, outsourcing the maintenance and ownership costs to someone else.
And then why bother buying the drill at some market where they're then manufacturing the drill for you? Pure laziness. Just make the drill yourself!
Or maybe, you just go with a trusted service instead of learning how to manufacture digging equipment when all you really want is running water.
Uber is actually cheaper for me than a car + insurance + maintenance. I work from home. I’m going to give my car to my son when we move.
When I need to see my parents 200 miles away, I can hop on a small plane for $300 round trip and just work from there for a week.
Companies these days just want to specialize in making cool menu designs and marketing and waiting on the three star Michelin review to roll in somehow.
That would be like a Hypervisor company paying VMWare to re-distribute ESXi or something.
But a farm company buying VMWare ESXi to run its IT infra instead of using, say, CentOS is exactly like a chef sourcing ingredients instead of growing them herself.
One part of the dynamic, simplified: big companies can show quickest cost savings by laying off employees; this satisfies anxious shareholders during the bumpy times by suggesting that management is wiling to make "hard decisions." Such companies cannot quickly re-tool their technology stacks nor renegotiate 3-year software contracts. B2B companies tend to do very well as long as they are not solely focused on their startup/growth/pre-IPO customers, who get hit hard.
Here are some arguments for post-downturn tech growth: 1981 and the use of the PC + Lotus/WordPerfect/BASIC for efficient local compute 1990 and the surge of the LAN to replace centralized IT 2001 and the swell of SaaS 2008 and the swell of cloud 2022 and the .....
An ERP is basically a database with an interface with business logic built in. Certainly not something you want to do in Excel.
Not just Linux but IT in general. It may have to be about security; my impression is that at least some of the widespread successful attacks in recent years might have been prevented if non IT companies had their own IT department, servers and in house security teams. Relying on an external provider is cheap and comfortable, until the day a single vulnerability screws all its customers data in a single day.
I think you vastly underestimate the cost of on-prem IT, especially for small and medium sized businesses. The "floor" cost of your own IT is many, many orders of magnitude higher than a subscription to something like Office 365 for something like 50 people.
"Normal" people don't use cloud services because they're lazy, they do it because the economics of rolling your own IT does not make sense, and hasn't since the days when it stopped being your only option.
But, even thinking of health care systems is thinking of big businesses. How does a road construction company justify an IT department or security team? Think of businesses like that. They have have an IT guy who manages services they use and is an expert at using those.
Most businesses are small to medium in size and non-tech.
Small businesses with in house It get hacked waaaaasy more.
KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory minimums for hardware support on network switches and servers. Cockpit makes it dead simple to run.
Oracle performance is so awful the license terms do not allow you to release performance benchmarks or comparative analysis against other databases. it also has all the same heavy lifting you need to focus on for things like galera clusters or postgres, so theres no clear win unless you like paying Larry for the privilege of slow transactionals on a hyperconverged iron beast, or youre too lazy to figure out ODBC.
And Symantec so openly hates their customers they now bundle a cryptominer with their software. before that their incompetence was so blinding Google had to step in and force them to give up their CA business.
"enterprise" software is an absurd proposition for anyone smart enough to realize their business is more than just the end product. to everyone else, these companies are borderline predatory.
I don't except to the degree that the product is more or less suitable for my business needs. And note I said product, which KVM by itself is not. If I'm going to use KVM--and, yes, I likely would rather than VMware unless I otherwise needed VMware for some reason--I'd be buying it as part of a supported commercial Linux distribution.
The money is of course important, but these providers are smart. They take only what they can and not more. Which is still big money. And while Oracle & co. would never make it into any company I can make a decision for, I don't think that keeps them awake at night - there are enough (big!) fish in the ocean.
We meet on Wednesdays; the coffee and cookies are free.
Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough.
VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.
This is it, really. For big companies this kind of stuff is important.
And "cobbling it together" is very much understating the effort involved to keep it running: eventually you'll upgrade one of the components and it will break something, because you didn't read the release notes of an upstream dependency that mentioned a breaking change that affects your particular setup.
Having the vendor (vmware) provide this as a delivered, tested, supported solution is so much easier.
Similarly, I suspect it would be significantly simpler to find IT firms and/or hire individuals with VMware knowledge than it would be to find the equivalent on KVM + Cockpit + the dozen other components you need.
Note: I'm not saying this is right or the way things should be, but simply pointing out the "enterprise" perspective. Boring technology is safe.
I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn’t kvm it’s everything else.
Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out of the box solution anyone can use and includes every single feature of ESX and many vsphere features youd easily lose your shirt for. https://www.proxmox.com/en/
heres an independent performance test. KVM is easily faster than ESX.
“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” applies equally to big enterprise SaaS providers and companies like Oracle, Microsoft, VMWare, Salesforce, etc.
It is also deployed in many many enterprise and government settings.
Also, notice when you go to VMWare’s home page you see “referenceable clients” - ie well known companies that use the software? This is “Enterprise Marketing 101”.
Besides, I can throw a stick and find someone who knows VMWare. As a (hypothetical) CTO of a non tech company, I don’t want “support”, I might want an MSP to do it for me.
How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and at their bidding, their standard support reply is to install from scratch as otherwise the won't look at the setup. If you don't look at the technology POV (in addition to others) the choices probably won't be the best.
Notice how on Proxmox.com there's a testimonial page that links to enterprise and gov't customers, how's that different "Enterprise Marketing"?
Proxmox also has reseller partner all over the world: https://proxmox.com/en/partners/reseller
So we got enterprise support, world wide enterprise reseller network, enterprise features available for all, with or without support, not sure how much more enterprise vibes one can get..
vmware isn't really moving forwards since a while, the acquisition by broadcom won't help that either IMO, but sure they're currently still able to pay "bribe" some CTOs or sales people lunch, so they got that edge going for them, won't be enough to stay the #1 in the long run though.
The average corporation is dependent on 110 SaaS offerings.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...
No matter what it is a pain to migrate. Corps aren’t being bribed. They are making the safe choice.
For instance even if some unknown cloud provider is “better”, if something goes wrong, the CTO is going to be questioned. If Azure goes down and it’s already an MS shop, people aren’t going to question whether it was a bad decision.
Expensive as hell though.
There are plenty of features Proxmox doesn't have that VMware does have. I've ran into a few of them
1. No ability to pin vCPUs to physical CPUs from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and set affinity for each vCPU's PID by hand if you want that.
2. You can't provision a VM with more vCPUs than physical CPUs. For example if I have a host with 8 cores, the max vCPU I can allocate to a VM is 8. And yes, I did have a use case for this.
3. You can't configure networked serial ports from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and edit the vm configuration file by hand if you want that.
4. Lack of serial port concentrator, which means you can't really use networked serial ports reliably when migrating VMs across hosts in a Proxmox cluster. In the NFV world this can be pretty important.
5. You can't manage multiple Proxmox VM hosts from a single UI unless they're clustered, which in many cases isn't practical to do. vSphere will let you manage multiple independent hosts from a single pane of glass.
6. (at least historically) lack of RSS/multiqueue in virtio networking. vmxnet3 on VMware supports this and allows you to scale better. But I will admit it's been several years since I've had a look at this area.
Again I'm not a VMware cheerleader. I'm sure I could generate a list like this for what Proxmox has that VMware lacks. But it's incorrect to state that it includes every single feature of ESX.
I've got several clients that pay over 500k/year to a SaaS ERP vendor. The ERP system is the very definition of enterprise software.
What would you suggest I advise my clients when it comes to their finance, inventory, order management, logistics etc?
I guess they could piece together various SaaS solutions to create some sort of composable microservice based system to meet their needs but that's a massive engineering overhead when they can just get all of the functionality they need on one big fat enterprise ERP system.
The cosmetics manufacturer I work with does not care about what the technologists (people like you and me) care about. They just want to run their manufacturing and wholesale operation and if Oracle are offering one system that does it all, why wouldn't they take that deal?
The health care organizations overwhelmingly use third party EHR/EMR systems and schools use third party companies for enrollment (Blackboard).
It doesn’t make sense to bring any those in house.
Bingo! If you are a manufacturing company, you care about two things:
1) does this software do the job I need?
2) does this software cost less than the value I get out of using it?
If the answer is "yes and yes" then -- congratulations! you made a sale!
Sure, if some other company comes in and says "hey, I can do the same job, but cheaper," the customer would listen. But so long as the software works good enough, then the externalities of support contracts, billing, "enterprisey-stuff" may matter more than features or performance.
Remember, not only are most non-software companies better at their business than they are at software, they're also not hiring from the same tech talent pool, they're not paying their tech people as much, they're not letting the tech run their business.
In this case, they have no need for VMWare or Oracle.
Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to, which allows them to float through their careers fairly unchallenged.
At one point in time, IBM had this market position. Then Microsoft, Oracle, and now Amazon and Google.
Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?
If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that businesses buying the Google Apps suite is nonsensical, because the only reason you'd ever use Google is because you're a "careerist" that "only know" Google.
That's obviously not true, Gmail and the rest of the Google suite have been market-leading for many years, because they are good solutions that solve real problems. Presumably the same thing goes for the Microsoft Office suite, and so on.
Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on.
If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference.
The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.
The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market.
I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.
If a tech company has achieved both technical and organizational lock-in (or maybe "capture"), specs don't matter.
Specs and benchmarks only matter to geeks.
Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (there are exceptions, yadda yadda...). With Oracle, their products may suck (and they do), but the company knows to answer the phone for their customers, otherwise they won't be able to sell that beefy contract in a few months' time.
> Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable?
Oracle? Lol.
When switching is effectively impossible, this is what happens.
Oracle has been buying various application companies with installed bases that are difficult to migrate away from. They are essentially buying customers to milk after putting in their enclosed pasture.
The main change is that MariaDB and PostgreSQL have caught up a lot of ground over the last years, so OracleDB has been losing the edge they have been paid for.
> They are firmly non-enterprise
So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the core enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but at the same time you're certain they're non-enterprise?
Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is absolutely enterprise. They definitely have enterprise support contracts, and the few times I've had issues while having a support contract they have been easy to work with.
You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.
There's still supposedly over 2 billion users of these services. Its not a small project with a niche client set where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the many products they've killed.
People on HN don’t grok “the enterprise”.
I mentioned in another post, that even though I work for $BigTech, I work in the cloud enterprise consulting space (not Azure). Dealing with the enterprise is a completely different beast than dealing with other tech companies. Microsoft has almost four decades of experience in the space.
Even on the personal side, I would much rather deal with MS for my one lonely 5 person Office365 subscription than Google support.
Um... perhaps because it is less costly and will lead to better capabilities, more reliability, less complexity than burying it under 18 layers of apis, containers, and virtual machines.
Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that maybe the technology is less of a differentiator in the overall effectiveness of a company’s IT environment than the people running it.
And with IT staffing supply having lagged behind demand (as also evidenced by relatively high salaries in IT vs many other professions), you could easily argue that it was (still is?) historically more difficult to hire good IT people than in many other professions.
And arguably that’s making outsourcing of IT needs relatively more attractive than outsourcing of other business functions where reasonably competent leadership and staffing is easier to come by.
And arguably, capturing many of the benefits of Open Source require more IT competency than using off the shelf mainstream commercial software. If I’m using the same crap that everyone of my competitors is using, none of us win or lose on that. But when using Open Source, I’m more likely to depend on the quality of my IT leadership and staff to outcompete my competitors. And unless a CEO is quite IT literate, s/he probably doesn’t want that additional headache of becoming good at figuring out how to hire good IT leadership.
So I’d hazard a guess, that insourcing and the use of Open Source will become more attractive for many corporations only if/when IT salaries drop more in line with other professions.
A friend uses VMWare in an IT role at a medium sized company. They don’t have a software engineering team, just a bunch of users and an IT skeleton crew; so it makes sense for them.
Broadly speaking, anyone generalising the world into suits and techies needs a translation layer between them and anyone else.
https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/endpoint-secur...
(the VMWare owned product isn't CrowdStrike, that just had the best SEO page with a clear description. VMWare have Carbon Black which is the other dominant player in this market https://www.vmware.com/uk/products/whats-new/carbon-black.ht... )
I work for CrowdStrike just so any potential bias is out there in the open, but do not speak for them.
My role also encompasses many “CIO-like” functions, but my area of expertise is in application development and I look to hire strong leaders in the other areas (or move certain tech domains entirely into other functions — eg our warehouse management system lives within our operations group, and me and my team help in an advisory capacity but don’t “own” the budget or WMS strategy).
I can't imagine it being cheaper to build everything yourself on top of just plain KVM, or even LXC.
Microsoft has a monopoly on Corporate Domains/OS as it is.
Have you ever considered the other way around? That is, “What changes with age that would make someone over 40 prefer outsourcing a problem to an enterprise?”
It’s possible that this trend is a result of a different perspective.
Something I saw in action building a startup is that the fewer people you have on your team, the more efficient they are.
As you grow, it’s wise to focus your headcount on your core competency and outsource everything else so that you are committing the organizational expense of more employees to all and only what you need as a business.
Of course, enterprise stuff is not all roses. You still have to have someone with product expertise. There’s vendor lock-in. Enterprise software is often oversold. Etc etc.
There is no panacea, just stuff that works better in different situations.
Yes I know how to do app dev + cloud Net ops, it’s kind of my thing.
You can see people spending millions of dollars a year to keep from having to deal with Linux as evidence that they are stupid. Or you can see it as evidence that Linux really is that bad. It works both ways.
VMware gives you a thing people can be trained on and certified on, a brand you can hire for and screen resumes on, a consistent environment which behaves in a predictable way that you really can turn employees into replacable cogs. Any helpdesk or admin employee can deal with VMware, any MSP, any tech recruiter, and a lot of training companies. You can get backup systems which "support VMware" and storage which integrates with VMware snapshots, and reporting tools which work with VMware.
It's almost not about the tech at all, it's about how do you build companies on shifting sands? You define interfaces for components which can be plugged together. "VMware" is an API or interface that the business can work to; vendors can say "deploy this OVF to VMware", sales can say to the business "this thing we need works with VMware" or to the customers "we can work with your VMware" or "our offering is trustworthy because we use VMware" and the customer recognises the name. HR can say "we need to hire people who know VMware" and that means something fairly specific to the wider world. "runs on Linux" and "people who know Linux" are wildly, wildly, variable and vague things which could mean "ran a website, minimum wage" or "turns SELinux off to make things run" or "was SRE for FAANG" or "did a PHD in AI for tuning networking stacks in HPC applications but doesn't know anything else".
You make software by defining interfaces and components that can be plugged together to make larger systems. Brands are that, for tech. Like you hire someone who "knows React" not someone who "is a programmer" because that's too vague and is as likely to get you someone who worked on a Java CRUD program or someone who worked on a Python log analyser. Like you hire a "service delivery manager" or a "customer account manager" and not "an employee".
I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US.
By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.
I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo.
I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”.
I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS.
Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners.
As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”.
https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/
I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.
New companies, too. There's a lot to be said for paying someone to make problems go away. Not everyone wants to write their own software or change their own oil.
"Use proxmox" - fucking lol
Companies don't buy companies, they buy IP, as I understand it.
I’m not sure it would have that big of an effect. It would certainly help in some areas like search and social networks though.
Broadcom is paying for the huge enterprise customer base, sales and support connections, mindshare, and engineering org that has proven adaptable to market demands.
I would be shocked if every single 'big' tech company didn't use _some_ vmware product _somewhere_ internally. Their software portfolio is a hell of a lot bigger than just the actual vmware product. Example: where I work we use the vmware product Carbon Black for 'endpoint protection', which as I understand it is virus scanning + some amount of port monitoring.
You are quite wrong…
It’s like saying Taco Bell has incredible culinary secrets because it’s so widespread.
Of course, it goes both ways and laws often favor the strong against the weak. But it is not all one-sided.
That's called competition
Is that really the case? Does it work? Isn't Instagram basically cloning TIkTok right now? and cloned Snap before that?
Apple with Alfred, Spotlight, F.lux etc are also examples. Seems like for software, either patents aren't utilized or simply can't be enforced.
I only know VMWare from its days as virtualization software. I would put money on them having had a bunch of patents on the specific techniques they used.
Software patents sometimes work out, sometimes not. If I were king of the world I wouldn't get rid of them but narrow the scope down to protecting specific implementations, none of this "Buying stuff of the internet" pantenting that invested the 00s.
It may be inevitable but I think I have a solid idea to at least check its explosive growth.
The CEO and the board (includes President) ought to be personally civil as well as criminally liable for any actions of the employees, contractors, or agents of the company if they cannot prove that the employees, contractors, or agents acted against company policy. Elimination of the "right to work" is a precondition to this proposal.
There is no reason for the west to allow Chinese companies to compete in their markets. Reciprocal market access or no access at all.
If western trade agreements forbid companies of a certain size from selling locally there is no alternative for Asian companies but to split or exit the market. We aren't helpless passengers on a worldwide economic joyride.
Also are you talking about Israel or Bangladesh? They are in Asia too.
it's not bizarre in the least if you consider any of the metrics that attempt to quantify corporate size and holdings.
Here's a market cap index[0], do you notice anything?
One thing that I notice is that every company in the top 25 is either American (.. or by some legal stretches, Irish) or from somewhere in Asia.
>Really didn't expect to see this dog whistling on HN.
"We can stop and let Asian tech giants eat us alive." is neither coded, nor suggestive -- nor is it written in such a way as to avoid condemnation or blame, It's a plain statement.
Can you describe how it's a dog whistle, and to signal which faction? I don't get it.
Asia is too vast for a group of people to be against the entirety, no? At least I haven't ran into the anti-Asia faction, yet; but I have ran into plenty of anti-country folks.
[0]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
EDIT: NATO shills don't like this comment!
There's no reason the company selling them support couldn't be providing support for QEMU btw. If it met their needs otherwise I'm sure they'd consider it.
I don't know what business you're in and maybe after a nightly tape backup there's nothing important for you to lose. Frankly that's most small businesses. But if you've got real trade secrets get a proper IDS/IPS before you regret it.
Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus? In most cases the answer is "no".
There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services.
This. As a tech person with decades of professional services experience in the tech space, I couldn't agree more.
Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities hire professional services (this isn't limited to tech stuff either):
1. There's a specific need for design/implementation expertise where FTEs are either not readily available or are unnecessary once the implementation is complete;
2. The internal group in favor of a particular technology/implementation wants/needs validation from "experts" to get full buy-in from management;
3. Professional services are brought in to "validate" existing project plans/implementation details as a CYA against project failure (e.g., "the consultants told us this was the way to go. They were wrong, not us.") which (both bringing in consultants and project failure) happens a lot more often than you might think.
I work for a large enterprise and we pay or retain vendors to do things for us all the time, at a much higher cost than it would be to do it in house, because we cannot find/hire/retain the expertise to do it ourselves, and at some point we need to get the work done so that other more mission-critical work can happen to drive the business forward.
Plus, there is value in paying someone to make the find/hire/retain part their problem instead of ours.
We buy the reliability of getting the work done in a timely manner, on top of the work itself.
Plenty of companies seem to be OK with using GPL2-licensed Linux, why wouldn’t qemu be the same?
With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills.
And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.
I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.