VMware outsourcing their support
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
Next year we will be using ProxMox.
Team A gets acquired. The product destroyed. Team B now founds a company becoming Team A, while Team A forks the open source product and keeps the game going. Its a ton of migrations, but you could get wallstreet to donate to open source as a business strategy.
But if Vmware was open source they never would have bought it. The leverage being closed provides is the whole point.
There is legacy technology corporation A - with a bunch of enterprise customers, eventually they: - reach a plateau of sales /growth - feature development slows down - cost getting cut across the board
The core product team eventually just leaves the company to use all their internal knowledge to create a startup B that competes with A and delivers next-gen technology in the same space. They get traction, and funding and outgrow company A eventually.
Revenue generating or not, the free platforms are will generate more revenue than VMware at such and exorbitant cost.
We can afford it all day every day.
We choose not to because I’d rather spend the money towards products and services we like.
I already do not like VMWare under Broadcom.
Maybe it wasn’t clear, but I do not expect our bill to remain at $3600, but I don’t care because this won’t be an issue for us.
I would not switch an enterprise from VMWare -> Proxmox without a really thorough analysis of what that will mean.
That said the future of VMware is certainly in question.
https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/105
Proxmox / KVM is the only alternative to ESXi that can support all of Windows security mitigations such as Core Isolation, which requires nested virtualization.
Calling in for any questions was met with a support tech who was actively hostile and tried their best to find some way to disqualify our ability to get support. The first trick was always Hardware Compatibility List ("HCL") followed by interrogating us about software versions. Before I get the cries of pity about all the dumb users who waste their time by not upgrading, we probably opened support cases twice weekly - and the same verification interrogation happened.
We'd routinely find situations where the stated support for SANs wasn't what it said, etc.
I'd have said it could not get worse, but reading what Broadcom is doing, I am convinced otherwise.
Anyone using VMWare for business critical things is likely in for both a huge pocket book hit and an even larger support headache.
Did anybody else become an early adopter but kept all that license stuff, or am I not remembering it correctly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Workstation
ESXi is the building block of vSphere (which is the building block of most everything else including vSAN) and initially released in 2001
But do you have to increase license prices by three times within the first quarter of an acquisition? Drop all free licenses that allowed for learning of your technologies? Even professionals with years of experience of providing VMWare official training curriculum are being forced to pay for licenses that were free.
All training responsibilities, dropped with no warning on the historical training providers...
What McKinsey Consultant, advised for aliening a customer base of 20 years, within the first quarter of an acquisition?
Google, Azure and AWS Sales reps must be salivating at this opportunity.
Got lucky with the LSI Logic design team and Google TPU's. Presently $8 bln/yr I understand. Although such serendipity increases when you're able to buy everything you see. With the exception of Qualcomm.
"1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year" - https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/08/vmware_customer_forre...
I am not a fan of them and didn't like working for them, but their financial results speak for themselves. You can attack the ethics of Tan's leadership certainly, but to call him an idiot ignores the fact that he's doing exactly what his shareholders want. Growing the company at obscene returns.
Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I don't measure things in just shareholder returns.
Being the optimizer of local minima, is bad business strategy, and smart shareholders should plug for a better optimizer.
So the strategy is to squeeze the 600 largest customers until they bleed, knowing they are so entrenched they cannot easily migrate. If the next couple of thousand stuck around as well that would be nice, but not essential. The long tail of hundreds of thousands of customers paying a few dollars a month they would gladly be rid of.
We're talking over 10,000 ESXi hosts in the current footprint and at least 50% of them will be off VMware by the end of 2026.
If they were smart, the people they would be focusing on squeezing are the mid-sized shops that don't have the in-house skills or top level cost focus to force a migration. The small shops can't afford to stay on vmware, the very large shops will have the in-house skills or contract to the right people to get moved, it's the mid-sized people that are most stuck.
Drop any pretense that you want to service any customer outside of the fortune 500. Then increase prices by several hundred percent because you're so imbedded in those fortune 500s, even if they want to run from you it'll take them 5 years and you can make all your money back in that window.
Note: you're all going to be complaining about Redhat in the next 5 years, because IBM knows how to get blood from a stone.
Google uses kvm. They probably contribute as well although I haven't checked.
From a quick search Azure uses a private build of hyper-v which surprises me actually but it's possible.
Edit : millions of VMs doesn't mean anything, at the end of the day it's just servers each running a bunch of VM, which people have been doing for 20+ years. There is no scaling issue there, the hard part is storage, networking, orchestration, managed services, power...
[0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...
Regarding AWS, I would also add Firecracker for AWS Lambda, which uses KVM.
In my opinion Proxmox does not have tooling like that.
So if I had written my comment better it would be what tooling and fabric these giants use and to what extent they share the tools and upgrades back to open source projects.