Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move
theregister.com
theregister.com
ETA: the context, for those who care, is VMware Workstation. VMware made that free for personal use right before the takeover, so Broadcom didn’t bother porting over the license database. If you have a pro/commercial key, make sure you back it up because Broadcom won’t help you recover it.
But if VMware is now free, why does this matter? Because the key words were “personal use.” They reserve the right to pull an oracle and hit your organization up with an audit and massive fees for that one guy that installed VMware workstation that one time.
We bought keys, but now Broadcom has no record of that. I’ve since switched all our virtualization scripts to use docker.
It's funny because Oracle has done this with their proprietary VirtualBox extensions.
When Symantec was acquired, they cut out all but the highest 1000 customers.
I think Broadcom misjudged the impact though.
I think they know exactly what they are doing.
Hang on a minute... deep thought ... surely we fucked up somewhere?
At the height of the cloud hype, we were all more than happy to pay to lift-and-shift our way to higher operating costs. Surely, then, a lift-and-shift toward lower operating costs is comparably feasible.
If anything the barriers are social. At the height of the cloud hype, we all believed we were riding unicorns to the end of a rainbow with a pot of gold waiting for us. When you believe that, of course you want to spare no expense on ensuring you have the fastest unicorn so you can get that pot of gold before anyone else can.
I doubt AWS is 10x more expensive when you consider all the costs - you have to pay for the humans to manage the servers if you do them in house.
labor savings and simplification of processes with cloud never happened; if anything they got worse, and OpEx is higher than ever.
It’s like applying to a job with a @hotmail.com address.
If you already know it then fine - use a hammer to crack a nut. But I get the feeling that it's the first port of call for people who probably suffer the learning curve without really getting anything much in return.
But I think another way to express my original point would be "Being an uncritical advocate for K8s positively correlates with having a tendency to overcomplicate things".
Because when you're just getting started, you're just looking at what's immediately in front of you. Logarithmic curves go up quickly in the beginning. Exponential curves are nice and easy in the beginning. The fact that one levels off and the other keeps turning ever more sharply upwards doesn't matter. Thinking ahead like that, considering second-order effects, etc., is neither Lean nor Agile, and invites accusations of engaging in Analysis Paralysis.
Clearly the answer is to run everything bare-metal on a rackful of Raspberry Pis. ;)
On the other hand, I don’t feel like this will be as amusing a suggestion for much longer.
I haven’t tried a Raspberry Pi 5 yet, but an Orange Pi 5 is pretty powerful.
It's unclear to me how Broadcom can excel at apparent ineptitude so well. I assume the analysis I've read, that they want to shed all the legacy non-Fortune 100 Customers, is true.
"Apparent" is the key word here. They don't care about all customers. They want to keep maybe 10% of the biggest enterprise customers, get rid of everyone else, raise prices 400%, and keep half of the profits while reducing costs to almost zero. Sure the product will die, but the acquisition will pay for itself multiple times over.
The company I work for started migration planning right when the acquisition gained approval. We all knew what would happen and have a “no Broadcom” policy when it comes to software.
Reduce cost by 80% and raise prices 10x tends to do just that.
> I assume the analysis I've read, that they want to shed all the legacy non-Fortune 100 Customers, is true.
No other explanation makes any rational sense - no one will learn vmware on their free time now.
Most people don't buy a cow to benefit the cow. They either milk it or turn it into chops.
I've been using it in my lab for the past few years without any major issues. Running an HA 3-node cluster. Only issue I ran into was when I kept getting kernel panic from an driver issues in my RAID card. But that really only affected me during reboots. Pinning to and older kernel worked. Oh and it was also because my RAID card is like 10 years old.
So HN - if you are moving off VmWare, what are you using?
Our get-off-of-VMware plan is basically #yolo into the cloud.
Understand that I routinely manage QEMU machine configs by hand, because it's trivial. Perhaps I lack perspective.
It may be overkill in terms of features but it's a free as in beer tool that novices can install and run with quickly without much of a learning curve.
There are just a lot of people where as soon as you say “code” or “text editor” they are out.
My proxmox stack is manually managed in the management GUI, but my Linux VMs within that setup are all managed with a Chef server that runs on one of the VMs. (I would say I only chose Chef because I use it at work and I have recent familiarity and figured I could learn more about it)
Basically I do the standard graphical Debian installer and then run a bootstrap script that registers each system as a client.
The next thing I’d like to do is figure out cloud-init with Proxmox so that I don’t have to do that manual installation process anymore.
This setup works okay for me as-is since I only have about 5 VMs at a time, it’s just a hobbyist setup.
Great approach. Might try that.
> The next thing I’d like to do is figure out cloud-init with Proxmox so that I don’t have to do that manual installation process anymore.
Yeah. cloud-init...
The only advice I have there is: use only core cloud-init capabilities -- the stuff that's been around for years, works everywhere and is unlikely to change in subtle ways -- and factor everything else into a shell script that does the rest, which you invoke from cloud-init.
For chef you put a client validator key in a specific location along with a first boot json file that has details about the client’s policy name and group.
After that it’s pretty much just installing the chef client and running it.
And what about redundancy and backups? Even a one-person business needs those, and small businesses arguably have fewer resources to spend on manual DR processes.
As to the "cave person" nonsense: I version control VMs, I can reproduce the whole stack from git, script any conceivable deployment... I'm not a cave person. I've just been inculcated to this whole world of VM management since before proxmox was a thing. It really isn't the hairball you think it is. People routinely author docker compose scripts and collections of k8s yaml deployments that are far more intricate than a VM config, and consider themselves on plane with modern devops.
> And what about redundancy and backups?
What about them? There are many was to solve that, and nearly all of them are better done using storage system tools: NAS, ZFS, NetApp, LVM, EBS, etc. I made that point elsewhere: the real problem with VM management isn't provisioning VMs. It's storage. Solve that and the rest is pretty basic.
I've been known to just start VMs from the CLI directly, for experimental purposes. The tooling everyone uses (Proxmox, virt-*, etc.) obscures the fact that spawning a VM is just a command with a bunch of switches. I suppose that familiarity for me came from using QEMU to emulate other archs on x86 for embedded development purposes: launching ARM VMs, for example.
But I'll answer your question directly, nonetheless. At ~45 VMs, I consider the system "small."
Understand you're going to need intimate familiarity with the extant tools. Not that it's hard or anything. It's not point/click Proxmox style, though.
Otherwise, pay the tax with minimum commit, and don’t allow creation of new VMs. they essentially created a business model that writes the justification for AWS or GCP.
When companies flip to rent extraction business models, you need to change how you treat the business relationship. VMWare is like an incandescent light bulb… if the cost of re-platforming and availability of resources makes it cost effective to move, you move.
MBAs, and their behavior, is inevitable under Capitalism. don't hate the player, hate the game.