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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why anyone still uses the product. They had a clear advantage 20 years ago but that was 20 years ago. I really don't understand what distinguishing thing they offer these days.

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Not having a clear advantage might be a good reason to not choose it for new products, but there are thousands of companies that chose VMware 20 years ago when it did have a clear advantage. You have to have a pretty good reason to invest thousands of people hours in a project to migrate to another plaform, and simply "it's not the latest product out there" is not often a compelling reason to throw out something that still works pretty well.

Price increases as in the linked article can be a compelling reason, of course.

If a company has a significant amount of infra set up with VMware the costs of migration to another solution are substantial. They have to retrain staff, who may not be keen on relearning how to do what they already know how to do with VMware. They have to replace other solutions that work with VMware but maybe not a new alternative. And there’s usually features that VMware has that others do not, or they work differently enough that it introduces more friction.

The core virtualization stuff is commodity, but there’s much more to it.

A lot of people knows it very well. I wouldn't consider it for personal use but I didn't have a lot of issue managing vsphere clusters when I was still into it.

Also it is not about the VMs only but the whole ecosystem. Last time I worked for a company where we considered moving out of vmware, the main issue was not migrating to a new VM management solution but having to migrate to a new VM hypervisors + migrating to a new backup solution supporting the new hypervisor. This while still maintaining original backup solution until retention runs out or we migrate and test all old backup with long retention. Or we had to decide on maintaining several backup systems in parallel which would increase the cost of backups.

It is not just about migrating VMs.

VMware was worth the money because it just worked and worked decently. I chose it in the past to avoid wasting my time on crashes, incompatibilities, and lacking performances that were typical for other VMs.

Nobody got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Cisco/VMWare

Inertia, both in a company and in the industry, is a major reason.

Maybe simply the moat? Integration with networks? What is the alternative? Xen? Proxmox?

Depends on what you're doing I guess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_virtual... there's a bunch

vmware had this magic sauce that worked before hardware virtualization support was common. In around 2000, the only realistic options was either vmware or vm/esa on a mainframe. It hasn't been like that for a long, long time.

>In around 2000, the only realistic options was either vmware

Let's not forget user mode linux. :-) I ran hundreds of "VMs" using UML and it worked surprisingly well.

Those are mostly alternatives for VM host/runtime/hypervisor. Not for the whole integrated eco system.

A lot of people use it. I for one use it because it is simple to manage, setting up shared storage is a breeze, live migration is super easy. I don't use any of the fancy NSX stuff and whatnot because I don't believe they add any value.

I was looking at Proxmox, but I kind of got lost in the documentation when it comes to shared storage and high-availability, meaning restarting VMs on another host if one host fails.

RedHat is just as expensive as VMware used to be, but it had less features, so it is not really an option.

If you're talking about OpenShift, it has less features for virtualization perhaps, but is easier for migrating apps over to k8s. Which is something many orgs want to do.

> ..., meaning restarting VMs on another host if one host fails.

Wait, your VM will still restart if vmware host dies, right? You can't have RAM sync between hosts.

There are two different things: - live migration: its wonderful because I can update servers firmware without any VMs downtime - VM restart if a host dies - works wonders in a cluster where given enough host capacity you have a level of assurance that the downtime is very brief.

And regarding Fault Tolerance, it is tricky and if you don't need that level of availability it's better to just plan for a VM restart or have other types of high-availability in place to mitigate a host failure.

> You can't have RAM sync between hosts.

That's what FT is for, if the primary VM instance dies or becomes unresponsive, you failover to the mirror instance.

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