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Comment by jm4 | Hacker News Reader

I was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great.

I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.

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If I never have to have two weeks of meetings around discussing how many vCAN points we will need for the next year ever again, I'll be a happy man.

Microsoft is doing well and you were a small customer for them.

VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.

Doing things that way (virtualization rather than containerization) fell out of vogue specifically because of how bad vmware was to work with. CPU quotas were probably what pushed serious people away from the product instead of machine licenses. I was early in my career but working with vmware products was the bane of our existence because if we wanted to make any sort of configuration change or spin up a test machine or really do anything at all it had to run through accounting which was just an instant non starter. we all started fiddling with alternatives and docker swiftly became reliable at least for spinning up a new web server or testing the latest and greatest whatever. vmware did this to themselves.

Exactly. You end up having to burn licenses for stuff like that, although I will concede that VMware always gave us more licenses than we paid for and they always included extra products. It was weird though. There was no rhyme or reason to it. One time they gave us 1000 licenses for VMware Fusion even though we didn't have any Macs. Microsoft, on the other hand, let us use whatever we wanted. If it was still around when it came time to true-up, we paid for it.

The vast majority of containers run on VM not baremetal.

But not on vmware, just zen and/or kvm with various management front ends.

VMware has always been a PITA, even in the late 2000's, we pivoted and bought several thousand physical machines for a new datacenter after they started to play tricks just weeks before we were going to turn up the DC.

They have always aspired to be Oracle like, where customers are hostages. Most people I knew who weren't stuck in the "Enterprise" trap moved to kvm/zen ASAP especially after the Westmere dramatically reduced the vm_exit() latency allowing for databases etc...

That was over 15 years ago, and outside of a very small number of niche use cases, tehre was no real argument to run container hosts on Vmware outside of a (IMHO) mistaken risk appetite.

It is really the fruit that ate itself, as had IT departments had a more data based risk assessment process, we would probably be heavily hybrid-cloud now. But the same Enterprise gravy train that VMware grew under killed them.

Shifting blame at great expense in licensing and agility to an _Enterprise_ solution was their jam...now Broadcom owns them an it is even worse.

Not in the F100. They're all VMs, all of the time, all on vSphere. Nutanix was the next best solution, with Hyper-V as a distant third. Hence why Broadcom ate them.

From what I hear and have seen, pre-Broadcom head-on VMware takeouts didn't go much of anywhere. But kubernetes-based (Kubevirt) products do seem to be having a degree of success.

100%. it was very hard (but not impossible) to compete against vmware in the virtualization space before the Hockening™; vSAN, vSphere and NSX were very very nice and super easy to use. nutanix succeeded more often than not.

orgs now are kind-of scrambling for alternatives. great for nutanix. better for the CSPs. also great for red hat (my employer) since we have openshift virt, which is based on kubevirt but is much easier to use and works nicely with the rest of the ecosystem.

Yeah, vsphere has a mile-long list of enterprise checkbox features that the sales managers can overwhelm the CIO's with on the golf course.

Kubernetes might have success, but AFAICS Kubernetes also sort of involves a new way of architecting applications (cloud native applications, 12-factor apps, microservices, etc.; whatever the buzzword du jour is). The idea with vmware was always to virtualize all those zillions of more or less idling physical servers, and get some snazzy management GUI to handle them all etc. etc.

Rearchitecting for containers is indeed a lot more effort and, indeed, one of the reasons for VMware's success was that it provided more efficiency without (at least initially) much in the way of operational changes.

But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.

kubernetes is where vsphere was circa 2010 or so. wide adoption with loads of room for growth and refining.

the vmware implosion + kubevirt gaining maturity is what will hyper-accelerate this.

nonetheless, it's a bit nuts that a vsphere alternative doesn't really exist for kubernetes. openshift, harvester and foss projects like portainer are close but not really the same thing. vsphere made it stupid easy to orchestrate vms at any scale with any level of experience. your cat could deploy a simple two-node vDC, and you could theoretically click your way through doing very very complicated things with your cluster (though you probably should).

esxi was silly easy to install most of the time also. provisioning kubernetes is finally (as of maybe three years ago?) pretty easy to do, but day two ops are still very command line. great for nerds like you and me; not good for former VIadmins who were suddenly thrown into the k8siverse.

this is even worse on the networking front. anyone who's messed with cilium or calico vs administrating NSX will know what i'm talking about. you can click your way through setting up a whole logical enterprise-grade networking fabric with vSANs, BGP, stateful firewall, the whole nine, all with near-linespeed performance throughout your vDC. cilium and calico, on the other hand, are powerful but have (to my knowledge) no real GUI equivalents.

storage is even worse. there's no vSAN frontend equivalent in the k8s landscape afaik.

Yeah, but I think his point is that VMs haven’t fallen as far out of vogue as the parent is perhaps suggesting.

We still run a lot of VMs, just not VMware VMs.

zen? like, uh, the browser?

I assume they mean Xen.

This really seems only obviously true if you're counting docker/podman-desktop and similar dev tools which work via stashing containers in a VM. There are a ton of large scale kubernetes deployments made directly on baremetal.

Did you switch from VMWare to Microsoft?

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