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Comment by ramgine | Hacker News Reader

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.

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Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.

There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").

VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).

I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc.

VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.

I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.

I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.

The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.

I'm not sure that's an accurate read. Broadcom changed the calculation by raking capex customers over the coals. Doesn't matter if you own the hardware and lease the data center space if your virtualization stack increases their prices by 1000% with a year notice. They would effectively make companies pay higher than cloud tier premiums for just maintaining their existing services running on VMWare.

I think that it boils down to that opex is considered speedy, flexible and agile. Whereas capex reflects slow/glacial but also stable. This is also why lease exists, why we have freelance contracts vs employee contracts for indeterminate amounts of time.

Engineer with an MBA here.

I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.

Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things. But we enjoy the thing in totality.

> I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.

Ultimately, the purpose of a system is what it does.

We've structured our society such that performing this type of activity is extremely lucrative, and financial engineering is by all appearances the endeavor that humans value above all others.

> As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.

That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.

> Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things.

No?

The cloud see them as a benefit, that’s for sure. They are frothing at the mouth for the customers to migrate their workloads.

> Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.

I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)

Well, it's not actually a trap, since it's not the management who pays the price - it is investors, employees and the society at large that do, while the MBAs have already moved on to their next victim.

Problem with incentives, I would say.

When the country is run by vultures, they celebrate the discovery of new successful ways to vult.

> I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are just stripped down. If you need it you should buy System Center."

SCVMM may technically have the thing you're missing from vCenter... but it's no vCenter. It is a grotesque, MMC plug-in-looking application where nothing quite makes sense to someone accustomed to vCenter or Hyper-V / FCM. Maybe if you're into Azure and slap another layer on top w/ Arc you'll have something that... is less icky but still isn't vCenter.

But, hey, The Reg says that VMware is now claiming that vSphere Standard was never really cancelled.

https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware...

Microsoft has done a lot of shitty things, including letting Windows Server and SCVMM languish to push/force their customers to Azure. I've been to a few Ignites and the feeling I got was Server development was starving for resources while the things we've asked for were being deployed to Azure only.

I don't think SCVMM is as bad as you portrait. I've used both SCVMM and vCenter. vCenter is so far ahead. And SCVMM was getting there until 2022. When they stopped trying.

Windows development in general, sadly, hence why I refer that Microsoft sees Azure as Azure OS.

If you think about it, all hyperscalers are hardly any different from old timesharing OSes, the only big difference is the way we get to log into the platform.

I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.

> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows...

I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.

Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.

I remember reading some obscure customer doco that "The old fax server is running on the virtual host"

And I was like... what virtual host?

What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack.

A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.

I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases.

Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.

But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).

If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.

(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)

> I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases.

I disagree. protoculture's core statement seems to be:

  A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.

A company's pinnacle product can be completely useless to me, but that doesn't change the fact that the products of theirs that I do use are very simple and unimpressive when compared to it. [0]

Having said that, I expect that a lot of people think Vmware Workstation is Vmware's pinnacle product because they've never heard of vSphere, ESXi, or anything else the company has made. "People have no knowledge of like 95% of what most companies do." is always a solid first guess when trying to work out confusion like protoculture's.

[0] Please spare me the "But how can it be a pinnacle product if it's not useful to you?" retort and ones like it. I've deliberately made a distinction between a product's usefulness to me personally and the sophistication of that product.

I don't think we're particularly in disagreement here, I think pinnacle product in manys eyes can be both reputational(prob workstation) or economic in addition to technical, so my reply was mostly in terms of replying to the NFI part of that statement and not really in terms of any personal judgement.

Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical.

If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)

Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure. So yeah, plenty of folks out there using omprem gear, it's kinda the reason why Broadcom is able to what it's doing - lots of suckers out there who're married yo vmware and can't get a divorce.

Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh

I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!

I’ll be honest it’s been over 10 years at this point. But we had to virtualize a dying Gateway 2000 that had Windows XP on it. As part of that we needed ISA to keep working. I found some USB ISA adapters and ordered them. It took a lot of messing around with Workstation, the host Windows 7 and drivers on the VM. I can’t remember all the details at this point :(

Couple of things (having lived in this world). The people running this stuff aren't by default stupid (well, not always), and not assuming they are helps with understanding.

First, someone has to pay to migrate apps, and as often as not the resources to do that aren't available. Sometimes you do the math and it doesn't make finacial sense to allocate those resources. And sometimes you just can't move apps. The vendor might not support vm/cloud/web deployment. Or, very common in manufacturing, you have an app that runs a machine and requires a very, very specific hw/sw environment to be supported.

Next, there's that whole regulated thing. We spend a lot of time in front of federal/national regulators explaining how we do things so that we don't screw up your mortgage or whatever. And those regulators take careful notes. So if I've spent the last 10 years explaining how we have this amazing VMWare deployment that ticks all the boxes, they're going to want some very, very detailed explanations of how HP VME or Proxmox or whatever is going to tick all the same boxes at least as good as VMWare did. And we're inviting a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years to make sure we did it right. It's a lot of work.

Sometimes you weigh everything, not just 'it costs less' or 'Broadcom are a bunch of assholes' or 'we don't want bros on HN to think we're suckers', and the answer is legitimately "the divorce isn't worth it".

At my last enterprise gig (financial, ~85k employees), when I inventoried apps for cloud migration, there were around 1500 what I guess you'd call 'thick apps', and about 75% of them were some variation of "stubborn thick client Win32 (or .NET) apps that are mission critical". Mission critical to someone, anyway, and the number of apps with 1 or 2 users was kinda eye opening. Noone was going to fund the effort to rewrite them to be cloud native or web based, so there was a lot of lifting and shifting going on.

Many businesses might do better pushing everything to web apps, but SaaS introduces a whole bunch of other issues in highly regulated worlds like finance. It's not always the right answer.

> quietly built a proxmox cluster

Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

Because it is made of a lot of open source components glued together in different weird ways. Sure, I would trust KVM over Hyper-V any day, but the management sucks for Proxmox.

If they build their new Datacenter Manager offering into what vCenter offered and abstract away all the ugliness (imagine creating a "distributed" switch on Proxmox with two clicks) I think they will make a killing.

Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support

> Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support

24/7 support will be available starting in October:

* https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-relea...

The other thing perhaps worth noting that the entire stack is open source, even Proxmox's 'special sauce' for management. Depending on your organization, if you can solve a problem with Debian (and Qemu) you can solve a problem with Proxmox.

If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing.

Better to just use same automation you use for VMs to just keep fleet of bare Debian + KVM machines.

Proxmox is for when you don't have a bunch of Linux experts on board. And that's also kinda what enterprises want to pay for, removing "liability" of having to keep very competent team.

...the fact that ends up costing them more everywhere is of no concern to middle management

> If you can solve a problem with Debian and Qemu Proxmox gives you nothing.

Proxmox gives you centralized management of a fleet of clustered systems with a very handy GUI (as well as CLI and API) that's used by many thousands of installations, which is a lot better than try to cobble together something yourself IMHO. Just because you have "a bunch of Linux experts on board" doesn't mean they have to 'waste' their time on re-inventing the wheel for management of VMs.

At my last job we had plenty of Linux folks and primarily ran a whole bunch of OpenStack, but we still used Proxmox for standalone management of VMs for 'tier zero' services (e.g., DNS, SMTP, LDAP, NTP) of various sorts that OpenStack itself depended on.

Anyone requiring that kind of support is likely hitting up Red Hat for OpenShift Virtualization (despite what warts that has, Red Hat meets the "organizational need for support part of the RFPs).

Is enterprise support super valuable these days when you get shafted anyway? Just pay for in house ya dingus.

This is loser talk.

Legal/Compliance/Risk department along the lines of “ nobody ever got fired for buying ibm”

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