How the End of VMware has affected me

[@paladin677]

A meeting we had at work with the Broadcom reps about the future of VMware was one of the most depressing things I've experienced in a long time. For those that work in industries that are strictly on-premise, the pain is real.

[@outhouse.wholesaler]

At the end of the meeting as they were leaving you should've said to your colleagues "alright, so what are we switching to?" loud enough for them to hear.

[@hifiandrew]

Switch to Nutanix. That's what we did even before the Broadcom thing. Our strictly on prem Nutanix system works great.

[@EliVideoCloud]

​@outhouse.wholesaler lol Why? The price? It didn't go up that much? Geeez you are acting like it quadrupled. Our reup didn't even go up all that much seriously like 15k and we got NSX Aria and VCF. I can't wait for people to start using open source or Proxmox for enterprise workloads lol. You get what you pay for....

[@TheOuterhaven]

No you don't understand. Broadcom knows exactly what it's doing. There is no hypervisor suite out there. That does what VMware offers. So saying that would have done nothing because they know exactly what they're doing and what they have. Nothing.

[@nigratruo]

@@TheOuterhaven Yes, Broadcom does this 100% intentional. But no, I have to disagree with you, the world has moved away from VMware, the stock has been flat for 5 years reflecting that, VMware was too expensive to start with, all big users that are living in today have moved away from it, KVM / QEMU is much more customizable, opensource, no vendor lock-in, a thing like the Broadcom killing (ehm acquisition) could never happen, because nobody owns / controls it fully. We all own it, that is not good for any stockholders, because in opensource, the benefit is with the users that use the software. If you think VMware was unique and cannot be replaced, you are inflexible and it sounds you are ready to jump off a cliff in defiance. KVM is different, it takes flexibility to learn something new. I have done that many many many years ago, I knew that proprietary Software (with its lousy ROI and always rising price) was not sustainable and as proven here, could always be killed by just one hostile company taking over to end it all (by cranking up the prices 400x if customers would bear it and then killing it through it, Oracle has done the same with Sun and Solaris) Look at how many companies now use KVM, it rules the world now. IT is a modular system, we know which modules exist, Proxmox for example uses the same KVM that everybody else, but built a management framework (GUI) for it, they did not have to build KVM or the very stable platform in Debian Stable that it sits on, you don't have to reinvent the wheel constantly, that is a huge waste of energy and time. Also, a thing that you might be missing: most VMware customers that left for the last years did not necessarily switch to KVM or any other hypervisor, but went to containers, which are a lot more efficient and again, modular and therefore more flexible, which is always the way to go. VMs are now being phased out in most places, it is very wasteful to run OSes 3000x, storage wise and CPU cycle wise. Unfortunately, for many people that are used to slower moving systems, where a technology will stick around for 40 years, IT is not like that, it is very unforgiving to people that are not constantly learning new things. In 20 years a technology comes up, shines, becomes dominant, then shrinks, withers and dies. That is just my perspective, I don't claim that it is the absolute truth.

[@pepeshopping]

Real experts never marry just ONE technology. Free ESXi was my trusted hypervisor for 10+ years but I always had virtualbox and then KVM on the side. I have moved 100% to KVM + ZFS and should have done it sooner!

[@jimmyrogers918]

The issues are making my business switch to ProxMox. We are gaining the advantage of hyperconverged storage going ProxMox, which we wouldn't under ESXi because of the licensing costing more than the hardware for vsan for a small company. ProxMox has Ceph built in (solid storage technology that IBM even uses in some of their products). Ceph is not efficient at using storage on small scale, but it's very resiliant and with fast networking and NVME drives, it's fast enough to run my business software with very little increase in overall investment. My workload is very CPU and read heavy, so I'm less concerned about the write penalty that Ceph has. Reads on Ceph are phenomenal and can get very fast with 25gb or faster networks.

[@menruletheworld]

As a vcp myself I like VMWare, I run it at home and in the past advised several companies to move to VMWare in my role as a consultant. However VMWare was only one part of my toolbox, I know Docker, Kubernetes, Proxmox, KVM, AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, CFEngine, plus all the old school Linux, Networking and storage stuff, and how to provision it, Why? Because there’s a thing I learned in the 25 years i’m in this game, and that is one thing never changes and that is change. Every couple of years you hear all the IT managers talking about the new shiny toy that will make all our problems vanish as snow for the sun, which of course never happens, I’ve seen it with moving everything to a SaaS platforms, Virtualization, Docker, Kubernetes, IaC, Agile, Scrum, and now with AI, etc, etc. And it will be no different with al the cloud stuff. In the end when the dust settled it will find it’s place next to all the other technologies. I already hear some of my clients and some companies that they have the intention to move away from the cloud, and back to running their stuff on premisse due to the insane cloud bills they receive and the promise that you will need less people to manage it which never materialized. There’s actually only two reasons to stay in the cloud: A you have a very volatile workload and the scaling up and down of capacity is essential to be able to service your customers, B you are very small like a startup and the credits you get from most cloud providers are enough to get you up and running. In short you can distill one simple lesson from what I wrote above , and that is Keep learning, in the broadest sense, don’t pin yourself to one technology stack, it will kill your market value as an engineer no matter how good you are, and it’s very simple to become obsolete when your a one trick monkey, just the next new shiny toy.

[@EliVideoCloud]

I take it, you're not an enterprise IT department...

[@VolkerHett]

ZFS is nice, although VMWares filesystem is no slouch and very stable, too. But when we're leaving the single machine homelab and enter business critical areas, CEPH is more like it. I have yet to test Longhorn. Back in the days of ESX 3.5 I used some replication software whose name I can't remember to replicate my Windows VMs from one building to the other. Later we switched to HP Store Virtual and then to VMWare VSan. It's a small datacenter with just six HPE DL360 servers in a vsphere cluster but there are 25,000 households depending on it!

[@menruletheworld]

@@EliVideoCloudclearly not, however there are multiple valid reasons to just use a bare esxi for small scale vps hosting.

[@druxpack8531]

VMware changed my life. Going from physical servers in the 90s and early 2000s, to VMs was night and day. It made the previously impossible, now possible. There are alternatives, but nothing as complete as VMware is. It’s going to be a paradigm shift for anyone on-prem.

[@maxstr]

vMotion was sorcery to me. Took me a few years to really understand how it works

[@BillyVotta]

For EVERYONE on prem

[@rustysparks65]

V-Motion is sorcery. Scared the he$$ out of us when we first used it. Like you, we understand it now. Today we just let it do its thing, shifting VM's between hosts. If you have enough hosts, total CPU and RAM across all hosts, its a I.T. admins blessing 🙂

[@davidbriseno910]

ProxMox foi the win! Screw VMware

[@TrippSC2]

If you don't mind me asking, what do you think is missing from Proxmox and Nutanix?

[@cpuuk]

I was waiting for that IBM patent to expire, that's how early I started with VM. I left the environment in 2016 having taken VM as far as I could (multi-site full recovery/ failover resilience & VDI desktops & VM on a stick mobility). Best tech EVER! But it was obvious that the re-slicing of the licences in the pursuit of greed (not only VM is guilty of this) would be it's downfall at some point in the future. The only constant in IT is change. Anyhoo, VM will go through price-gauging, contraction and re-structuring that will really make Support a thing of the past . Time to move on and support a new idea ;-)

[@GearSeekers]

My whole career before KZbin was VMware. This makes me very sad. There are many Hypervisors out there but ESXi was/is easily the best. I'll start transitioning all of our stuff away from VMware in the next couple months. Very sad times for the community.

[@BinaryBlueBull]

What are you transitioning too, if you don't mind me asking?

[@GearSeekers]

@@BinaryBlueBull I'm thinking either Proxmox or XCP-ng

[@natk5569]

I personally have been using Proxmox as my hypervisor for few years. It's pretty good.

[@midcurvemanic]

My employer just announced that everything will move to the cloud and we are forklifting existing instances to AWS. Yeah. I'm sure that's going to work out great.

[@davidbriseno910]

Sounds like a terrible idea. We as tech pros have seen this over and over by high management. What do they do, they lift and shift just to bring it back down because the costs are very high. Unless you are a large business, you are in for a world of crap.

[@ToBi-xr2mg]

I feel you all. Come join the ProxMox crew.

[@michaelrichardson8467]

Corporate greed is one of the main reasons I moved from VMWare after 6. It sucks either way you slice this, though. I still have clients on 6 who are not happy with licensing re-ups and are looking at moving to the cloud or other hosting options, which cuts us out further as well.

[@rustysparks65]

What hypervisor did you move to @michaelrichardson8467 ?

[@hifiandrew]

If you still wanna stay on prem, I've been happy with our Nutanix system. Cloud can be its own nightmare and expensive as heck.

[@thepappas]

I have been a VMware user since 1.0 in 1999 (basically known now as Workstation) . Came on floppy and ran on winnt 4. Certified pro since the certification existed. Saddened, but as with all tech, gotta move on.

[@jimh2067]

Yes, after getting the price for renewal of some licenses outside of an EA, we relized we will need to find a different solution. We will need to find a solution for our 2500+ VMs and Broadcom will never get the 7 figure annual renewal they expected when our main EA expires in 18 months.

[@benjibenning692]

And that's that. Broadcom killed off the free license today.

[@2GT-Rich]

Yep, there goes all ESXi in the #homelab. It's a sad day.

[@davidbriseno910]

@@2GT-Rich ProxMoix is legit

[@TheThenewdiabolic]

The team I work on manages a large VDI environment and now I'm working on figuring out my next path. I love the team I'm on and have no desire to leave but looking like the future is dark and no clue how the next year or years will be like. I was working on getting NSX certified but now that seems pretty pointless.

[@BinaryBlueBull]

Just about the same story here, though I'm more from the server infrastructure side than VDI. I am (was?) on the VCP-DCV track and that now seems quite pointless too. It would be a shame of all the money I invested in my learning but I really don't know if I should even proceed. We had a gigantic datacenter overhaul planned for the next 3 years and were past the planning stages, and that has ground to a halt as well, at least for now, as our CTO and IT managers are (rightfully) hesitant to make the investment given the current course VMware is on

[@Anonymous______________]

Leostream is your friend.

[@CeruleanHollowNailsIt]

As someone who works on VCF, I feel you. I've been working with VMware products since ESXi 4.x. I feel lost.

[@EliVideoCloud]

VCF isn't going anywhere

[@arnefines2356]

@@EliVideoCloud Thats right, vcf makes azure seem like a good product.

[@EliVideoCloud]

@@arnefines2356 How so?

[@cosmotraumatika7474]

We just migrated off of VMware Carbon Black. The EDR had been struggling in the desktop/server world since VMware's acquisition (though their integration into ESX was rather interesting) but the Broadcom acquisition help finalize the decision. They slaughtered the Carbon Black organization. The cuts were so bad that major MDR and MSSPs were discovering there was nobody they could reach - all their account teams were gone. No consideration about transition plans.

[@scootergirl3662]

I don’t blame you - it’s not to near the same extent since I haven’t been in tech as long, but docker the company has saddened me because they keep making docker less approachable and generally are getting greedy. Docker was one of the first technologies I got really good at.

[@Demonata1223]

I use docker pretty extensively as a software developer. Let me tell you. Devs will not put up with it. We'll make our own open source docker agent so fast the second they step out of line. I understand making a profit is necessary. But you don't F over the people who made your product popular to begin with.

[@bluesteelbass]

I do not comprehend why Carbon Black got cut. Seemed to be a perfect solution to virtualize the interconnectivity instead of using physical networking.

[@MakeKasprzak]

As someone who only briefly used VMWare before moving to VirtualBox then other virtualization/container stuffs after moving to Linux (QEMU, LXD, Docker, Podman), I kinda forgot about VMWARE nearly a decade ago... 😅 It still sucks to hear the news, but if its any consolation, its possible to forget VMWare.

[@paulstubbs7678]

Well not if your the support guy who is responsible for a pile of systems, and needs to re-do everything in the time that ordinarily was just to support them, like 10,000% workload. I'm kind of expecting many to just say to the customers 'sorry' as the close the door on a once viable business.

[@LoneStarSpartan]

I started using it back in the GSX days when Diane Greene was in charge. There was simi panic when it moved from EMC to Dell, but we just got a lot of product bloat. Now this is just steam rolling the mid and smaller companies out. The alternate hypervisors will thieve.

[@IlyaSergeev0]

I feel you, but I think it is a valuable lesson for the industry and everyone in it on why you should value open source software.

[@pauldunecat]

I went from RLX blade servers to GSX and "ESX infrastructure node" and it was a great couple decades. But I also still think of Novell all these years later but don't use. Same will be with VMware.

[@PowerMechGuyTechMasterEarl]

I just want to start off by saying, your channel is awesome and I can't wait to see all the other stuff you've posted. I then wanted to say thank you for posting this and acknowledging the pain. My whole life has been filled with a constant search for reliability and sustainability. That means buying things I don't have to buy again, or more recently, educating myself on open source solutions. And I know that an argument can be made that one should simply avoid all paid software. There are many reasons for that sentiment. But I think it dismisses something that anyone who has paid or invested in good software feels when they can no longer justify continuing to use that product. It hurts. It just hurts. You know how it functions. You've done so many cool things with it. You bonded with it. And now, for whatever reason, you can't use it. Sure, in some cases you can still use it on the side for personal projects or for fun. But as a viable, reliable, sustainable, core solution, it no longer works. And that simply sucks. And I don't think dealing with that starts by saying, "just go open source." I think it starts by acknowledging the incredible sense of loss one must endure when they are forced to part with something that, in the world of software, was working great just the day before. Sincerely, thank you, and God bless you. I hope your foray into new solutions brings you to a happier place that is hopefully just as, if not moreso, sustainable, and rewarding.

[@StephaneThirion]

Citrix have shut down their community as well, EUC community can't relly on their major vendors anymore.

[@kuhndj67]

I'm still using it and I just forked out a new house worth of $$$ to get licensed for 3 more years... but I see the end of the road coming fast for my time with VMWare. I'm just too small to fit the Broadcom model. It does suck because it's been a great product.

[@Feed9Will]

The answer to no ownership on prem VMware is not no ownership remote "cloud." On prem subscription / cloud hive mind have the same goal - Ownership over "your" business data + infrastructure. "Many subscriptions to rule them all, many subscriptions to find them, one cloud to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

[@jig1056]

I’m a home lab guy that moved to XCP-NG and Xen orchestra, community edition 3 years ago and I’ve loved it and haven’t looked back.

[@Anonymous______________]

Combine it with GlusterFS or MooseFS bam, perfect replacement for vSAN.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

@@Anonymous______________ Isn't GlusterFS essentially dead now?

[@jmbaronster]

Good luck out there boss. Same story, same place. I have paths out and up, I just don't like them like I did virtualization.

[@stephengentle2815]

I’ve gone through the disappointment and yeah, a bit of grief, but it happened as soon as the Broadcom deal was announced back in May 2022. I knew Broadcom too well by that point from other places to be able to believe it would go any other way, and started looking at the alternatives. One other thing, by the way, it’s an extremely common mistake, especially in the US (even serious companies make it in their marketing material), but it’s plain wrong English to say ‘on-premise’ - the correct term is technically ‘on-premises’, it’s always plural in this sense (as in “The owners keep servers on their business premises.” The singular as a noun only means “an idea or theory on which a statement or action is based.”

[@FirearmTutorials]

It's called "on-prem"

[@stephengentle2815]

‘On-prem’ is acceptable. It’s just short for ‘on-premises’ (but the shortening is useful for avoiding the error if you don’t remember which of ‘premise’ or ‘premises’ is which).

[@nicholasvinen]

Yes premises is the same spelling for singular and plural. Same as sheep.

[@TheDillio187]

right there with you, brother. The first time I used VMWare was in the late 90's on a peltier cooled, overclocked Pentium III.

[@ivanmaglica264]

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't something like this happen before? It was when they released new pricing model based on amount of RAM a few years ago. There was a moderately sized exodus to Xen and Hyper-V (some KVM as well), but VMware then took few steps back.

[@DonaldMolter]

I’ve worked on and used VMware products since esxi 3.x. It saddens me to see this move and has affected colleagues of mine who worked with VMware as a consumer of their software, VARs, and even current/ex employees of VMware. It’s really sad to see something change so drastic when prior to all of these changes they were unmatched by basically any of their “competitors”. I will say it'll be nice to add some competition but again not at the price of what we are witnessing.

[@FranckEhret]

Hi there, As many VMware changed my perspective about IT and I'm grateful for everything it brought me. I'm using VMWare since VMware server 1.0 based on Windows) As many too, I feel betrayed and sad this happened. But even tough my company is for now not really ready to move on (we still have a couple of years of paid support ahead of us), I AM READY to learn new things! And everyday since the deal reveal is my motivation to use free software even stronger. Watched you XCP-bg video this morning, I can't wait your next videos about the other alternatives!!! 😉

[@itchrisw]

Looking forward to your content post-VMware. Sorry that we're all in this situation. It was definitely good and fun while it lasted.

[@EdwardChewcontact]

best part of my career was at VMware. Watching Broadcom buy my house and burn it in front of me was really hard to watch, even if I am no longer there. VMware was a unique place, and I still mourn its demise.

[@TheCynysterMind]

I have been using VMWare Desktop since version 7. It is how I can keep familiar with the various operating systems and test things as an IT Tech and later as an IT admin. I have over 100 VM's and now wondering how I can migrate these to a new platform because some of these machines are clones of actual physical computers that no longer exist (my way of extending the life of proprietary machines indefinitely. In addition I have several MAC clones that I managed to get running on PC hardware. If a viable solution is out there I would love to get my fingers into it. I know of Oracle Virtual Box... and I am happy to migrate there as long as I can convert my VM's So any info that might be suggested I would love to hear.

[@pabss3193]

Proxmox, F the cloud and agree on your points, late stage capitalism...

[@Strykenine]

It's not stupid. When I was getting started in IT (more than 20 years ago) and I encountered VMware for the first time it was like a revelation. It was what I thought computing should be - I was never short on machines or hardware again. I could just spin up a VM for a task - boom, done. I even thought about being a VMware engineer. Maybe I should have - I'll never know. What I do know is that I was a Dell customer when they acquired EMC and EqualLogic and VMware, and this feels like the biggest punch in the gonads of anything I've gone through. The is the first time I have ever been through this stuff and thought 'This will make things demonstrably worse.' But then again, it's just business. I'm moving on, and other small customers should too.

[@Renville80]

Former VMWare user here. I switched from the Wintel universe to the Mac rather than upgrade to Vista... I had a few apps for which I still require Windows, so I started out with Parallels. I had been active enough on their forums to eventually be invited into a closed beta, but it turned into a Charlie Foxtrot when they decided to change the beta group mid-test. The change was so abrupt, there was no way to gracefully revert to the last stable version. After spending a couple evenings doing a backup, wipe, and restore (and much profanity), I promptly switched to VMWare and was a faithful customer until I made the fateful decision to switch to a newer Mac with M1 silicon. Wasn't happy when I found out I couldn't run VMWare anymore, the only Windows version able to work with the revised VMWare version was the ARM edition, and M$ was being exceedingly parsimonious in making those licenses available. Wound up buying a refurb PC to install my preferred version of Windows on it and just using RDP to connect. (shrug) Not sorry to see VMWare go after that, and I'm glad I got out before that rediculous 10x hike!

[@loiphin]

Unfortunately these kind of crazy disruptions affect all facets of IT. I am networking guy myself for the past 25 years (CCIE) and you have to adapt or die. Time marches on...

[@TayschrennSedai]

I'm in the middle of deploying and migrating to vmware. No regrets even with the change. Hyper-v with SCVMM is an absolute joke.

[@djohnsto2]

I started with VMware in the early 2000s with ESX 2.5 (non-i with the service console) on 32-bit platforms with non-hardware accelerated virtualization. Yes, I'm old. I was taken with it. I've made decent money since then making VMware work for other peoples' businesses, bought a house, and fed my family with that money for 20 years. When the free ESXi became available I pushed it to LOTS of customers over many years - I staked my personal reputation to recommend it, and now I do feel betrayed. Knowing what the industry is like I'm not surprised, and it might open up new contract opportunities - But I'm not celebrating.

[@markdownsouth1500]

While I run ESXi in a VM farm at home just because, I support a fairly large (48 socket Ent Plus, 2 HPE Synergy enclosures-sorry, frames with 10 blades in each stretched across a Metro-E 10G link) VM farm across two data centers. All the change is going to do for me is my SnS annual cost will go up, probably significantly. I don't like it but IIWII. With more than 800 VMs I don't have the desire to rip and replace the entire infrastructure.

[@jfkastner]

Sad, but we have more Alternatives for SMB on-prem now than ever, XCP-NG, Proxmox, Dockers, Kubers, ...

[@judewestburner]

I didn't know anyone was 'emotional' about VMware. I'm blown away by that

[@BillyVotta]

​@@judewestburnerVMware solidified the shift to virtualized computing. They were the best and still are the most feature complete vendor in the space they largely created. This company, that shift, made professional lives out of hundreds of thousands of admins and it was cool to play with in home labs getting old video games working on new hardware with VMware being early adopters of virtualizing directx. That was in the late 90s. You're talking about a company that invented the technology that shaped many people's childhoods paving their way to sys admin careers. It's not often the thing you do as a hobby growing up becomes the thing you do as a career so when that happens AND it's thanks to one company then yes of course there will be emotional responses to their untimely demise by corporate greed.

[@arnefines2356]

@@judewestburner Time and resources spent

[@callmebigpapa]

Carbon Black ......least fav solution in that space and that is saying a lot.

[@HwSystems]

When enterprise act like this I feel no remorse cracking it.

[@thewordywizard4389]

Thing is this means compition has a chance. Like you said, on-prem VMware was the answer and nobody questioned it, now they need alternatives they will come

[@aaronholt6595]

I really appreciate this video and seeing how much it means to you. Like you, i feel so saddened by the handling of what was such an amazing product. Innovative, market leader, reliable, solid, these and similar words were what i associated with VMware. Now, its like watching your beast mate drink himself into oblivion after a tough breakup and nothing you can do can stop the demise. They're heading for a cliff face, recklessly out of control and all i can do is sit and watch the insanity unfold in front of me. We've already decided to migrate to another vendor after months and months of shoddy service and endless buggy software. As a technician, this is likely to be the last time i encounter VMware, and after starting out on 4.1, this really is very sad.

[@2GuysTek]

Appreciate the reply. Out of curiosity, what did your company end up moving to?

[@aaronholt6595]

@@2GuysTek We're still in the decision making process but the leader is Nutanix. AHV seems to fit the bill and we're looking at Guardicore to replace NSX, which has given us nothing but trouble. Our SAN is also eol hence looking at the HCI side of things.

[@2GuysTek]

@aaronholt6595 I appreciate the info! Professionally I’m looking for alternatives as well, and I appreciate hearing what direction others are looking to move.

[@mas5867]

@@2GuysTek Your "moving" background is distracting. Change it.

[@reetrulez]

Well keep in mind, the only shareholder that really mattered was Michael Dell as the majority shareholder of VMware, he's the sole reason the acquisition went through.

[@2GuysTek]

You’re not the first person to mention this to me, and you’re right. I would love to know what motivated him to make the decision.

[@reetrulez]

​@@2GuysTek In my mind, it was the money. I read MD made around $22 billion himself from this sale

[@HomeBudgetComputing]

@@2GuysTek Money is the sole motivator.

[@BroncoPatriot]

I can empathize with your dismay of on-premises datacenters and VMware as a solution (not the). I experienced this transition from on-premises to cloud in 2018. I am thankful for embracing and not pressing my heels into the sand. Over just the past 5 years cloud computing far exceeds on-premises capabilities and ROI as you move from a 3-year plan for on-premises over compute to JIT cloud compute. Also, with AI being now the next revolution even if Broadcom didn’t buy VMWare workloads would predominantly move to solutions like Microsoft AVS to provide both training savings while also leveraging dynamic cloud compute. Glad you are looking forward but don’t keep your sights on on-premises architectures as you will place your professional future similar to the old Mainframe days.

[@olavodias]

Cloud solutions are most likely using Vmware too, so prices will go higher. We need other options to replace Vmware now.

[@Knirin]

AWS was built on Xen. The last discussion they had about it mentioned Xen and KVM. Digital Ocean and Linode both use Xen or KVM. Azure uses Hyper-V of course. Google Cloud Platform uses either KVM or Xen.

[@olavodias]

@@Knirin next purchase by Broadcom will be Citrix then. Then we are all doomed 😭

[@azzido]

I feel bad for the companies that don't get off vmware asap, they will be stuck with the bill once vmware have to make back the money they are going to lose once customers move off the platform. As hypervisors, theres so many good products (maybe even better than vmware).

[@ronaldhofman1726]

I do , docker, hyper-v , ESXI and proxmox, it's not the end of the world, vmware wil regret this in the long run

[@arnefines2356]

There is no more vmware, its broadcom.

[@DonaldTripp]

I’ve been using VMware since you installed it as a Linux package, so over 20 years. We though EMC buying it and the EMC Tax and then Dell buying them both would end it, but it still held on. Let’s home Broadcom doesn’t fubar this too badly.

[@guytech7310]

I suspect Broadcom saw the writing on the wall: Small\mid size companies are moving to the cloud. The on-premise for small\mid size companies has been declining for nearly a decade, and its just a matter of time before its completely gone. With a declining used base, the only option was subscription without ending support as sales revenue & system upgrades are collapsing. The cloud era has killed VMware for on-premise use. No doubt VMware will focus only on cloud computing for future development.

[@ScottZupek]

A lot of SMB's move to the cloud, with the calculations that it will be cheaper. And then, with the ever long problem of pricing unpredictability, they move back after 7ish years of not being able to control costs. The grass is not greener in magical cloud world, despite the BILLIONS of dollars the big 3 spend to convince you it is. This is from real world/real business experiences. The ONLY people moving to cloud full time, are corporations. NOT SMB.

[@guytech7310]

@@ScottZupekOdds are cloud will remain cheaper: 1. No internal IT staff required for support\maintenance. Plus deal with hiring\Employee retentent\Benefits, etc 2. Cloud have access to large internet pipes edundancy 3. Need to run support DC HVAC & power backup edundant systems 4. All software is moving to subscriptions anyway, not just VMware, but windows, server apps, etc. Some apps are going to be cloud only as large CRM just stop offering on premise software\support. 5. Companies shifting to remote workers: No more Corporate office (rent\maintenance\utilities) Companies that close office (virtual office) have no spot to for a DC. I would say on-premise is pretty much turning into buggy whips. Probably the only major reason to keep on-premise: Cyber attack on a cloud provider, or some sort of bad upgrade that crashes it for a period of time.

[@gpbarchi]

Not everyone lives un the US or Europe with ultra fast AND reliable connections. Running complete systems in the cloud is not ideal in many places.

[@Knirin]

@@guytech7310 The cloud is only cheaper for stuff that can be demand scaled well or is designed primarily for external access. If your system can't or doesn't allow for on demand scaling then the cloud isn't cheaper than on-prem. @gpbarchi is also right about network connection issues. Sending a json request offsite for every scanned barcode on a POS system is a recipe for a very shitty rollout. Don't get me wrong stuff like square is great for shops that handle a few hundred products and maybe a hundred customers an hour. But being good for a small coffee shop/deli or someone at a fairground or bazaar doesn't mean I can run a store with a half dozen cash registers on them.

[@LivingCommonSense]

Hmm, I been running Hyper-V for 12 years or so with no problems and no reason to look at anything else. Played with VMware around 2008 or so which worked as well virtual PC and virtualbox. Couldn't justify the cost over the free stuff and wouldn't put my name on the line with the freebies until Hyper-V. Hearing everyone crying over vmware makes be kind of wonder what I was missing out on and glad I don't know or have to worry about it. I suppose if your staying away from Windows then VMware was the way to go.

[@JibunnoKage-cj2kz]

As someone that did Enterprise design on VMware then Hyper-V and then KVM variant (RHEV) in turn, there are things that VMware just did well, before Hyper-V or even KVM, and a few things they still do 'better' though the window of difference is getting or has been getting 'thinner' over time. VMware was and is still (a bit) ahead with NSX and vSAN and other features, but the bedrock of vSphere that was VMware raise to dominate has been in trouble once Hyper-V reach reasonable parity with VMware in many of the basic features. But VMware had deep pockets and great support, so the innovation kept coming. But now? If you are starting out with virtualization, you have to ask... Why OS level virtualization at all, when Application virtualization maybe sufficient, this is the maturity of Docker of course, that is hitting OS level virtualization square in the teeth. VMware tried to derail Application level virtualization with Photon, but that failed. A solid Docker based infrastructure is just too lean and easy to support than a typical vSphere stack, never mind Hyper-V stack. And the adoption numbers suggest this, as Docker management solutions have matured. OS level virtualization is less hated by Security Engineering teams, than Application level virtualization, but that is also slowly changing as well. So the days of adopting OS level virtualization by default are gone. And VMware is facing a major challenge. Microsoft is without much noise released Core to also trip up Docker adoption, but like Photon is struggled, why even today much of Microsoft based solutions are not as Core based as Microsoft hoped. To develop Core applications is easier than it once was, but still not painless... as that changes, Core will gain, and will provide (maybe?) enough leverage to Microsoft to avoid exodus to Docker? Maybe? Depends on how many firms decide, hey since we are leaving VMware, maybe we should also leave OS virtualization behind where we can as well? If I was still actively engineering virtualization solutions... I would. If I really don't need OS virtualization, why use it... would be the argument. Besides, anytime I can avoid Microsoft $$$ solutions why not? Would be the argument to management, IMHO.

[@hifiandrew]

Hyper-V isn't sexy or trendy (maybe it will get a second look now) but I've always liked it, it works just fine. I still have a place for it in our enterprise portfolio.

[@davidmarquesneves]

Thanks. I also in the same boat.

[@djdonbentley2141]

I'm not a professional or an admin who deploys virtual systems , but from day 1 vmware had the same problem that many open source products had. If you come out on day 1 in competition with yourself , offering free scaled down personal solutions that directly compete with your paid business model , what do you think will happen to the value of your Paid solutions . it will be consistently undermined and in conflict with your business model.

[@morbius1490]

I work for one of the big 4 hyperscaler's in the UK, I used to be a big VMware fanboy and operated in the lead architect / cto space for years. Now there's a massive shift in all the conversations I have. VMware is indeed dead, they've pulled the rug from under it, instilled massive unease in customers and all the very large enterprise customers I speak to want off of VMware in their environments, a lot considering VMware on cloud but certainly they all say the same, no more VMware in their own DCs. I actually can't quite believe Broadcom could be that stupid tbh, they have pulled the plug out the tub and expecting to keep some of the bath water in, the problem is there's now too many holes. Enterprise is all about confidence and assurance, destroy this and you've pretty much destroyed your business.

[@DEVAXTATOR-1]

vcp 4 and 7 with my home is a vmware esxi so i dont even know how to proxmox or kvm or the other platforms and i dont want to move to another one esxi 7 works for me and it will for many years to come

[@CraigTompkins1]

With the announcement of KRR buying the EUC division of VMware this morning, what are your thoughts on Horizon? My biggest question is "Will I have to buy Horizon from 1 company and vCenter/ESXi from Broadcom to run Horizon on when those resources have been included in the cost of Horizon?"

[@Solkre82]

I just got a job where they would pay for me to get certified in VMWare... I don't even know if I want it now. Broadcom can eat a bag of Di... Patch cables.

[@2GuysTek]

😂 This made my day! lol But seriously, if your company will pay for your VMware certs, or any certs for that matter, take them up on it. Build that resume!

[@aarontshaffer]

I''m right there with you man. This sucks.

[@Wahinies]

Im boldened most of my experience is with Hyper-V, Proxmox, and Xen

[@dnldnl4880]

Considering most Enterprise customers have vmware I think lots will start to look at what else they can do but not sure if there is a good answer

[@renatoespinoza1066]

It was Michael Dell's doing he had over 50% stocks though his own shares and through his holding company who voted for this, this really sucks

[@eric-seastrand]

I’d love some post VMware content. It was my go to hyper visor since forever. Tried all the others but hardware support wasn’t there for my kit

[@cheapscotsman]

We sent in our core count and will get a price and will see. Have Ent+ and standard on Nutanix. So will we keep VMware or go HyperV or AOS on Nutanix.

[@rvboyett]

Please stop saying EUC is dead. We are not dead. If anything, the VMware spirit and culture are very much alive at EUC. Companies should always be looking at their VDI/UEM options but I can say that the way forward for EUC will become much clearer in the next few weeks. Folks around here are pretty excited and frankly impatient for the spinoff to occur. Wish I could say more.

[@2GuysTek]

@rvboyett, I genuinely hope that EUC lands on it's feet and that Hoizon continues to live on and is successful! It's hard to see the positives through all the fallout, so I look forward to seeing what comes of EUC soon. Thanks for the comment and the insight!

[@BillyVotta]

If Nutanix buys Horizon they will likely finally get Horizon Admin off of Windows and onto a much easier to deploy appliance like UAGs are and likely script the hell out of pretty much any conceivable thing you can think of that often goes wrong with horizon (instant clone cp-template cleanup in AD, etc). Prism is awesome with how it orchestrates updates, I much prefer it over even vCenter 8's lifecycle management. But honestly same, I can't wait to see who buys EUC. Unfortunately it'll be the highest bidder and not the best place for it.

[@chris.dillon]

Read Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. It's about many companies. Whatever Cory's next book will probably be leaning into enshitification and I will read it. The problem is, you can switch to something else but it's likely to follow suit. AWS will go this way one day.

[@IanHobday]

RIP VMware. Long live open source solutions! KVM and containerization are the future.

[@flomax_actual]

I guess that each vendor will have to develop their own product development road map but does anyone have insight on how purpose built enterprise applications like Cisco Call Manager be supported in the future?

[@geerliglecluse5297]

IT has always been about making money in the first place, and will most likely continue to be that way. Humans are nowhere more Resources than in tech. Useful, expendable or disposable, depending on whichever of these suits tech-business interests best at some point in time. Before I switched to tech about 20 years ago, I worked in finance as a professional. Same story. Just make sure you'll stand out as a competent professional, adapt to change, and keep an eye out for the next tech-bandwagon coming along to jump on and thrive. In my view, that's just how it is, whether we like it or not.

[@IanGSully]

This sucks that they killed off Free licensing, because the crappy thing is. I have a bunch of Cisco Phones that are connected to Cisco CUCM, and Cisco only supports ESXi for Cisco CUCM

[@germanmosca]

I've moved away from CUCM a couple years ago. I use Asterisk on a RasPi these days. And can configure the Cisco Phones from there.

[@michaelhess4825]

Gotta say I'm at an impass. Do I over burden my cloud engineer by telling him we'll be moving our vm's all to the cloud, or start testing, testing more, testing even more, with no access to lab equipment, and migrate to prox or xg? As a non profit, I'll still be reaching out to our vendors to see if we can weak arm Broadcom...

[@Anonymous______________]

If you are not using VMWare Horizon for VDI, converting your datacenter to XCP-NG or oVirt is insanely easy.

[@alexandercristian1899]

What about Kubernetes and kubevirt as an alternative? Would be interesting to see if it’s feasible as a hypervisor replacement

[@nssk]

We just started a VMware 8 start but our new system will now be nutanix. As for vdi a new venture we were setting up for I’m not sure now.

[@2GuysTek]

I'd love to hear how your venture into Nutanix goes! Consider joining our Discord and sharing!

[@BinaryBlueBull]

Yeah same here, we have a meeting planned with Nutanix next week to look into it as our VMware datacenter overhaul is, at least for now but likely forever, shelved

[@Crispy_Mofo_]

we run vmware 7 on top of nutanix and are probably going to transition to ahv. Nutanix makes it very easy to convert to ahv and honestly it will be cheaper to dump esxi. I think this has been coming for a long time. Ever since Dell bought vmware it honestly has been going downhill anyway. Broadcom will make it worse so its probably a good time to start moving. I guess for home I will have to get some mini pc's so I can start running proxmox.

[@hifiandrew]

We switched to Nutanix AHV 2 years ago and have been very happy. Completely on prem HCI, better than our old VMware 6 system. Great support, great people there, easier to admin than old VMware. Updates are cake, set it and forget it in LCM.

[@TechnessCorner]

Damnnnnn... Peace Broski

[@dj_paultuk7052]

Keep your ESXi 6.1 installers safely tucked away !.

[@aadityabhaijijain2388]

Would it be advisable to pursue the VMware Certification after VMware Broadcom merger? Please reply.

[@FirearmTutorials]

No

[@userhandler0tten351]

Thanks for the insight, my boss has us on VMware for our own application server testing. Before this gig I was a hyper V baby. That said, I started an MSP last year for a client that I have on contract to provide 75vms a month and I personally chose XCP-NG, but I also have ProxMox and Openstack (devstack currently) In my small cabinet. Once I get more hardware I’d like to setup a simple KVM on NixOS as it’s super reproducible and hardware agnostic with regard to vm migrations.

[@nelsone.hernandez6654]

Can't wait for competitor's marketing saying "VMware = High TCO". Shame on Broadcom

[@naeemn45]

Microsoft Hyper-V team doing high fives. What a bad direction for VMware.

[@FTABoyNavid]

same feeling bro same feeling.

[@Sammoga_Yeddi]

This is how I feel. 😞

[@anunnakis1]

I refuse to let VMware Community fall apart! 😢

[@2GuysTek]

😢 I wish it weren’t so too.

[@muhdiversity7409]

I believe I bought my first copy of VMWare in 2001, if memory serves me. VMWare is now 100% dead to me.

[@__SKYNET__]

Does anyone know the esxi pricing moving forward?

[@jimh2067]

An early renewal and conversion of just 18 procs to cores for an ANNUAL renewal was.$75k with "great discounts ". That was for 3 generation old hardware. The renewal of cores for current server hardware would be twice as much because they have twice the number of cores.

[@__SKYNET__]

@@jimh2067 You have got to be kidding me, WTF.

[@chasuav]

@67 How many ESXi host, CPU, and core for $75K per year? We have two ESXi hosts, 2 CPU, 8 core (16 cores total) per host. The 3rd ESXi host with the same server specs is at our DR site, not sure if it requires a license. Just emailed my rep and waiting for a renewal quote.

[@xznmusic]

My career started with VMWare in the IT space, though I am in the camp of shifting away from VDI's as a whole. A lot of services are being migrated to other methods and we need to move with it. On premise used to be many servers, then virtualization reduced that. The next stage is cloud/microservices, whether on-prem with localized orchestration via Kubernetes, or "on someone else's computer". Docker containers/LXC by design run closer to bare metal and are able to share resources more efficiently. Virtual desktop was merely a step, the future is microservices.

[@TheJensss]

Proxmox next

[@chunhe142]

The end of VMware could spell the end of Cloud freaking computing. Yay!

[@brodriguez11000]

Hardly.

[@caribeskinner6290]

Wonder what Broadcom's end game is? The only thing I can see is chasing some DoD dollars.

[@joejoe2452]

what about hyper v server it is unlimited license? what is so special about vmware?

[@davidbriseno910]

I think it is just the fact that VMWare was used by so many companies and it was one of the real true hypervisors. It also had the free version to test in your own homelab, etc. It was just an OG and it is a sad thing to see it be ripped to shit because of company greed.

[@TheRealPixx]

They were a excellent employeer.. shame ;(

[@black_heart_gaming583]

I'm still going to use it until we can't anymore

[@cheapscotsman]

ESXi since 3.5 first, First VMWorld in 2008

[@moe47988]

You're all jumping the gun. This is so extreme that broadcom is going to backpedal on some of these decisions. Mark my words.

[@fiendlybrds]

FYI carbon black are coming back.

[@funkiam9214]

fck cloud premise is live asf! its hard to move somewhere if you use vsan or other features from vmware

[@richardlarson7065]

We are moving on to Citrix Xen Server

[@simonong5839]

it is sad. very sad