Broadcom aquires VMWare for $61B

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zipcad@reddit

rip VMware. Start the three release principle.

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HotelRwandaBeef@reddit

We just started exploring other options haha. VMware was starting to charge ungodly numbers so we were already in the process of exploring but this fast tracked that a bit lol.

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moldyjellybean@reddit

What have you started leaning towards?

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Microsoft Hyper-V Isn't as nice, but it's pretty simple and straight forward! I've had experience in switching to it from VMWare and it was easy with the free Starwind P2V/V2V converter! Also took it as a good time to setup new VMs on the latest version of their OS platform.

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Ms is about to ruin hyperv though. Its all being forced into cloud

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NaesMucols42@reddit

I didn't know that! Everything comes to an end at some point. MS is good at playing with stuff. I'm just happy they opened Applocker up to Pro installations of windows!

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Proxmox. Check it out

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moldyjellybean@reddit

Yeah we used that many years ago on 2012 datacenter, though it was 10 years ago I think there weren’t any cpu, sockets , vcpu licenses it was just buy datacenter and run as many ms vms as you wanted

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NaesMucols42@reddit

Full disclosure, I don't know much about the licensing offhand. I've only calculated licensing once and that was about a year ago at this point. Take all of this with a grain of salt. That stated, I know we're using Server Standard and we're operating on a core based licensure. If I'm reading Microsofts information correctly, the Datacenter version is licensed per-core and not by CPU socket. You're restricted to licensing per-core necessary in relation to actual cores and VMs you intend to use. We've got 4 servers operating on 4 16-core licenses, so we are allowed a total of 8 Production VM Servers (2 VM's 16-core licensed server) for a total of 64 cores. We don't actually have 64 cores in all of our servers combined. I don't think It applies to test servers, and VMs for remote users top access local resources. Per Microsoft: ***Licensing Requirements:*** * *All physical cores in the Server must be licensed (Hyperthreading (SMT) does not count as actual physical cores)* * *A minimum of 8 cores must be licensed for each processor* * *A minimum of 16 cores must be licensed for each Server*

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abakedapplepie@reddit

Hyper-V is free if you dont need a GUI...

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XVWXVWXVWWWXVWW@reddit

Not true anymore unfortunately

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Head-Champion-7398@reddit

Yes. Clustered S2D is much better than what it was on 2016 too, so vSAN people out there have an option as well.

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Digging_Graves@reddit

xcp-ng

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HotelRwandaBeef@reddit

Were labbing up a bunch of HyperV stuff at the moment. It's baked into our Microsoft contract already so we figured why not. We are a single campus environment and aren't doing anything too crazy with our VMs. Maybe around 250ish servers.

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calladc@reddit

red hat openstack

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icss1995@reddit

Nutanix makes a pretty solid product depending on your size. It may be worth taking a look at if you haven't already.

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WhittledWhale@reddit

Nutanix.

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moldyjellybean@reddit

Symantec was a such a shit product before Broadcom I didn’t think it could be worse but Broadcom made it a lot worse . Had a usual tech lunch with some people and my friend was telling me how he was trying to renew licenses for his department 900 licenses for a shit Symantec endpoint license and they basically didn’t want his business, tried going through a VAR , rep , nothing. Message labs was ok before, got worse with Symantec and after Broadcom I heard it’s shit.

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ooblongtea@reddit

We were a Symantec shop. Asked our VAR 4 months before our licenses expired to get me a renewal quote. He said he would. I asked 1 month later and he said Symantec was still working on it. Mind you we have \~500 seats. Moved to another product and a year or so later someone from Broadcom reaches out and tells us she's our rep. I told her that I asked 4 months in advance and nothing so we moved to another product. Crickets after that.

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jackalsclaw@reddit

Same here, Could not get a renewal quote out of Broadcom out of any of our VARs for over a year. HAD to move to another product for several clients. It's a weird story, I would love to know why Symantec stopped selling its products. Here is some gossip: *"First a reseller from Colombia that I was chatting with at the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco informed me that he was there to find a solution to fill a gap created by Symantec abandoning all but its top resellers. Second, another industry veteran told me that Symantec is abandoning all but its most profitable 2,000 customers. That will leave over 100,000 Symantec customers looking for alternatives."* https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardstiennon/2020/03/16/the-demise-of-symantec/?sh=500b4a675fc7

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matthieuC@reddit

Broadcom MO is fire everyone in dev or support, keep a small commercial team to respond to the top accounts and increase the price by 1000%. Use the money to buy another company and do the same.

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pdp10@reddit

No matter how much we're willing to spend, always have alternate supplier options waiting in the wings.

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ooblongtea@reddit

The vendor we moved to gave us a headstart on our licensing, so rather than going live in January we were able to go live in September and not worry about the 3 months (our contract is Jan to Jan). Removing SEPM was one of my best days ever.

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Leg0z@reddit

Similar story but at an MSP. We had their endpoint solution deployed to maybe 4,000 nodes. Then we started having issues trying to renew licenses and got nothing back from them. We would ask for quotes and got back crickets. We were forced to abandon them. It's like they became allergic to money.

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jake04-20@reddit

I remember when we jumped ship from Symantec, we had no real way to do an automated uninstall of the software and had to go around to every single fucking one and run a symantec cleanup software. It was such a massive PITA.

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lukify@reddit

SEP can definitely be uninstalled with a CMD script. After we pushed the policy update to remove the uninstall password, I scripted the uninstall in a couple minutes.

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jake04-20@reddit

I'll take your word for it but at the time I exhausted literally every resource I could for about two weeks trying to uninstall it. CMD, powershell WMI scripts, various management and ITSM solutions, etc. It was a nightmare.

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PMmeyourannualTspend@reddit

We went from selling 9 figures of symantec a year to actively moving every single customer we possibly could do an alternative.

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moldyjellybean@reddit

Wow that’s a crazy story, like I’ve heard from many people that they weren’t even interested in sending off a .slf for tons of money. I can’t even understand why.

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PMmeyourannualTspend@reddit

It was insane, I'd reach out to them with a simple "hello, can I get a quote for the renewal, customer would like to give you $30,000"- and wouldn't get a response. Two years later they finally started reaching out to me asking why all these customers were past due and wanted to know if they intended to renew.

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moldyjellybean@reddit

I remember talking to a guy from CDW in San Fran and he said he used to sell a ton and basically Broadcom ghosted them (this was years ago sometime during covid 2020/2021ish). CDW is pretty big VAR in our area and they couldn’t even get calls back. Wondering what everyone is using for the their endpoint now, trendmicro seemed to get a decent chunk from what I’ve heard.

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zvii@reddit

You speak like Covid was a decade or more ago, made me laugh

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Smooth-Zucchini4923@reddit

What's the three release principle?

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ITMANAGERIT@reddit

I guess the same as the three seashells.

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redhatch@reddit

If I had to guess, it will be three releases before the product turns into garbage.

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peesteam@reddit

I guess we'll never know.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Patiently waiting for my layoff notice as we speak.

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chicaneuk@reddit

I am really sorry to hear this :-(

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bulldg4life@reddit

It's ok. Based on the outcome of the integration planning, working for Broadcom didn't sound that great. They've gutted a ton of teams. And, with how things have played out over the past 6 weeks, even the people with full time and transition offers are not too excited about staying around.

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mitharas@reddit

Sounds like a gigantic exodus of all the best engineers. Not the best future for the product apparently.

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vhalember@reddit

Yup. Out with the talent to make a few bucks in the short term. It's reputation and quality falter. Customers flee enmasse. The pinheads who created this mess bail while the numbers are still good, and move to another company to ruin it. Rinse, repeat... a race to the bottom.

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Dal90@reddit

>The pinheads who created this mess bail while the numbers are still good, and move to another company to ruin it. That's not Broadcom's model -- for the executives to move on. Instead they just buy another company with deep tentacles in enterprise so they can jack prices and milk the cow until dead knowing how long and expensive it is for enterprises to shift to new technologies. Our divisional CIO (and I suspect our global CIO) currently want Broadcom 100% out within 3 years. That's going to be painful, but these assholes told us if we drop the $300,000 in annual support for software we no longer used, they'd just increase our renewal for other Broadcom products by $300,000. Currently extending hardware lifetime rather than replace what VMware is running on...I expect at some point they'll realize how expensive AWS is and we'll buy new hardware for Hyper-V.

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JMWTech@reddit

This is my life at a bit smaller scale... I'm not really excited to move to Hyper-V as I don't MS to not pull the rug on it and point at Azure as it's replacement.

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malrick@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V#Microsoft_Ending_Support_of_Hyper-V_Server They already are.

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darth_static@reddit

That's just the free server core version.

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jackalsclaw@reddit

Don't worry so much about that, they need Hyper-V to run Azure and they need to deal with so many vendors with compliance requirements (Gov/DoD, Healthcare) and stuff like bandwidth and hardware requirements, that they are not going to drop the product anytime soon. That said they might want to make it a subscription fee-based product feature. There is the case of both VMware and MS not wanting VirtualBox or something similar to get enough business that it turns into a true contender for enterprise (with a support ecosystem with SLAs)

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WSDTech@reddit

> VirtualBox Proxmox has entered the chat :)

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Jarnagua@reddit

Thought I read they basically used KVM over at Azure.

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EndUserNerd@reddit

> VirtualBox No way would an enterprise jump willingly into the fires of Oracle...most who are stuck there and have any sort of choice are practically chewing through their restraints to leave. But you're right...if you wanted standalone rock-solid virtualization on regular hardware without having to pay for HCI, VMWare was pretty much it and will be tough to get rid of. One route I could see Microsoft going is forcing people to buy Azure Arc and getting rid of SCVMM (the HV equivalent of vCenter.) I highly doubt the core Hyper-V will go away since they have to have a hypervisor they control for Azure, but nothing's being sold anymore that doesn't have subscriptions attached to it and nothing MS will be offered that allows you to use less Azure.

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jackalsclaw@reddit

Fine then, KVM\OpenShift+Redhat or xenserver+Citrix. The point I was trying to make is there is an upper limit to market prices where other players are willing to try to get into the market.

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technofiend@reddit

Well if you really want to go do something different there's always bhyve on Solaris.

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crankbird@reddit

BHYVE is a bsd thing … so I’m pretty sure that while you can run Solaris in it, you can’t run it in Solaris Interesting trivia tidbit : BHYVE was created by Netapp who then open sourceed it and gave it to the BSD community, so you can ask “which major storage vendor created a widely deployed* hypervisor” .. most will answer EMC and will be wrong *BHYVE made its way into Darwin got called XHYVE and was the foundation for docker desktop on Intel Macs

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technofiend@reddit

Well I could be entirely misreading things, but it appears the guys at 0xide are using bhyve on [[Illumos]](https://github.com/oxidecomputer/illumos-gate), which is a Solaris fork. See their GitHub entry for [[propolis]](https://github.com/oxidecomputer/propolis) as one example. Their use of a Solaris-derivative isn't terribly surprising, considering [[Bryan Cantrill ]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill) works there. In general I don't think 0xide really emphasize their tech choices, rather their website is more about the features their cloud in a rack offering provides.

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crankbird@reddit

Thanks for the time you took to put the links together, it’s late now for me, but I’ll check it in the morning, looks really interesting

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phosix@reddit

I absolutely love FreeBSD, and have high hours for BHyve. Once BHyve has reliable and seamless support for live migration, ideally with shared storage instead of sending the entire friggen disk each time, and proper GPU resource sharing, I'll consider it a proper contender. Until then, it's only a little better than VirtualBox; and VirtualBox is an absolute toy of a hypervisor. You can also use FreeBSD as a Dom0 for Xen, which *does* offer full live migration and at least some shared GPU passthrough for certain nVidia cards. Hypothetically, I don't think there's anything from stopping someone from compiling the XCP-ng xe tools for FreeBSD, then run Xen Orchestra to manage the whole thing. Though it's probably easier to just install stock XCP-ng.

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crankbird@reddit

Part of me wonders if some of the storage related things were deliberately left out of consideration when BHYVE was created in what was the advanced technology group (the wonderful ATG) on the assumption that all of that stuff would all be handled by ONTAP (live volume migration, backup, caching, snapshots, geo distributed mirrors etc etc). Still that was a long time ago, I’m a little surprised (and maybe a tad disappointed) that it hasn’t made more progress

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ninjacrap@reddit

> ot really excited to move to Hyper-V as I don't trust MS to not pull the rug on it and point at Azure as it's re Last version of Hyper-V was 2019 - and there will not come a new version. Windows Server 2019 is under support until Jan 9 2029 though. Next on-prem hypervisor-product for Microsoft is AzureStack.

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phosix@reddit

Xen, either XCP-ng or Citrix. May not have quite all the bells & whistles of VMWare, but it's a far cry better than Hyper-V.

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jorel43@reddit

No dude hyper-view is great, use SCVMM and you're all set.

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xgnarf@reddit

The day MS doesn't have Hyper-V is the day they don't sell on-prem server. I would say MS making everyone who wants windows server to use Azure instead sounds like another massive anti-trust lawsuit ready to go, but given all the crap they've pulled with constantly resetting Edge to the default browser and how it's like "4 yes I'm sure I don't want Edge to be default browser" clicks and still no anti-trust, they must have bribed better politicians, or more accurately current politicians are just REALLY cheap to bribe... I mean lobby.

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TotallyInOverMyHead@reddit

meanwhile over here in euro-land we have started adopting hypervisors like e.g. proxmox (with support) for out data-center needs. Worked out really well on the licence cost side and even better on the performannce side. next hardware refresh cycle for 600-ish hosts is coming up and i'm not dreading it like i did last time i needed to get that quote from vmware.

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Geminii27@reddit

> Instead they just buy another company That's the broad con.

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pppjurac@reddit

Smells like Computer Associates though.

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jpmoney@reddit

> but these assholes told us if we drop the $300,000 in annual support for software we no longer used, they'd just increase our renewal for other Broadcom products by $300,000. We have a niche software product that is required in our industry, easily over 7 figures a year in 'support'. They also do the same 'squeeze the balloon' support model when we try to reallocate things.

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vhalember@reddit

Good point. 100% of Fortune 500 companies use VMWare - it will take them years to move on from VMWare, and in the meanwhile Broadcom will milk them for cash. Will they milk $61 billion before they lose nearly all their customers though? I have no idea on that one. I'm just sad to see a well-reputed company bought by a trash company. (I'm also very thankful I dropped out late in the interview process to get on with VMWare in late 2021.)

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psiphre@reddit

idk, a bunch of seasoned engineers from the "gold standard" of virtualization moving on to other projects and bringing that expertise could usher in a golden age of new virtualization competition!

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1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v@reddit

Sure, but first, the CEOs need to stop drinking the "move everything to CLOUD" koolaid, so that realistic and cost-effective strategies can be created to run some stuff locally.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

Well, I'll bet that the vast majority of folks running vmware today also have cloud workloads, but were planning to continue running vmware anyway. So, they will be a substantial part of the market for on-premises hypervisors. The question becomes: how quickly would such innovation take place in other hypervisors?

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psiphre@reddit

i've been either quite lucky or quite unlucky, depending on who you talk to, to have been in a position to staunchly resist the move-to-cloud tendency over the last decade. my *everything* is on prem. i guess with the exception of my email smarthost, but i don't really think that counts.

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thrwaway75132@reddit

Broadcom is very selective in the areas they are investing in. vSphere / VCF / Aria / NSX Principal and Sr. Staff engineers got golden handcuffs to keep them there. 1100 shares of AVGO at current price is $1.035M vested over four years to keep that talent. Staff 1 got about half that, but still a chunk. Many of the roles being cut are in Finance, sales ops, CIO, and OCTO. Places where there is overlap with Broadcom existing staff.

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Rex9@reddit

Neither is jacking your prices to the point that F100 companies start dumping you. We're building a new DC starting next year - no Cisco, no VMWare. We're not the biggest customer for VMs, but our spend wasn't small either. They came back this year on contract negotiation with numbers that were worse than eye watering. Not my dept thankfully.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Well, I’m on the ops/it side. So not directly product side yet. I’m sure product side cuts will be coming eventually though. I know a ton of people that have left over past 18mo. And, myself along with many others, wanted layoff immediately because we have options and could find something else. Not many people want to stick around and see what happens.

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bulldg4life@reddit

The transition and FTE offers (at least in my org) didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason. It was definitely not performance based and, at least up to my VP, there was no insight or explicit list making. And, even the good performers that are staying are already annoyed and looking for an exit.

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Le_Vagabond@reddit

Welp, that's the end of my "for prod virtualisation you want reliable, you use vmware. No other option." advice.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

Sounds like VMware is going to shit in that case Based on Broadcom's history, not a big surprise VMware is dead to me now and it leaves on prem in an awkward position Hyper-V is just shit for running a cluster - VMware is better than it in almost every way I'd run a Proxmox cluster for on prem before I'd go back to VMware and Hyper-V

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bbgeek17@reddit

And you wont regret it! [https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote/proxmox-vs-vmware-nvmetcp/](https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote/proxmox-vs-vmware-nvmetcp/)

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Murderous_Waffle@reddit

We're running prox in prod. Works fine. VMware is a better product. We also setup an openstack cluster. Works pretty well so far. But has a few kinks. VMware is a more polished product but these alternatives will do.

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PlatformPuzzled7471@reddit

Yeah I’ve been running Prox in my home lab and really my only issues with it are minor. One is that there’s not a first party terraform provider, so I’m actually having to redo a bunch of my terraform code due to the provider made by Telmate being abandoned. The other is that I don’t care for is the VMID mentality where everything goes by some arbitrary number instead of the VMs name.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

Shit they abandoned the provider? I was planning on re-doing my home infra with tf and Ansible with that provider Maybe there's another one

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PlatformPuzzled7471@reddit

Yeah in newer versions of PVE (8.0.4+) apparently they changed something in the API that makes the Telmate plugin crash, but the last project update was 6+ months ago and apparently telmate got bought out by another company. Most people in the issue tracker are switching to the one written by bpg ([https://registry.terraform.io/providers/bpg/proxmox/latest/docs](https://registry.terraform.io/providers/bpg/proxmox/latest/docs)). I did a test VM last night and it seems to work pretty well. It did a clone and cloud-init in about 2 minutes, so I can't really complain about that. The only thing I don't like about it is they decided to name all the resources like "proxmox\_virtual\_environment\_vm" instead of something shorter like "proxmox\_ve\_vm"

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

I feel like a bunch of people are taking a harder look at containers today.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

They should have done that years ago It's mature technology and makes upgrades so much easier

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Sparcrypt@reddit

Containers are great when applicable/appropriate. But they aren't for many things.

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PlatformPuzzled7471@reddit

Literally everything can be containerized. However, not everything does great on kubernetes.

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lucky644@reddit

Yeah I’m not sure where we’re going now. VMware ESXi is essentially dead, Hyper-V seems to be getting abandoned by Microsoft for Azure (and kind of sucked anyhow). Sucks.

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Murkk3d@reddit

So the word on the street is Broadcom plans to sell most of VMwares products to other companies and only maintain fortune 500 companies moving forward, don't have much more to offer than that but I knew this acquisition was coming for over a year now...

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

Proxmox and Xen look like good options This will probably further push people to cloud

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phosix@reddit

I've had reasonably good results with Xen over the years for smaller on-prem private clouds, both Citrix and XCP-ng. Xen Orchestra may not be quite as featureful as vCenter, but once you get used to the differences it's serviceable.

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Jaereth@reddit

We use Hyper-V at offices with under 50 people and it works fine? One of them botched up one time and we had it fixed in an hour before maintenance window was even over.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

I've seen failover clustering freak out before and decide that none of the nodes have any SAN storage 600 VMs died instantly

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ClementJirina@reddit

OpenShift.

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dagbrown@reddit

OpenShift? Triton Data Center? They actually survived being eaten by Samsung!

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FarVision5@reddit

I would have put Prox up against VMware in the low to mid-market anyway.

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systemfrown@reddit

On the plus side the CEO might rise you with ecstasy on a private plane.

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psiphre@reddit

idk, a bunch of seasoned engineers from the "gold standard" of virtualization moving on to other projects and bringing that expertise could usher in a golden age of new virtualization competition!

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HitherFlamingo@reddit

Did they buy them from Oracle?

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vasaforever@reddit

Yeah. It's been a rough week. I got mine earlier for transitional role, and then the warning as well. I'm worried about my Bulgarian teammates as one of my Costa Rican teammates got laid off today..

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SnavlerAce@reddit

Doesn't pay to be beneath Hock Tan's red line of death. Source: former Broadcom stooge. Good luck moving forward!

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microcandella@reddit

Can you add some details/color to this?

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SnavlerAce@reddit

To add to OP's reply: if the business unit doesn't add a certain level of revenue (RLOD), everybody kicked and assets redistributed. Rinse and repeat until all money is extracted. For VMware, licenses are going to see a 'healthy' increase in price and customer service will be reduced to bare bones.

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eldersveld@reddit

> For VMware, licenses are going to see a 'healthy' increase in price and customer service will be reduced to bare bones as well. Or, as it's now called, "pulling a Citrix"

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SnavlerAce@reddit

Yes indeed!

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bulldg4life@reddit

Everything I’ve seen is Broadcom is very dictatorial and power is concentrated with/around Hock (ceo). What he says goes and that’s the end of it. Return to office seems to be coming and there seems to be very little autonomy for certain areas.

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kjbdckjnsdlckn@reddit

That sucks dude. You contributed to excellent software.

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EchoChamberReddit13@reddit

We are migrating from VMWare as we speak. Quite unfortunate all around.

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Michelanvalo@reddit

Wow, they did it day of announcement?

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bulldg4life@reddit

Nah, people knew this was coming. They had sent full time and transition offers to nearly half the company in mid october. Then, everyone was sitting around waiting for deal to close after 10/30 when it was expected. It closed last Wednesday and they said employee communications would happen 11/27. So, everyone should have expected it this morning if they had not received some sort of previous offer. There were some special cases for different organizations within VMware or if you were in the EU.

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Floh4ever@reddit

I'd imagine. Getting rid of employees isn't that easy of a think in the EU.

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jan-jindra@reddit

Do not want to be rude... But what happened?

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bulldg4life@reddit

We simply received the WARN notice telling us that we will be laid off on 1/26/24. And, instructions on how to access the Broadcom portal to review our severance information.

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TotallyInOverMyHead@reddit

That is 2024-01-26 for anyone on ISO8601

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Mission-Tutor-6361@reddit

Let’s be honest, you don’t want to work there for the foreseeable future anyway. They are going to be applying pressure to make that 61B worth the investment. Going to be hell for the employees and the customers. Renew now before the price hikes.

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epsiblivion@reddit

at least they're paying you through the holidays.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yeah, I definitely am not upset with the financials of being laid off. 60 days of non-working paid absence, 2months + 1 wk for each year at the company severance, plus retention cash award that was granted last june (please don't leave until you get laid off). It's all the other stuff that sucked - integration planning, communications, decisions on who to retain

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Start_button@reddit

This sucks, but it sounds like you were prepared as you could be. Hope you land on your feet partner.

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bulldg4life@reddit

I’m definitely ok in near term. Thankfully have healthy emergency fund and the severance will help for several months. Right now just a bit nervy looking for a job in questionable market at the end of the year. I’ll feel better once I find something.

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TerminusFive@reddit

Market should bounce back up around the Spring period so you should be good.

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cokronk@reddit

What part of the country are you in?

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bulldg4life@reddit

Eastern us

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cokronk@reddit

If you’re in the DC area, government contracting companies are generally always hiring and you could likely find something there. Hell, anywhere that has federal agencies will have those opportunities.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yeah…I’ve had several interviews with those types of things. I do have a clearance so that helps, but I don’t really want to move to NoVa.

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akp55@reddit

I know it sucks but we know Broadcom is moving a lot of stuff to channel partners, so depending on what you covered one of those partners might snatch you up real quick

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Knightified@reddit

Statistically speaking January and February are when the most jobs are posted. Best of luck!

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dam_broke_it_again@reddit

Feb/Mar job market usually picks up.

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bulldg4life@reddit

I'd really like to find something over next couple months. If I can line up something to be able to start right when my notice period starts, that'd be awesome. I could have a new job and get 4 months of severance pay on top of it.

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Cool_Radish_7031@reddit

Good luck to you man! You're taking it much better than most would and I'm sure some company will be very luck to have you

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Talran@reddit

The job market should start looking better soon too if you just need to take it easy over the holidays, best of luck!

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mcatech@reddit

Can I ask...how long were you with the company?

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bulldg4life@reddit

7 years

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andrewthemexican@reddit

Sounds like Centene package wasn't too far off, 9 weeks (had only been here for a year if include my few months as contractor), 2 months of notice (so ending this week) and then next 3 months of cobra subsidy (not fully covered, but same cost as I'm paying now as an employee)

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katzeye007@reddit

EU I'm guessing?

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bulldg4life@reddit

Us

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secret_configuration@reddit

That's actually not too bad, still sucks but could be worse.

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spacelama@reddit

Oh, not on the 1st of Quattuorvigintember 2024?

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bharder@reddit

[ Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN)](https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings) > provide at least 60 calendar days advance written notice of a plant closing and mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment

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semanticallysatiated@reddit

Tell them you identify as British and you’re happy to leave on the 1st of Dechexdember

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Responsible_Ad2463@reddit

Sorry to hear

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Neat_Onion@reddit

Were you a VMWare employee? I thought companies usually wait a few months before they lay off staff.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yep. They laid off me and most of the engineers that were on my team.

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Neat_Onion@reddit

Wow, I would have thought Broadcom would want to milk VMWare IP for a year or two before mass layoffs.

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bulldg4life@reddit

I think today was mostly ops/it, hr, etc. Most of the product teams that I work with got fte or transition offers

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3meterflatty@reddit

What’s the importance of your job?

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bulldg4life@reddit

Obviously it didn't have too much importance!

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AlexisFR@reddit

But why ? Makes no sense to me.

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Atacx@reddit

That’s awful. Sorry to hear it

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iB83gbRo@reddit

Gonna take wild guess and say that they got a layoff notice.

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gregsting@reddit

[Broadcom to cut 184 Broomfield jobs days after $61B VMWare acquisition – BizWest](https://bizwest.com/2023/11/27/broadcom-cutting-184-jobs-days-after-61b-vmware-acquisition/)

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IcyCarrotz@reddit

Broadcom had a receipt for u/bulldg4life

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bulldg4life@reddit

It was the find out portion of "FAFO"

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a1-vergeio@reddit

[https://www.crn.com/news/virtualization/layoffs-engulf-vmware-after-broadcom-close-chaos-for-partners-in-sales-trenches](https://www.crn.com/news/virtualization/layoffs-engulf-vmware-after-broadcom-close-chaos-for-partners-in-sales-trenches)

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EndUserNerd@reddit

This sounds like what happened with CA and Symantec, both of which made products my previous employer depended on. Day after the acquisition, everyone we had any contact with at both companies was just gone. VMWare isn't exactly legacy abandonware though...I wonder what Broadcom is planning on doing with it? My guess is just riding it into terrain while charging more and more for it for as long as they can. I just don't see what will replace it though...Proxmox and Hyper-V look like the only viable choices besides KVM or an expensive HCI, and none of them "just work" the way VMWare does.

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Murkk3d@reddit

I heard they plan on selling off a lot of the VMware products and only supporting fortune 500 companies moving forward, knew this acquisition was coming over a year ago, that's about all I know atm..

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Flameancer@reddit

I just hope they don’t raise the price of VMware Pro. Best solution I’ve found to using a triple monitor VM setup. I tried Hyper-v but was experiencing constant hitching but I’m wondering if that was from the AMD TPM issue awhile back. Haven’t tried since because I’ve been satisfied with VMWare.

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bulldg4life@reddit

They've mentioned investing in R&D, so who knows if it is platitudes or not. I kind of got caught in a gray area being on the ops/it side while supporting an external facing service. If I had been in the same organization as the teams I worked with most of the day, I probably would've gotten a full time offer with new company. One of the weird gotchas of a massive acquisition.

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scriptmonkey420@reddit

Welcome to the company's ruined by Broadcom club. (Used to work for CA until they were bought in 2018)

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AwShix@reddit

which country?

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seeyahlater@reddit

I’m sorry to hear this. I did find your comments and perspective interesting. Thank you for sharing. All the best to you and the family

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JoeLaRue420@reddit

I have a close friend who works there... he's wanted out for quite some time, but hasn't done anything about it. he was hoping to get laid off. instead, he's been told they're keeping him with a pretty hefty bonus / raise + stock. funny how shit like that turns out.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yeah, some of the people on the product side got decent offers with welcome stock that is on top of their existing equity. If you’re a high enough level, it’s an extra tens of thousands per year

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aaroncoolguy@reddit

I sympathize with you. Broadcom acquired Symantec Enterprise Security a few years back, same thing happened to me. Brighter days are ahead, just keep your head up.

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Commercial_Papaya_79@reddit

wtf seriously? ugh gutted for u. i hope u the best of luck moving forwards. seems like they are taking care of you after the layoff.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yeah, the severance package and retention stuff makes it palatable. Obviously, way better than getting shoved out the door with nothing to fall back on.

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1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v@reddit

What was your role or position?

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bulldg4life@reddit

Director of an engineering team

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Hotshot55@reddit

> Edit: And got it Damn that was fast.

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bulldg4life@reddit

They told us last week when to expect them. Deal closed Wednesday morning and they said employee emails would go out 11/27 morning. Full time and transition offers were sent out in mid October. So, if you hadn’t received anything by now, chances were very high you’d be laid off (in us at least)

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Hotshot55@reddit

Ah yeah, I remember going through that with contract change-overs and it was always a nightmare.

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FarVision5@reddit

Friday's at 4pm at Motorola in '96 were a laugh a minute!

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VlijmenFileer@reddit

Good. VMWare is absolute trash.

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Murkk3d@reddit

It's really not but OK...

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VlijmenFileer@reddit

You must have never used it...

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redstarduggan@reddit

At least, not yet.

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Ragerino@reddit

Run. I hear Proxmox is looking great for SMB these days.

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Things2021@reddit

I run proxmox at home on enterprise equipment . The change from VMware was easy and over 2 years I've had no issues. If you know VMware, the change is easy

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sarosan@reddit

Some companies will have to wait until their next server cycle refresh or when their VMware contracts are up for renewal before they even consider upgrading let alone switching hypervisors. Even then, change is not easy, especially for the big organizations that move at a snail's pace adopting new tech or can't afford/risk the downtime. I'm sure a few companies are stuck with VMware for the next decade or more.

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Ryuujinx@reddit

Eh, big companies can be very quick when they are financially motivated to do so. I just finished migrating an entire DC in about 3 months because if we did it by end of year we save 8 figures in taxes or some shit.

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Its amazing how fast a legacy company can change when they realise they could skip a massive bill. Suddenly every blocker about business continuity etc gets nerfed and suddenly migration pain is acceptable

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Ryuujinx@reddit

Yeah I mean I lit prod on fire twice over the last month because of this migration and the response was basically "Yeah that sucks, but the migration is gonna be done still right?" For reference, I work at a f500 bank. I don't think you can get a more slow moving default.

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Hope you got them to buy you some nice new services and toys that were "required" to make the migration happen.

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Ryuujinx@reddit

Sorta, I argued for things that will make my life easier. Got the VM guys to open the API to us so I can throw terraform out of a gitlab CICD to spin up new VMs since we moved off physicals, also got the network guys to make me a tenant in the load balancers so I can manage my own pools. Also gonna get the network guys to dedicate a /22(Haven't really run the numbers to see how much I really need yet) or so to our stuff so we can whitelist that CIDR for outbound connections to AWS for Elastic SaaS.

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joey0live@reddit

>I'm sure a few companies are stuck with VMware for the next decade or more. We're a huge school, and we got a letter from our big Director that they stopped VMware licensing because a lot of servers is getting moved to the "cloud". Now a lot of SysAdmins and such at big labs is running around.. some may move to Proxmox.

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sep76@reddit

This is basically what broadcom is betting on.

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Things2021@reddit

To be fair...I don't know about proxmox in big enterprise environments anyways. I'm sure people do it...but I will def be pushing smb toward it.

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flattop100@reddit

I would add the following caveat - if you've only been Windows-based, the learning curve with Proxmox is steep. It's heavily Linux-based.

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Things2021@reddit

I would say the same for VMware

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tipripper65@reddit

between that and Nutanix there's definitely a good set of alternatives to Hyper-V

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Cyhawk@reddit

Proxmox is getting better every update, its been great. Though the networking isn't quite as robust or easy to configure as say VMWares (via GUI, if you're a Linux networking guru from the before times you can do some amazing things).

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sep76@reddit

the normal networking in proxmox is very very easy. a single vlan aware bridge for the vm's, just type the vlan number into the config when you make the vm, and done. No need to configure anything on the host for a new vlan, just tag it on the portchannel on the switch. But I am eager to try the new vxlan evpn integrated SDN. the config on the TOR switches would be so simple if all it needed was a link network to the host, instead of hundreds of vlans on a port-channel.

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Vallamost@reddit

I had the backup solutions are still pretty bad, nothing like Veeam for it

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sep76@reddit

proxmox backup server is really fantastic. what I do miss from veeam is the replication, having a DR host ready to start on a different cluster is very nice. PBS do have live restore. but the storage server would need to be beefy with iops to be able to boot and live restore all vm's at the same time. altho cross-cluster replication is on the proxmox roadmap.

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nirach@reddit

They're not as slick as some things, to be sure, but IME they work just fine either with the 'built in' backup option, or the dedicated backup server. My biggest gear-grinding with proxmox is/was removing hosts from a cluster. That wasn't nearly as clean as I'd have liked, I don't know if it's changed though.

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jan-jindra@reddit

They have PBS, which is not that bad. Sure, probably some features are missing, but it is not as bad as some people would like to say... If you got time and resources, check it out. I was very skeptical and not anymore. IF ( and that is really big if...) more SMBs adopt proxmox as solution, more features, more polished product and more support will probably arrive as well. I won't hold my breath tho..

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lolniclol@reddit

Broadcom ruined everything they’ve purchased so far. RIP VMware.

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herkalurk@reddit

The VMware reps assigned my my employer all sent emails today telling us that they now have emails at broadcom.com.

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occasional_cynic@reddit

Well, there goes a great product. Broadcom is going to nothing but jack up prices, and accelerate cloud adoption. VMWare forever changed IT. As someone old enough to remember when a data center was full of individual serve0sr, and the massive admin headache managing them was, I will always have fond memories of it.

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xxdcmast@reddit

That's the part I don't get about this whole VMware thing. They nearly singlehandedly changed the way computing is done. I would have imagined them being on top of the world. But to be bought out by such a shit company like broadcom. Its just strange.

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synthdrunk@reddit

They got Dell’d. Agree they brought in a revolution. I remember ordering the first edition, wasn’t on a CDR but it was a bare disc in a paperboard mailer. You’ve come a long way bb…

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

I'd say the biggest thing is so much moving to cloud. I don't need VMware to manage all my VMs in AWS and Azure. They're still crushing on-prem market share, it's just that is not as much of a growing market like cloud infrastructure is. Going forward, their big risk for on-prem is competition on container management.

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

Yeah, but they could have developed a container management solution, a K8 management solution, and bought out someone if those failed.

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akp55@reddit

We did. Cloudfoundry actually came out of VMware. A lot of large orgs use it, though they are slowly moving to k8s. Mostly because k8s is the new kid on the block, when I ask customers why they want k8s they aren't really able to articulate why.

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davewritescode@reddit

Because it’s a standard and while skills for k8s are in high demand now, in 10 years it’ll be a commodity

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akp55@reddit

From what I can tell, it's like the 1% of developers that actually want k8s. The rest just wanna write their code and go on about their life. I'm still struggling to figure out why it became the standard, because as I stated most business are not able to articulate WHY they actually need k8s, it's more of everyone else is doing it so we should to.

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davewritescode@reddit

Developers don’t care until they need to, that’s the point of a good abstraction. We needed K8S at my last job because it replaced hundreds of thousands of lines of homegrown code related to deployment and infrastructure with something that’s 100% standard.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

They did, it's called Tanzu, it's just not as good as the competition

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jpmoney@reddit

> Tanzu More like Tanz-WHO!

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

So they screw that up too... Then they should have just bought out someone. There are lots of decent K8 management startups.

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_Demo_@reddit

This is the answer. It is still a strong product, but it's not growing due to cloud and containers and SaaS based product offerings.

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Polymarchos@reddit

Not sure what Dell did. Dell bought their parent company (for the SAN business), who had earlier acquired them. Dell mostly left them alone except to integrate VMWare's products.

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joshbudde@reddit

Once EMC bought it, the writing was on the wall. EMC was not a place to go for growth and betterment of product. It's been a slow and steady decline since. Then Dell bought EMC and started squeezing the VMware customers hard, and now Broadcom will really show those last remaining customers what squeezing looks like. VMware is a dead product now. You should have been making plans to leave when it ended up at Dell, and if you haven't, you should REALLY be making them now.

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crankbird@reddit

As much as I hate to say it the EMC acquisition was very good for VMWare, especially under Diane Greene. Some tech EMC had in their portfolio (eg the clustering bits, some of the data movement tech used for backup and I think storage vmotion ) was almost immediately incorporated into what became vcenter. After Greene was ousted, Geslinger seemed to take them from being beautiful dreamers into demons of focused execution, watching them kill Citrix from the sidelines was both scary and awe inspiring. This was also when VMWare started playing a little dirty IMO and started to skew things strongly towards EMC’s favour and filled middle management with EMC faithful. The value of VMWare inside of EMC was hidden though, if you removed VMWare from EMC’s market cap, EMC was worth less than Netapp. That made the purchase by someone almost a no-brainer.. enter Michael Dell (who IMO is much smarter than some other very high profile tech CEO’s I could name) It is kind of sad seeing VMWare go through a transition like this though, I had such high hopes for them when they finally got their independence back, but by then, the years under increasingly aggressive leadership and investors with more of a focus on short term stock performance than building something amazing for the future seems to have taken its toll. I don’t think it’s over for VMWare by any stretch of the imagination, the tech is still best in class, it still has great people, and the problems it addresses are still worth solving. I just hope the people who get “lost in transition” land safely and find a way to thrive in another great company and community.

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e0m1@reddit

As a VMWare/Dell employee on both sides, that just wasn't my expierence. VMWare was left alone in almost all regards, including the channel. If Dell had made more of an attempt to integrate VMWare I think things would of been better. Dell missed on this one.

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synthdrunk@reddit

From the admin perspective they were offering too many things that did the same stuff. And way, way overselling how ready their HC stuff was. I don’t spend 7 a year so maybe it’s different higher up.

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Abracadaver14@reddit

From what I understand, Dell already got rid of their controlling share a couple years ago, VMware has been a separate company for a while now. Michael Dell still held a significant share though and he's been pushing for this Broadcom deal to get his money out.

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syshum@reddit

I would say the downfall started with EMC, it has been poorly managed for a long time.

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SilentSamurai@reddit

Because management was happier with a big check than continuing to work and hold out for a better fit. Hard to say most people would do differently in the same situation.

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FatStoic@reddit

> Because management was happier with a big check than continuing to work and hold out for a better fit. Management are legally obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders - if management decline a great acquisition offer they need a very good reason, else the shareholders can sue them.

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thegreatcerebral@reddit

You found the issue... "Shareholders". Add to that investors and you have the problem with most of society.

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donjulioanejo@reddit

To be fair, many shareholders are: * Pension funds * Market ETFs * University endowment funds * Bank mutual funds * Individual people with IB/Robinhood accounts Most beneficiary holders of these are regular Joes. Wall Street douches do have a disproportionate impact (by virtue of being active managers), but large chunks of the markets are held by regular people's rainy day/retirement savings.

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thegreatcerebral@reddit

The issue still is this: "Last year we made $20M in profits after everything is said and done. We need to cut all costs, fire people, move jobs and production overseas so that we can essentially not do anything to improve customer service, our product/offerings/services, raise prices on the customer for lessened customer service because we must make $30M in profits this year or we have failed." That mentality is REALLY what I'm targeting. I think if companies were ok with making $10M or even $20M and not being F\*cks all across the board then those that are invested would not mind and probably end up pumping more into the company investment-wise due to having more money to spend from not losing jobs, artificial price gouging etc. I think there should be a law to protect citizens from companies that if your company is making profits then you cannot raise your prices period without making an approved change to a product that allows that to be done. Also, if you cannot prove that your cost has gone up, and you are still going to make money you cannot negatively impact your offering without reducing the cost to the consumer. Like all this "shrinkflation" that is going on.. these companies are making $BB still. why are we allowed to get F\*cked?! It shouldn't be allowed.

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SilentSamurai@reddit

"Hey stockholders, we just made you wealthier with the best deal we could get!" Congratulations, I challenge you to find a path where the shareholders can claim damages that will hold up on court.

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Rex9@reddit

Customers leaving in droves due to ridiculous price increases should do nicely to gut the company.

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donjulioanejo@reddit

If it's anything like many other mergers/acquisitions, VMware stock would get converted to Broadcom stock.

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rabbit994@reddit

VMWare no longer exists, their shareholders have gotten fat stacks of cash. Therefore, any action against VMware by VMWare shareholders is limited to before deal closed.

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iama_bad_person@reddit

Reddit moment, lmao

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SilentSamurai@reddit

"I could have made Bond villain levels of cash!" is not actual damages unless you could prove that the company went below market level.

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Eisenstein@reddit

> Management are legally obliged to act in the best interests of shareholders - if management decline a great acquisition offer they need a very good reason, else the shareholders can sue them. This is an often repeated misconception. > While it is certainly true that a central objective of foe profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate taw does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not: do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval' $upport a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not All uncommon for such corporations to further humanita$- ian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come: readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit; may take costly pollution-control and energy, Conservation measures that go beyond what the law re- quires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities iO Other countries may exceed the requirements of local law; regarding_working _conditions. * 573 U. s. (2014) [More reading.](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)

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thetinguy@reddit

> with ownership approval yea this is the key sentence. you have to get shareholder approval to follow any other guidance.

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Eisenstein@reddit

Let's all IT people argue against the Professor of Business and Corporate Law at Cornell who wrote the article headlined "Corporations Don’t Have to Maximize Profits"...

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thetinguy@reddit

There's no arguing against. She lays it out in the article. In fact she mentions it twice. >For-profit corporations, with ownership approval and >So long as its owners agree, a for-profit

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Eisenstein@reddit

The word 'owner' is not used once in the article.

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thetinguy@reddit

Oh sorry I assumed you were quoting from the article you linked.

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FatStoic@reddit

I read the article, including a legal case they link to, and it seems that: Directors do not have to maximise profits - if shareholders agree Directors do not have to sell to an aquisition - if they can prove in a court of law that the offer is too low

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Eisenstein@reddit

You missed this part: > More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price.

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joey0live@reddit

The problem also is, when companies like that is so high on top.. they're going to get ruined by not innovating new things. Look at AOL for example.

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The-Jesus_Christ@reddit

> Its just strange. Not at all. The board liked the offer and so presented it to shareholders. The shareholders would have approved it at a meeting (Or the majority holders at the very least) and so the offer was accepted. Yes from a technical point of view it is strange, but big business is not run by engineers.

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pdp10@reddit

They were bought out by Avago, who previously bought Broadcom and then adopted the name Broadcom. Broadcom had a storied history of product development. Avago is some private equity that originally bought the instruments division of HP when HP first decided that it didn't want to be in business any more.

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lemon_tea@reddit

Kubernetes came along and took virtualization that one step further while VMWare was jacking their rates up to the sky and figuring out how much more money they could extract from their customer base. K8s is mostly free and grew at a staggering rate. BC will continue the rate-jacking but virtually stop any innovation and extract as much money as they can while it coasts.

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shadeland@reddit

I don't think Kubernetes supplanted (or ever will) supplant what VMware brought to the table. There's waaayyy more care and feeding of Kubernetes than with VMware. VMware succeeded in part, I think, because it was pretty simple. I remember about 10 years ago OpenStack was going to be the thing that dethroned VMware. It had the same problem as Kubernetes does: Pretty complex setup. operation, and maintenance. Hyper-V was always more complicated, I think. Especially in the begining. Nutanix is pretty simple, and I think why they've been so successful.

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donjulioanejo@reddit

Kubernetes is fairly simple and can be easily programmatically managed if you use a managed service (i.e. GKE, EKS). However, it's made for a different use case. Kubernetes makes the most sense for software shops that do many small microservices and like rapid deploys, high uptime, and autoscaling. Virtualization still makes more sense for COTS on-premises stuff. You aren't going to run a 15 year old accounting server in Kube, and you will have fun running anything that's a "pet."

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shadeland@reddit

The Enterprise still has quite the "pet" farm. Most (if not all) of the on-prem stuff in most orgs I've seen are pets. Consuming kubernetes is easier, I agree. But running your own infrastructure, ala vSphere, is a lot more involved than vSphere IMO.

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CrazyTillItHurts@reddit

VMWare had their own container solution anyway, ThinApp, which existed before Kubernetes was a thing

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shadeland@reddit

I thought it was called something else. Not really used from what I remember.

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psiphre@reddit

i'm on a small nutanix cluster and it's been great. migrated off of vmware at basically cost parity and was just happy to be rid of it.

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WhittledWhale@reddit

Nutanix is the fucking shit.

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psiphre@reddit

i've really liked it. great support. will see what it's like next year when my contract runs out.

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MaNiFeX@reddit

Yeah, we use nutanix boxes at branches and save ESX for our data centers.

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lemon_tea@reddit

There are so many orgs running K8s and containerized infrastructure either on their own mental or in the cloud that would otherwise have had to have been on VMWare or one of its open source alternatives its not even funny. I don't think containerized infrastructure will fully replace virtual machines, but it has, and will continue to, take significant bites out of it. The simplicity in VMWare/Hyper-V/ProxMox/Whatever is really built into the installer and a result of vendor coordination on the HCL. That's where things like Rancher and other K8s managers come in and provide a similar experience. Its still complex, but getting easier.

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

That may have been true 5 years ago, but there are lots of cheap or free K8 distros and management platforms.

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da_chicken@reddit

IMO, it's not just that it was pretty simple, but because they got hot migration working while staying simple. vmWare was built on VT-x suddenly existing, vmWare Workstation being the best option (when that was important) and hot migration. IMX Hyper-V isn't that complicated if what you need is braindead simple. But once you actually need to configure stuff, it's kind of just annoying. That said, it's been 8-10 years since I've touched any of it.

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No_Investigator3369@reddit

Our K8's still run on ESXi servers. That's doesn't stop management from looking for more free or "open source" hypervisors.

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sofixa11@reddit

They're like IBM. They brought on a revolution, and then mostly stagnated for a decade while fundamentally misunderstanding why they're being left behind. VMware Integrated Containers and later Tanzu indicate they never really got it. Nowadays it's a legacy business that has its place, but most of the growth is going to be from existing customers and price hikes. Close to nobody starts a business or a project today picking VMware tech.

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

As a VAR, that last sentence isn’t true at all.

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tastyratz@reddit

>As a VAR, that last sentence isn’t true at all. It's hyperbole but there is no denying VMWare sales have been tanking more cloud deployments have been rising. There is still a market for on prem but it's ever-shrinking. As a VAR, just how many renewals and new licenses do you think you will sell when broadcom bumps the price 500% over the next couple years?

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Seth0x7DD@reddit

What would be some of the growing alternatives to ESXi? Outside pure container deployments.

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tastyratz@reddit

Hyper-v has matured over time as well as the utilities to manage it. Proxmox has seen a lot more adoption I think in the SMB space too. The cloud options from Amazon/Google and especially Azure as it gets built into Windows Server more and more are also more competitive and capable compared to what they were a few years back. All of this is closing the gap on VMWare who has slowed down being an innovator in the space. Esxi 7/8 effectively killed off the whitebox/personal use case that kept sys engineers sharp. familiar, and interested in the product. Horizon updates are really hit or miss and it feels like you really need to touch your endpoints and uag's every other month to be able to iterate the environment - which sucks considering they have put out a lot of really piss poor client releases the last few years. It also sucks that UAG's don't have a native inbuilt upgrade system similar to vcenter appliances. Docker/Kubernetes/Tanzu integration just doesn't bring the engineer-friendly management to the table you expect from a VMWare product compared to running things elsewhere and it just feels like they are trying to break into a new space their licensing costs will never compete in. It really seems like the company has been misguided lately and Broadcom is not the visionary they need to bring things together. It's sad to see how far they have and will fall.

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Seth0x7DD@reddit

Thanks for the comprehensive reply! I definitely agree that VMware has an issue with slowing down being an innovator, while also missing the point with some of their updates. I still don't understand how anyone at that company feels that the current implementation of viewing/filtering logs within vCenter is acceptable if you don't have Aria licensed as well.

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

I agree, although since covid there has been an uptick in Horizon licensing sales. We don’t make anything on selling licenses (VMware or otherwise) so we don’t care much what Broadcom does. Licensing is usually a necessary auxiliary to something else. Honesty VMware is a pain in the ass to work with.

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tastyratz@reddit

> Honesty VMware is a pain in the ass to work with They are. Their support has taken an absolute nosedive from what it was years ago. The sales and technical support justified the premium price tag with their ease of use. As an engineer I prefer their products but organizationally it's probably not the "no brainer" it used to be.

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

Totally agree.

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Ron-Swanson-Mustache@reddit

Indeed. What other option would you look at that's not cloud? Maybe RHVM. I also know hosting providers and they all use VMware products.

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Reynk1@reddit

Have both VMware and RHV-M, VMware is much more reliable

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Polymarchos@reddit

I see Hyper-V used on a lot of smaller scale projects. But for the big ones? You need VMWare.

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Talran@reddit

HyperV definitely gets use in smaller institutions, but yeah, VMWare is still the pick for bigger on prem builds... For now.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

Nutanix has a pretty good product IMO RHVM is going out of support and Red Hat's virtualization strategy is moving to OpenShift. It's pretty good but I would say it's better if you have some VMs you want to run alongside a primarily containerized workload, rather than a platform primarily for VM management.

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sofixa11@reddit

Close to nobody. I doubt everyone not picking VMware products goes through VAR at all (you don't need one for a public cloud, a PaaS, on-prem Kubernetes or Nomad), so how would you know?

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

lol, They buy other thing from VARs as well you know..

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sofixa11@reddit

A modern cloud native startup buys what from VARs? Macbooks? How would that tell you what their infrastructure is running on?

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

They still buy network infrastructure, circuits, PaaS, SaaS, etc. Cloud makes up about 35% of our revenue. Besides that point, How many new businesses outside of software development do you think kick off with any dev talent at all, or can even pronounce “Kubernetes”? Most dgaf and will run whichever way is cheaper- which usually means a hybrid approach.

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sofixa11@reddit

People pass through a VAR for a PaaS? Do you know why they waste their money that way? What do you provide as a VAR? For hardware there's the theoretical support and stocks (in my experience, fucking bullshit, but maybe you as a VAR are better than the useless incompetent ones I've had the displeasure of working with, who couldn't get an order straight let alone be of any use), but what do you thing for software, let alone a PaaS?

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

A ton of Azure through CSP is an example. They do it for the “value add” and engineering consulting benefits.

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sofixa11@reddit

What's the value add of reselling Azure? Consulting I get.

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SceneAcceptable9176@reddit

Mostly the consulting/support and licensing guidance.

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Banluil@reddit

> Close to nobody starts a business or a project today picking VMware tech Wrong, my last workplace migrated BACK to VMware after a debacle with RHVM, and was happy to do it. My current workplace just upgraded their entire VM infrastructure, and didn't even look anywhere else other than VMware. Just because you think that it's not ever going to be used again, doesn't mean you have any touch with reality.

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sofixa11@reddit

>Wrong, my last workplace migrated BACK to VMware after a debacle with RHVM, and was happy to do it. >My current workplace just upgraded their entire VM infrastructure, and didn't even look anywhere else other than VMware. That's not *starting*. You already had an existing VM estate, still consider VMs to be needed, so how is that starting a thing? >Just because you think that it's not ever going to be used again, doesn't mean you have any touch with reality. Oh it will be used, lots of organisations will be reluctant to change regardless how much Broadcom abuses them. That doesn't mean that anyone starting today should even consider VMware.

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Banluil@reddit

> That's not starting. You already had an existing VM estate, still consider VMs to be needed, so how is that starting a thing? They still could have went to hyper-v, they could have went out too the cloud, there were numerous other directions that could have been gone too. Yet, you cliamed that nobody would be using VMware. Guess what, you are incorrect. >Oh it will be used, lots of organisations will be reluctant to change regardless how much Broadcom abuses them. That doesn't mean that anyone starting today should even consider VMware. Oh, are now trying to move the goalposts. Instead of claiming that nobody will, it's now that nobody SHOULD.... So, which one is it? Nobody will, or nobody should? Come on now, lets get your words straight so we know what you are actually claiming here.

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sofixa11@reddit

> Close to nobody starts a business or a project today picking VMware tech. My original statement. So, nobody starts a new project or business today and picks VMware - they'll pick the public cloud, or a PaaS, or roll their own hardware if that fits their needs with Rancher or whatever. On *existing* things, very few organisations *should* continue to use VMware products once Broadcom starts abusing them even more, but many will. Is my position clearer now?

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Banluil@reddit

> So, nobody starts a new project or business today and picks VMware - they'll pick the public cloud, or a PaaS, or roll their own hardware if that fits their needs with Rancher or whatever. Incorrect. People are telling you that, myself included. But you want to keep doubling down on it, even when we give you examples. >On existing things, very few organisations should continue to use VMware products once Broadcom starts abusing them even more, but many will. We don't have any proof that is going to happen yet, Broadcom COULD be intelligent about it and just let VMware run itself. >Is my position clearer now? Your position is clearly just as wrong as it was before....so yes, it's absolutely clear.

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sofixa11@reddit

>We don't have any proof that is going to happen yet, Broadcom COULD be intelligent about it and just let VMware run itself. Broadcom that announced in their acquisition plans they want to triple earnings before interest and taxes? Broadcom that is already laying off people in VMware? Broadcom that ruined Symantec? That Broadcom could be intelligent with VMware and let it run itself? That's delusional. >Your position is clearly just as wrong as it was before....so yes, it's absolutely clear. At least it's clear. As for being wrong, we'll see, only time will tell. From my interactions everyone more modern that the public sector is looking into alternatives. And honestly it's surprising to me *anyone* thinks VMware have more of a future than an IBM "still there" legacy tech business.

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Banluil@reddit

> From my interactions everyone more modern that the public sector is looking into alternatives. I work in the public sector, and nobody is really looking at anything other than VM ware, because most of them are more prone to failure (RHEV/RHEM), or too expensive (anything cloud based) for the money that we get being IN the public sector. IT is a last thought in the public sector, so it's laughable for you to think that most IT departments in the public sector are going to be able to afford any kind of cloud based VM solution, or are going to go with anything that fails as much as RH does. But ok, dude, you have a great day. I actually have work to do.

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sofixa11@reddit

>I work in the public sector That explains a lot. Why do you think your environment is in any way representative of computing trends in general?

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

What they're saying isn't even representative of the public sector. I also work in public sector, except I consult across 4 states as well as a few local governments. I have talked to numerous public sector organizations that are looking at VMware alternatives as well as moving some workloads to cloud platforms -- which apparently this person thinks *nobody* is doing. Especially funny because some states like Oregon are actually *mandating* that new projects adopt a cloud-first mentality and you have to provide justification for something to *not* go to the cloud. This commenter is clearly some mid level sysadmin in some silo'd organization, and thinks their little slice represents the whole market. https://www.oregon.gov/eis/siteassets/eis-cloud-forward-20230116.pdf

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sofixa11@reddit

They're like IBM. They brought on a revolution, and then mostly stagnated for a decade while fundamentally misunderstanding why they're being left behind. VMware Integrated Containers and later Tanzu indicate they never really got it. Nowadays it's a legacy business that has its place, but most of the growth is going to be from existing customers and price hikes. Close to nobody starts a business or a project today picking VMware tech.

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chum-guzzling-shark@reddit

> Well, there goes a great product. I thought everyone was already hating on vmware before this

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jake04-20@reddit

I actually thought this acquisition already happened. I guess I don't pay very good attention.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

The announcement of the intention to purchase was a year ago, but the regulatory approvals only happened recently.

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Garetht@reddit

This isn't hot off the presses: El Reg had a story on it 6 days ago https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/23/broadcom_vmware_reorg/

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slugshead@reddit

I had an email off VMware on the 22nd "we are pleased to annouce that Broadcom has completed the acquisition"

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jake04-20@reddit

When I say already happened, I mean like last year or longer ago lol. I'm somehow way out of the loop on this for being a VMware customer! Whoops

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

They agreed on the deal last year. They took a long time to work everything out, and get regulatory okay in various countries.

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Fr0gm4n@reddit

It's been in progress and subject to various national regulatory approval in multiple countries. The last one was getting approval in China.

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sep76@reddit

the announcement was a year ago. the "ok" from china was a week ago. UK and US gave the ok a month or 2 back.

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Chest-queef@reddit

Same, I feel like I’m having deja-by because I could have sworn Broadcom already acquired them last year

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

There is no hate like the product that sucks, but knowing it sucks less.

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Abracadaver14@reddit

My personal observations: the products are mostly still excellent (although there has been a bit of a decline the last few years), it's the support that gets a lot of (deserved) hate.

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malikto44@reddit

VMWare changed the data center as much as the concept of networked storage did. The ability to separate workload hosts from physical hardware, bounce things around, suspend VMs, run two VMs in tandem for fault tolerance, and snapshot tier backups has brought a lot of nines from relatively cheap hardware, where before that, you had to have a HA solution like IBM's RS/6000, which was extremely pricy. Insane pricing aside, VMWare has brought a lot to the data center. Want HCI? VMWare vSAN not just brings ease of adding disk space, but deduplication and other items. NSX is quite useful for another security layer. Backups are easy with CBT and disk to disk based copies. Finally, there is a ton of software out there to have VMWare do a lot of workloads. Right now, there isn't any real competition in the production IT sector [1]. Hyper-V has not really evolved that much. XCP-NG and Proxmox are excellent, but no third party is bothering to make tools for those platforms. You can get commercial Proxmox support and have the entire stack supported, but you will be hamstrung by the paucity of third party software like enterprise backup support.

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Ok_SysAdmin@reddit

I guess you haven't used Hyper-V in a while, but you can do anything with Hyper-V that you can with vmware.

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dscoleri@reddit

I agree with you. I don't understand why I constantly see posts like the one above stating how Hyper-V isn't in the same league as VMware. I know that at one point in time Hyper-V was severely lacking but it has come a LONG way since then.

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Ok_SysAdmin@reddit

People get stuck on ideas from ten years ago and don't acknowledge that things change. With all the windows update bugs that effect VMware I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. All my Hyper-v servers are running TPM and Secure boot just fine.

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dinominant@reddit

Ransomeware is less expensive than vSAN. There is no small business solution for virtualization, backup, and SAN from vmware. It's either free esxi with locked out features, or pay a huge fortune for the software. We are pivoting to Proxmox, because I see Microsoft also moving to a cloud/subscription model for HyperV.

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asianclooney@reddit

Nah, they have the essentials kit and essentials kit plus for small business. Gives you all the enterprise features for a flat one time licensing fee that small businesses can afford. Only pay for ongoing support if you want/need. Used at at my last place until they grew big enough to switch to their stamdard licensing.

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jake04-20@reddit

Essentials and essentials plus doesn't get you svMotion though does it? A tech taught me a work around for that anyways -- if you vMotion the VM to another host you have the option to storage vMotion it as well. You can't just svMotion by itself if I'm not mistaken.

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asianclooney@reddit

Just looked at pricing and it has exploded since that last time I looked. It used to be more priced for SMB. Now it is stupid. I'm so sad. I loved VMware. I guess time to start looking at proxmox.

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jake04-20@reddit

I use it at home so I worry less about compliance but it really is a pleasant product to work with once you cut through all the licensing red tape. It really is a shame.

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dinominant@reddit

I'll look into this but last I looked it was a few years ago. I found the pricing was not that appealing and it didn't offer any way to grow without the pricing tiers being very expensive. I mean, the product could be great, but if the value added over the alternatives is only small (compared to the price increase) then it can be hard to justify the expense.

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WayneH_nz@reddit

Essentials is about nz$1100-1400 (approx us$800) for the license and three year updates. 2 cpu 3 host

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lost_signal@reddit

>I'll look into this but last I looked it was a few years ago. I found the pricing was not that appealing and it didn't offer any way to grow without the pricing tiers being very expensive. For vSAN there used to be HCI acceleration kids that bundled vSAN + vSphere at a decent discount. some general advise don't ever construe list prices as actual prices in this industry.... Also make sure you get the quote from someone who isn't trying to sell you something else.....

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theducks@reddit

I never got HCI - why would I want to pay VMware license prices for storage?

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jamesaepp@reddit

Local IOPS but with all the benefits of conventional HA storage. That doesn't go for just vmware either, but any other HCI vendor.

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systemic-void@reddit

Awww Nutanix didn’t even get a mention :(

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Krelas@reddit

We use Nutanix and it has Veeam support.

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lost_signal@reddit

> Backups are easy with CBT and disk to disk based copies. Finally, there is a ton of software out there to have VMWare do a lot of workloads. I've always believed VADP + CDP was the lowest hanging fruit to "Why VMware" for the SMB customer. It's been extended with VAIO, and other things (Snapshot offloading technology making the stun a nothing burger, new snapshot aware replication for cyber secure storage etc). Storage vMotion made storage migrations 98% less work.

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exekewtable@reddit

Proxmox backup server is actually pretty good now. Pull backups, diff disks, sync servers. >d party is bothering to make tools for those platforms. You can get commercial Proxmox support and have the entire stack supported, but you will be hamstrung by the paucity of third party software like enterprise backup support.

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jake04-20@reddit

VMware really is/was the golden standard. If there comes a time where our company doesn't want to go with VMware, I'm going to feel like a fish out of water. I've lived and breathed it for years now. Learned it, and loved learning it. I remember the first time patching Dell hosts in the middle of the business day on a Wednesday, thinking "wow, it really doesn't get any better than this!". I hope this isn't the end of an era but sadly I have a gut feeling it will be.

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slayernine@reddit

I guess I'll have to figure out hyper-V.

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Ok-Front-9320@reddit

We have a Nutanix running alongside our VMWare. It’s been solid.

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alloygeek@reddit

Nutanix for us was nearly 3x the cost over VMware for a datacenter I was setting up a few years ago. I hate to say it but if we have to move, we are going Proxmox

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Ok-Front-9320@reddit

I do still prefer VMWare over Nutanix. We use the Nutanix to run our Veeam setup which is then backed up by a Cohesity box. My former manager had a way of trying new stuff…

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alloygeek@reddit

Wow- that sounds a lot like an MSP I used to work for. We had things like random firewalls between our desktops and printers or between two physical servers to 'test' them... we also had Shadow Protect backing up our Intrada repo (it was 'too expensive' to backup clients directly with decent software.

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Hangikjot@reddit

We have been primarily Hyper-V, a few hundred hosts, and many many VMs. No real issues, our staff prefer working on the Hyper-v systems now versus vmware.

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Maleficent-Employ-88@reddit

On my windows servers I use hyper-v which is installed though add roles and features. We use Citrix DaaS for our VDI environment. We use the cloud as an external storefront server but the DCs and VM hosts are all onsite. The subscription for the basic is around $4 a desktop per month. Definitely better for small businesses. We use an onsite storefront server to serve our onsite thin clients. We point the onsite storefront to the Citrix cloud connector and that acts like the delivery controller. It all works!!

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Algent@reddit

We switched to Nutanix AHV 4y ago, really like it. Only big pitfall we only learned about last week is you better ask for end of support date for hardware because it's a hard cut and it can be 4 to 7 years away depending on what you buy.

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NameEnvironmental358@reddit

Nutanix will charge you an arm and a leg for support once you are yo with renewals. Ask me how I know :)

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Algent@reddit

Yeah it's already the case here, but pretty much every supplier is doing +10% to +20% every year lately. Worse offender is Palo Alto who basically is so high you pay less to renew exact same hardware with 3y included than you would for 2y of maintenance. They also keep splitting licences into several so we are still losing features. This price gouging is really causing major issues, our budgets are locked in June for the next year and it's not easy do justify IT cost skyrocketing that fast with no added value. Several vendors forcing us to renew recent hardware is hitting a nerve here too; factory is constantly working too reduce every source of waste to prove we aren't green washing and here come IT having to throw away recent still functional devices that are nearly non-recyclable.

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AmiDeplorabilis@reddit

Right. ESX (VMware) and Hyper-V (Microsoft) licensing are substantially different. That's one reason why ESX became so much more popular. Microsoft gives you the first 16 cores, then bleeds your bank account dry. I implemented Hyper-V on one server, then when we purchased a more capacious server, moved everything to ESX.

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syshum@reddit

If you are running any windows servers your costs for HyperV should be included in the Windows Licensing, there is no Separate HyperV License

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psiphre@reddit

this is true only for datacenter, last time i looked into it.

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ITMANAGERIT@reddit

Standard includes 1 Hyper-v server (host) and 2 server licenses (guests).

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SimonGn@reddit

It's very specific to the licensing program and not clearly explained but basically yes, if the host is dedicated to only running licensed VMs then the host does not need it's own license. So that excludes Linux VMs. Win server standard under most licensing programs allows two copies at once. First 16 cores included (most licensing programs) then you have to buy 2pack core licences after that and every physical core must be licensed regardless of actual access to it i.e. you can't just limit the VM to 16 cores or disable cores in the BIOS. Also it is on the honour system so good luck during the audit

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syshum@reddit

> So that excludes Linux VMs No it does not, for Licensing Purposes an Linux VM is an OSE just like a Windows VM Windows Server Standard allows for the host Plus 2 Guest OSE (windows or linux) Windows Server Datacenter allows for the Host plus "unlimited" OSE's (windows or Linux) So the only impact on licensing would be if your very linux heavy so you would have the license DC instead of Standard. >>First 16 cores included (most licensing programs) then you have to buy 2pack core licences this is a very odd way to phrase the licensing, yes With Server 2016 windows moved to a Per Core licensing like many other software Vendors, However that is all that changed. Windows licensineg was ALWAYS for the phyical hardware none of that changes my original statement, if you even have 1 Windows VM you have to license the entire physical hardware that is running on, this has always been the case for the entire history of windows even before the per core model

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SimonGn@reddit

Hmm interesting interpretation, I will reread the licensing docs and see if it matches up with yours because I like yours better. I mainly deal with spla (8 core minimum, 1 ose). Good example of why Microsoft licensing is as clear as mud when two people can read through the same document and have a different interpretation.

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dscoleri@reddit

Yea take another look, the poster above is correct. We do a LOT of Hyper-v work and you fully license the host not the VMs. Microsoft licensing is a nightmare, you are right about that part lol.

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SimonGn@reddit

I looked into mine and yeah in the definitions technically the licensed system means the hardware, but in my case (SPLA) it makes no difference because the provision is gimped to only allow the one VM at a time (or 2 if I double the core licences) >Standard edition permits use of one Running Instance of the server software in the Physical OSE on the Licensed Server (in addition to one Virtual OSE), if the Physical OSE is used solely to host and Manage the Virtual OSE. So nested Linux VMs would be fine, but Linux VMs running alongside the VM I'm permitted to run is not.

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dscoleri@reddit

Interesting, we don't do a ton of SPLA licensing but sure enough you are right. Datacenter still gives unlimited VMs but with SPLA licensing Standard is reduced from 2 VMs to 1.

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mustang__1@reddit

>Windows Server Standard allows for the host Plus 2 Guest OSE (windows or linux) Very much not the way I understand it. If you're licensed for two windows VM's (plus the host) on the core basis, you can have as many linux VM's you want. At least for 2019.

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syshum@reddit

Like with most Microsoft licensing there is no clear documentation, their use of "OSE" in licensing terms and not "Windows Guests" or similar seems to indicate the intention to include something more than Windows but that said it is entirely possible the would not care. I only ever buy Datacenter licensing as we are mainly a Windows shop anyway so that specific question has never come up as we always have more windows servers than linux servers

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psiphre@reddit

that's great for a small business with two hosts but it's not really scalable otherwise.

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ITMANAGERIT@reddit

Its not about business size, it is about server density. You just have to do the math... I need X VMs on this host.... The question is it cheaper to go with datacenter or standard? I believe the number is 10 or 12 VM when it is cost efficient to switch from standard licenses to datacenter. Datacenter also has some features not available in standard... so there is that.

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psiphre@reddit

sure. baked into my comment was the assumption that for technologically equipped companies, vm density is going to generally scale with size of business.

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AmiDeplorabilis@reddit

This. If you're SA for a small company, datacenter is a non-starter.

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psiphre@reddit

unless that "company" is a nonprofit! datacenter is quite affordable to nonprofits due to special pricing. an absolute steal (i set up a hyper-v cluster for a nonprofit once).

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AmiDeplorabilis@reddit

Emphasis on "special pricing". But few companies enjoy such exceptions.

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ElectroSpore@reddit

Don't forget the central management and patching tools to operate a cluster.. You get bent over building out the full solution at which point it isn't much cheaper, especially if you have a large amount of non windows VMs.

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anonaccountphoto@reddit

This is wrong, hyper v is free. You just need to license Windows like you would under vsphere.

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Seth0x7DD@reddit

I don't feel like VMware isn't trying to bleed you dry if you want a "well-rounded" system. Between licensing for ESXi, vCenter, NSX, vSAN, Aria, Tanzu and probably a couple of more products that have been split of to make you pay for them while they should probably be included with your ESXi license.

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pdp10@reddit

You don't want to jump from one dead-end product to another.

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gordonv@reddit

Hyper-V is being depreciated in 2 years. Containers, QEMU, micro instances like Lambda....

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HotKarl_Marx@reddit

Dude. Just install linux. Plenty of hypervisor options there which are free.

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Digging_Graves@reddit

xcp-ng is a much much better product. For the love of god don't go hyper-v

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JMWTech@reddit

> xcp-ng Several of us have requirements for 3rd party enterprise support (mostly for CYA reasons) so projects like this aren't an option. Add to it that I don't trust MS to not pull the rug on Hyper-V while pointing and grinning at Azure. Proxmox and Nutanix are the only real option and they both have major downsides to them.

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Digging_Graves@reddit

XCP-ng has enterprise support tho. Not sure if it covers all your needs but it's there.

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noiro777@reddit

FYI ... Hyper-V is basically dead. Hyper-V server 2019 is the last version that's being released. It's being replaced with Azure HCI which is a hybrid cloud platform.

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Hi_Kate@reddit

Can this rumor die for once? Free product "Hyper-V Server" is dead. Equivalent licenced Windows Server 2022 with Hyper-V role is still present and supported, and Hyper-V role is still in Windows Server 2025 preview. Which means Hyper-V is supported at minimum untill 2035.

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slayernine@reddit

Good to know!

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sep76@reddit

running vmware on FC san, proxmox on FC san, proxmox on ceph, hyper-v on FC san. Hyper-v cluster is without a doubt the beast we have the most problems with. would only consider doing hyper-v now if it was a single standalone node. Proxmox cluster is much more similar to vmware esxi cluster on vcenter then hyper-v is. The main thing i miss on proxmox from vcenter is setting a node in maintanance mode. but you can do something similar in proxmox with HA groups.

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slayernine@reddit

I've used Proxmox in a home lab but not for work stuff. Is there support available for Proxmox?

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nirach@reddit

AFAIK you can pay for support, and that grants you access to the enterprise update repo as well - Us plebians that use it at home pay diddly squat and get the peasant repo and forum support.

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sep76@reddit

the peasant repo :) is basically proxmox's extended QA. the enterprise repo gets the packages a couple of weeks later. that beeing said i use the free repo on the homelab. just to get an early warning on what will come in 14 days at work. and have never had an issue that was due to proxmox or their packaging.

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sep76@reddit

yes, both directly from proxmox https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/pricing or via proxmox partners. https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/all/filter/partners/partner/partner-type-filter/partner-type/solution-partner

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onexia@reddit

Is it still the case that proxmox support is based on business hours in an EU Country I cannot remember (Belgium?) and there’s no true 24/7 prod support for us yanks?

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sep76@reddit

that i would know nothing about, since I am in europe. But if it is true. should be an opportunity for a us based consulting company to become a proxmox partner :)

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Professional-Fee2235@reddit

We run raw libvirt/KVM on Ceph, although we do have a lot of automation with Puppet

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blissed_off@reddit

It sucks.

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mini4x@reddit

Prepare to be disappointed.

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jake04-20@reddit

Lol, truth.

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KaitRaven@reddit

Would you consider Proxmox?

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theholylancer@reddit

it is honestly even beyond that, without vmare and its ability to use COTS hardware to achieve what mainframes can do, I expect there to be way more mainframe vendors today and IBM and co won't be in the business of solutions but still hardware. everything from LPARs, to seamless hot / hot standby, to pausing / resume (or hot / cold standby), and a whole lot of other shit meant that you can buy a dell server and achieve the same capability that is offered by Big Blue or w/e at a fraction of the cost. without VMWare, even if Nehalem was some how better than it was (it was exceptional), it won't see as big server adoption on X86 simply because mainframes still offered way more things cluster wise than even the best individual machines from X86 can offer.

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stephenk291@reddit

Not so sure there. The race to the bottom with cloud is long over, it's not exactly cheap itself. VMware won't be easy to get rid of because the off ramps to other choices are all frankly dogshit. For large companies the shift will be long and for now OEM licenses goes to hardware, e.g. VxRail as an example (depending on how you buy) are still the grey area. I think time will tell with broadcom, even before them VMware was already changing their licensing model and the perpetual to core (16) was/is shit anyway. My guess is if you're not a fortune 500 broadcom won't give a shit about you and you'll be left to channel partners. I think 61B is a lot for them to piss away knowing many people were already on the fence with their history to go full steam ahead of rocking the boat even further...for now at least.

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Dal90@reddit

I remember watching their demos at Linux World Boston the year VMware broke into the mainstream, thinking this changes everything. When I got back to the office my co-workers looked at me like I had lost my mind as I'm going to town on a whiteboard trying to explain what I just saw and how it was a new fucking world for the x86/Windows/Linux ecosystem.

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cowbutt6@reddit

This news made me think back to my days beta testing VMware workstation on my 486 DX4-100, using it to run Windows 98 within Linux.

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Whatwhenwherehi@reddit

VMware has sucked for years. I love it too... But Everytime I look at proxmox for anything not data center. Hell hyper v is fine in many cases. Sure there's some enterprise functions you can't live without. But I'm sorry it's days have been numbered.

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MrPatch@reddit

I really remember asking 'so you install this thing and then you can run lots of other computers on this one computer?' Who knew I'd be responsible for the whole stack just a few years later.

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Crotean@reddit

Why the hell was this buyout allowed? VMware feels like such an important cog in the it world they shouldn't be allowed to be bought.

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Michael dell gets whatever he wants. Thats why

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DarkAlman@reddit

No one in congress understands how important VMware is to the worlds industries

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Crotean@reddit

Lina Khan has been a spectacular failure as the FTC chair too.

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rabbit994@reddit

Say what? FTC is trying to undo 40 years of "Yes Corporations, go right ahead and merge. Drop off your highly paid job offer on my desk before you leave." Their success is going to be spotty at times but it's about what you would expect considering hostilely towards telling companies no.

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Crotean@reddit

Did you watch any of the microsoft activision case? I like that the FTC is trying to challenge things, but its super clear from that case the reason they keep losing is because they are borderline incompetent at their jobs right now. The FTCs lawyers were fucking clowns. The exodus of experience under her watch has absolutely brutalized their ability to do their job. [https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/senior-ftc-staff-departures-spike-as-ambitious-agenda-looms](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/senior-ftc-staff-departures-spike-as-ambitious-agenda-looms)

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rabbit994@reddit

I did, the judge was openly hostile towards FTC and clearly part of school of "If Corporations say they won't be anti competitive, I'll take their word for it." 40 years of government agreeing to EVERYTHING that big businesses want has rotted so many institutions. It's going to take years to undo that brain rot. Also, FTC Staff departures are to be expected. FTC used to be a place for Lawyers to go, wag their fingers at few companies, play nice, get a job offer and become highly paid lawyer on other side receiving the finger waging from FTC lawyer. Alot of executive staff knew Lina Khan was going hunting and knew if they didn't cash out now, they would have trouble cashing out after they bagged a few CEOs.

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rabbit994@reddit

~~No one~~ Everyone in congress understands how important VMware is to ~~the worlds industries~~ their election funds. Cloud/different products provided enough cover to any anti trust concerns on this one.

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JacqueMorrison@reddit

r/proxmox

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malikto44@reddit

I just wish Proxmox had more support from third parties, like Veeam and other backup providers. If Proxmox had third party support, it would be quite competitive.

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LooseSignificance166@reddit

Proxmox has their own backup service. Pbs. Its pretty damn good

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bloodguard@reddit

> other backup providers Proxmox Backup Server works reasonably well. And since it all runs on Linux using KVM and QEMU I feel like third party will fall in place easily. There's already [unofficial](https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agents-for-linux-mac-aix-solaris-f41/proxmox-incremental-backups-with-veeam-t66702.html) ways of backing up proxmox using veeam's linux agent. Looking at their forum there definitely seems to be a lot of interest.

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

nobody is going to trust their backups to some hacked on bullshit method. They need first class support with enterprise backup solutions, and it's shocking that the brains behind Proxmox haven't been actively reaching out to Veeam/Commvault/etc. and working on making this happen.

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BloodyIron@reddit

> hacked on bullshit method. You went down the wrong alley there bud.

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

I was referring to the weirdo veeam workaround to get the Linux agent running on proxmox, not the built in oroxmox backup service. But anyways I don’t think PBS supports S3 or immutability last I checked. It’s fine but definitely feature lacking.

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BloodyIron@reddit

So go ask the Proxmox devs to fill in the gaps that you care about. They actually care btw.

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

There’s an open issue for s3 support that’s nearly four years old. Seems like they care a lot.

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BloodyIron@reddit

Did you post in that thread why you care about it, and why it's worth being implemented? Software development takes time, and it being 4 years doesn't mean it won't get implemented. Sometimes life be like that. There's times I've had to wait multiple years (or much less) for changes to happen in software myself. That doesn't mean it won't happen. If you want them to hear you, go share your voice. That's part of the beauty of open source bruh.

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

That’s a lot of effort. I’ll just use something that works instead.

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BloodyIron@reddit

And so shall I stick with Proxmox, which works and costs way less.

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Hotshot55@reddit

> nobody is going to trust their backups to some hacked on bullshit method. What backup methods out there didn't start as some "hacked on bullshit"?

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cpujockey@reddit

or even linux for that matter. essentially gnu / linux is a mishmash of opensource and free software projects combined into a "vision" of sorts and distributed as a "distro".

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pdp10@reddit

If you didn't prefer that, you'd be using BSD, which is a unified filetree where one could traditionally `cd /usr/src && make world` and let the whole operating system recompile itself.

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cpujockey@reddit

> nobody is going to trust their backups to some hacked on bullshit method. hacked? Bullshit method? this is the linux way.

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lordmycal@reddit

I wish Veeam would sell their own backup appliances. I'd love to buy veeam gear that is fully supported by them, as I've had issues with vendor fingerpointing before. We switched to Rubrik to avoid those issues, but there are still some things that I miss about Veeam at times. It's good software.

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syshum@reddit

> Proxmox Backup Server takes me back to like 2011 technology level of backups, just basic image level backups.

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bloodguard@reddit

Not really. I can go into any of the incremental backup snapshots and restore single files if I need to. Or restore the the whole VM. Via the web interface or CLI.

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syshum@reddit

that is still image level crash consistent backups Veeam I get * Hypervisor agnostic backups (Restore from any supported Hypervisor to Any hypervisor or supported Cloud. i.e I can restore a vmWare VM to AWS Directly * Application Aware processing for common applications like SQL (big one) * SQL Transaction Logs backup in per minute intervals * Continuous Replication * Isolated / Automated Restore testing with reports * Awesome Compression and Dedup rates * Builtin Support for S3 Storage with out having to do OS Level hacks * Builtin Support for Block Replication with having to do OS Level Hacks * Help Desk portal for File Level Restores that allow of RBAC Security * Integrated Agent based backups for physical systems that provides a Single Plane of Glass for Backups that is just a start, i could list ALOT more

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sarosan@reddit

I'll add to your list: - Change Block Tracking (CBT) support - Immutable backups repository

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NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit

After this.. Probably will.

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FatStoic@reddit

If Broadcomm fuck this acquisition up enough, third parties will see which way the wind is blowing and start investing in alternatives.

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YetAnother_pseudonym@reddit

> ~~If~~ When Broadcomm fuck this acquisition up enough, third parties will see which way the wind is blowing and start investing in alternatives. FTFY.

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mathmanhale@reddit

Proxmox Backup Server works pretty dang well at this point.

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syshum@reddit

One of my frustions currently with veeam is they refuse to add another hypervisor unless the market shifts to that hypervisor, but the market will not shift to that hypervisor unless veeam makes it compatible Veeam is a market leader, they need to start acting like it, and be a leader not a follower.

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Professional-Fee2235@reddit

They just care where money comes from. No point throwing money at market where most people would just use worse but "good enough" open source solutions

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syshum@reddit

Given the state of security and ransomeware I dont believe that would be the case. Backups are one most important thing and IT Dept does, Veeam is already freaking $$$$$, far more expensive than vmWare.

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Alex_2259@reddit

ProxMox has very low enterprise adoption and yeah as you said, overall support. Call a vendor and tell them you're ripping ProxMox and they'll look at you like you have 18 heads. Hyper-V is a more likely successor but given Prox is open source a company can fork it and offer enterprise support with more logical licensing. If I had the skills and business knowledge this would be a great start up idea

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malikto44@reddit

What might be interesting is some sort of interface to fool Veeam and other products to thinking Proxmox is VMWare. They have different architectures, but something that appears to be a dummy VCSA appliance which then uses Proxmox's calls might be useful. However, this will take a ton of reverse engineering, and may afoul of VMware IP. However, if this could be done, it would get Proxmox to gain a lot of acceptance, especially if this was commercially supported.

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Professional-Fee2235@reddit

I prefer OSS software where I can but honestly there is just no good enterprise scale backup software that could compete

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jaymef@reddit

Looking at this myself. Have been using oVirt/RHEV but it looks like it is tanking too

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FreeBeerUpgrade@reddit

I feel like RHEV is dead in the water. Tried getting a quote directly from Red Hat hat this year for this product. They basically said "Go OpenStack/OpenShift or go home."

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jaymef@reddit

ya that's what I've been seeing. I'm active on the oVirt mailing list and they are getting no support really. The project is basically frozen at this point. Future is not looking bright.

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FreeBeerUpgrade@reddit

Best bet if you can handle it at your org level is to move to ProxMox if your org and infra can support it, IMHO. It's a lot more involved and less shinny than VMWare afaik. But hell, it's debian, rock solid, there are partners who really do good work and it's actively developped. Like they introduced SDN this year. It's real open source.The guy who wrote SDN is a French contributor and the same one who trained me and on PVE. The support from ProxMox is only European Business hours but YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO GET SUPPORT FROM THEM. You're supposed to get support from a gold partner from theirs. It's really a stupid argument waived around by nay-sayers when they just don't want to learn the damn thing. That... And it's not as feature rich as VMWare. I.e. HA only supports rebooting the VM on another node. It does not allow to sync RAM between 2 VMs on 2 hosts for a failover-like scenario where you have zero downtime. There's a VMWare product just for that (can't remember the name). But hey, consider giving it a try. It's good. Given it's more geared for medium sized businesses but that's were VMWare was at 10 years ago too.

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1StepBelowExcellence@reddit

>It does not allow to sync RAM between 2 VMs on 2 hosts for a failover-like scenario where you have zero downtime. There's a VMWare product just for that (can't remember the name). Fault tolerance. Which while a very nice feature, I feel it's not heavily used anyway with the resource requirement. It's also got the downside that if there is a fault in the OS level, the fault is replicated to the secondary. So, it's only good for host-level VM redundancy which could be achieved with failover cluster type configurations across 2+ VMs anyway.

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FreeBeerUpgrade@reddit

That if your application even supports it. I still work with a lot of oldshool application servers, proprietary shit that I cannot poke around but is supposed to 24/7 no downtime. Hehe

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jaymef@reddit

Proxmox is where I'm leaning. I'd love to get away from VMs all together, have made some headway over the past few years but not quite there yet.

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walkalongtheriver@reddit

I feel like I read they basically were (just not in a press release) shuttering RHEV in favor of Openshift and whatever KVM they layered on top of it. That was over a year ago too. And because of that, oVirt was/is dead in the water and will receive no new updates, etc. At least not from the likes of RHEL themselves. And yeah- Gluster. It seems neat but looks like Ceph ate its lunch.

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jaymef@reddit

ya, you're probably referring to this: https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6960518

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varky@reddit

I spoke to one of the head Red Hat Europe people at a forum like 5 years ago or so and asked why RHEV was getting so stale (even back then). Basically, in vino veritas got me the answer: not enough people used it for funding to be put there. They were still banking on Openstack, not even openshift back then. RHV is basically forgotten on life support for years now, the finance department just hasn't figured it out to pull the plug...

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pdp10@reddit

The enduring tragedy of Red Hat is how incredibly little they manage to accomplish with their [billions](https://www.zippia.com/red-hat-careers-9680/revenue/) in revenue, compared to others in the space.

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FreeBeerUpgrade@reddit

That's just sad

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mathmanhale@reddit

Same. RHEV isn't even quotable was what they told me. "But OpenStack has way more features and is a better product" said the salesperson that doesn't know what I need or even understand what I want...

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Banluil@reddit

Last place I worked had so many issues with RHEV they migrated BACK to vmware.

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Ivanow@reddit

Proxmox is a meme. I don’t know anyone who would seriously consider deploying it anywhere near prod. It’s basically homelabers domain.

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JacqueMorrison@reddit

You’re not wrong, but it gets often used for less critical stuff like dev/test environments, even outside homelabs.

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Ivanow@reddit

Whole point of test/dev environments is to try out things under same infrastructure as what prod is running on. Proxmox is nice “baby steps” “all in one” introduction to virtualization/contenairzation/disk attached storage, all in one box, which saves himelabners electricity bills, but I have yet to see any large company request it from prospect employees. This role is currently mostly handled by VMware or whatever cloud buzzword stack, and I would like to see how it develops, especially given the news in this thread.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

I do cloud now, but VMware is dead to me If I had to run on prem infra again, I'd go with Proxmox

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CrazyFoque@reddit

Broadcom: Where technology goes to die.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

...goes to be killed...

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bwyer@reddit

It's the Computer Associates of the new millennium.

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BrainWaveCC@reddit

So true!

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joecool42069@reddit

if you're a vmware shop.. prepare your budget's to be ratfucked.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

Is there any info on what will be changing? I heard rumors of a VM-based licensing change, so you're billed on the number of VMs you have (the cost will also be multiplied by X depending on the phase of the moon)

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thrwaway75132@reddit

Nope, per core subscription just like MSFT.

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Justsomedudeonthenet@reddit

Which leads to people deciding to pack dozens of unrelated services into one VM to save costs. The whole thing virtualization was created to avoid.

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xoxide@reddit

Guess that makes the ROE of the services cloud easier to calculate.

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bmxliveit@reddit

Yikes that would be bad if they charged per vm. Got 150,000 plus vms across multiple systems.

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cyberentomology@reddit

Could be worse, could have been Cisco

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slugshead@reddit

Yeah my licensing is due next June...

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time_is_now@reddit

Michael Dell is rumored to earn 21.6 billion in cash and Broadcom stock from the sale…

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DarkAlman@reddit

15,000 people lose their jobs, thousands of companies get F*** on renewals, and Michael Dell gets a new yacht

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time_is_now@reddit

Well the important thing is that Michael’s needs are well attended to. The serfs can fend for themselves /s.

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sarosan@reddit

This reminds me of the time when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and ruined it all.

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Angelworks42@reddit

Oracle didn't help, but Sun didn't help either. I realized back in 2000 (and I worked for a really large Sun customer) that once Linux figured out 64 bit on Intel/AMD that paying 1/10th the price for hardware/software was going to ruin Sun and it did. I mean yes you can talk about bullet proof hardware, but we had Oracle databases running on E4500's that as I recall cost 250k each. It had hot swapable everything as I recall. I remember having a Sun Blade 1500 dropped off on my desk (it was so awesome looking) - the price tag on it was almost 10k and there wasn't anything it did quicker than the Dell Precision on the other end of my desk. You bought these machines because the software you needed to run your business only ran on these machines. I do remember them fondly, but they (like SGI even) didn't realize that prices kept going down and performance keeps going up on this stuff :(.

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stab_diff@reddit

I lost one of my earliest IT jobs because my company assumed that laptops were always going to cost $5k+ and be worth repairing. Nope!

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bernys@reddit

E450s with a single power input, but multiple power supplies was one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. When one of the power supplies failed, it'd *always* trip the breaker taking out the server.

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Angelworks42@reddit

Heh I had totally forgot about that. Funny thing to we had a bunch of those that during big workloads they'd like to crash and we called Sun and they had someone out at the data center in less than an hour - pretty much every machine had mismatched CPU modules (same speed but different revisions).

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phosix@reddit

I would not be surprised to learn there's still loads of E540's and E5400's chugging along out there. Those things are friggen **robust**! In my experience they just absolutely *refuse to die*.

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Angelworks42@reddit

Yeah our last e450 was still up and working even with several dead fans. Most all of the HP and Dell 1u machines like to shut down during fan failure (which I get - not a big deal either with clustered systems either).

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gregsting@reddit

But Solaris was a very good Unix system, able to compete with Red Hat no problem. It could run on x86 too. The hardware was just the cherry on the top

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autogyrophilia@reddit

To the point that it still sees some very limited enterprise usage, on the form of legacy applications ,and in the form of SmartOS. (Which is a fork of a fork of OpenSolaris, but) .

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Angelworks42@reddit

Oh I fully agree - they just needed to scale the environment down like Linux was doing. Fwiw when it did finally get open sourced and Oracle screwed over the license on that - Illumos the fork has become really robust with containers, and support for kvm.

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kiss_my_what@reddit

Sun never delivered bootable hardware RAID for their SPARC hardware, so they lost a lot of our business for just that.

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gregsting@reddit

Did they keep anything else than Java? I was at Oracle world a few years ago, they were so proud to present their "engineered system" where all the stack from cpu to database was engineered by Oracle...

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sarosan@reddit

ZFS for one, and they tried to kill MySQL but failed (I say this because development on it had stalled at one point). By then I switched over to MariaDB and never looked back.

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gregsting@reddit

Solaris is dead, MySQL was not sun. Zfs is open source

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vhalember@reddit

Or Oracle, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast with almost everything they touch. Sadly, many big tech companies are great at acquiring and destroying things.

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skipITjob@reddit

What about Google and Microsoft?

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Electric_Ultramarine@reddit

What did AT&T kill?

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vhalember@reddit

DirectTV. They slowly doubled the price, and lost over half their customers in eight years (25 to 12 million). Of course, people were cutting the cord, but the huge price increase accelerated the demise. They lost as many customers as Comcast and Dish Network combined. They also bought TimeWarner for $85 billion in 2016, and sold it to WB Discovery for only $43 billion in 2022.

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Electric_Ultramarine@reddit

To be fair satellite tv was an inferior product (for most people) at the time.

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vhalember@reddit

8-10 years ago for many people in the Midwest you had a choice between the evil, incompetent Comcast or go with a satellite service. We last had DirectTV in 2017, it was $157/month for their 200 channels and HBO. Just two years earlier this was only $90/month. After we left it got worse for the remaining customers. My in-laws stuck with them until late last year - they were paying $190/month for just those 200 channels!

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PlatformPuzzled7471@reddit

Yeah and the target demographic was individuals in rural areas, a lot of which are low to mid income. A lot of folks just couldn’t afford it after AT&T started jacking up the price.

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ApertaPrincipium@reddit

Good reception.

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Extras@reddit

Rip DYN

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dam_broke_it_again@reddit

SUNW was very poorly managed near the end, so no surprise on Oracle. Wondered how it would have been under IBM??

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PlatformPuzzled7471@reddit

Probably just as terrible and likely nothing would have been open sourced, considering how IBM effectively killed CentOS after they bought Red Hat.

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saraseitor@reddit

I still remember Sun very fondly. Oracle on the other hand is not a company that stirs a lot of positive emotions for me

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krankie@reddit

Come up with a positive memory about Oracle or they will sue your company.

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saraseitor@reddit

lol that's exactly how I feel about them

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nostril_spiders@reddit

One positive emotion per core. Of every computer that you've ever used.

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NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

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phosix@reddit

Still have most of my Sun goodies from my brief stint there: a mug, a glass, couple pens, and the front badge of my Ultra 45 workstation.

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timsredditusername@reddit

I met a guy at Disneyland (a park employee who was enjoying a day off with family) who helped us get from World of Color in C.A. to a great parade viewing spot by the Matterhorn in D.L in about 15 minutes. His mom worked at Oracle, and she was pretty nice. Not related to the company at all, but one of their employees in 2015 was cool.

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gregsting@reddit

I still cherish my "Solaris expert inside" T shirt

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NauteeAU@reddit

Been doing a unit on Distributed Systems this semester at university. Sun Microsystems was such a pioneer and laid the foundations for what we have today. Really interesting reading into what they did and what they have influenced.

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amgeiger@reddit

VMWare customers are about to get a tour of the Broadcom mansion’s bunker.

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ooblongtea@reddit

One of my team: "On prem is looking pretty good!"

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

Enterprise-wise for on prem your choices are - Hyper-V (shit compared to VMware and full of headaches) - VMware (lol, enjoy the new pricing scheme and lack of innovation) - Nutanix ($$$$$$) Best bet would probably be Proxmox tbh

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NewMeeple@reddit

You've also got OKD/OpenShift and OpenStack (pick your flavour), and if you need enterprise support go Red Hat, but yeah, get your point.

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SpongederpSquarefap@reddit

OpenStack looks like a great option, but I'm sour with RH/IBM because of the RHEL bullshit they pulled

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NewMeeple@reddit

I mean realistically when they announced CentOS Stream, they were going to take away the git repos back then and not even make CentOS 8. There's an entirely different git repo for Stream. Managing all those extra repos has been said by many RH kernel engineers to be a huge undertaking. I think they communicated really poorly and all the Reddit/YouTube drama became unstoppable, but they want people to contribute to the EL ecosystem, not leech off their srpms. I don't think IBM had anything to do with it, but I agree that IBM are big stinkers. They are better than Broadcom though.

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InvisibleTextArea@reddit

Good news! You can also ask Canonical for support.

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scriptmonkey420@reddit

Xen: who?

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ooblongtea@reddit

We just moved out vmware to a data center and combined a good many servers. Saved us a ton and we renewed before we were bent over the fire again. I'll be doing something else before next renewal.

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post_break@reddit

Until Microsoft stops selling you licenses for on prem for your particular service. Looking at you Office 365.

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Digging_Graves@reddit

It is, depending on what product you have ofcourse.

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-----0-----@reddit

How long before Broadcom implements Loot Crates?

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DarkAlman@reddit

I opened 75 and still haven't gotten VMotion... Want a Tanzu? I've got 7

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-----0-----@reddit

I'm still trying to collect enough Tier 1 Support Calls to combine into a Tier 2 Modifier. Only 78 more to go and 6500 Gems!

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RykerFuchs@reddit

I’ve got an upcoming hardware refresh happening. Super bad timing. Other than this word on the street, I would think it will be a year before we know what’s up with VMware renewal costs. Would consider Proxmox, but without veeam support it’s not happening. We are straight up licensed for hyper-v. Might end up just pulling the trigger on that for this cycle and dropping VMware at next renewal. Still really stupid timing.

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CompWizrd@reddit

Proxmox has a backup server solution that's worth looking into.

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BoredTechyGuy@reddit

So it begins. Another giant slain.

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GhoastTypist@reddit

So are they after a monopoly or something? So far they've acquired Symantec for cyber security products and now VMware. Next they will probably be starting a huge cloud similar to Azure or AWS, all hosted on VMWare products with Symantec protecting it, please tell me they aren't looking at Veeam.

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210Matt@reddit

There are plenty of good alternatives and VMWare has been losing market share for a while.

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the91fwy@reddit

Please enlighten me on what can fully replace vCenter? I’d love to plug something else at work but nothing really fits the bill.

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210Matt@reddit

Depending on your setup, Hyper-V has most of the features and if you run Windows Server Datacenter you have the licensing. For Linux look at proxmox.

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sarosan@reddit

> Hyper-v and proxmox Those are hypervisors. vCenter is the management plane that is an entire appliance on its own. Apart from Nutanix offering a competitive alternative, I am unaware of Hyper-V or Proxmox offering anything remotely close to what vCenter brings to the table (and we're talking about more than a pretty web UI). Some key examples: * Multi-domain management: several data centers with their own respective clusters, policies, etc. * vSphere Distributed Switches * vMotion over WAN * Multiple linked vCenters in HA * Hybrid cloud management * Automatic hypervisor deployment * Centralized hypervisor updates * Host policy management (e.g. applying CIS controls or DISA STIGs) I'm all for open source, but Proxmox has a lot of catching up to do.

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InvisibleTextArea@reddit

I think you may be wandering into OpenStack territory there. OTOTH Openstack might be completely over the top for some.

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210Matt@reddit

System Center would check some of those boxes. It is not a apples to apples comparison, but with more a more super high availability applications migrating to SaaS on the internet is has moved the needle on requirements. Also if you are deeply entrenched in VMWare there is not a huge reason to leave today, but there are other solutions out there when Broadcom lowers support and jacks up prices.

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xxbiohazrdxx@reddit

lol name them

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demonfurbie@reddit

Xen Server or the Vates virtualization stack come to mind.

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210Matt@reddit

Hyper-v and proxmox are increasingly popular. They are cheaper than VMWare in most cases and can do almost as much. With companies moving more mission critical applications to the cloud these other hypervisors are getting more attractive.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

Broadcom is the Computer Associates of the 21st century. It's where software goes to die.

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ScotTheDuck@reddit

Ironic, because one of modern Broadcom's first victims was CA.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

Somehow I missed (or forgot) that. Maybe that's where Broadcom gets it from. Corruption from within.

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Zephk@reddit

Good old DoD contracts. Just wait for Broadcom to buy out ivanti and veeam and they will basically have all the defense software money.

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sofixa11@reddit

VMware already tried a public cloud based on their tech(vCloud Air) but it was a massive flop because they couldn't compete with anything from AWS or Azure. Their tech was bad and lacking, APIs were shit, and presence was minimal.

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Fr0gm4n@reddit

They are/were trying to ride the k8s train with Tanzu but I don't know what kind of uptake they've actually had with it. Their free training seems decent, though.

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rabbit994@reddit

We evaluated Tanzu at $LastCompany. First off, the pricing was pretty rough. We were already in Azure and Tanzu + vSphere BEFORE Broadcom was tough sale. Second, integrating with vSphere was painful mainly due to personality conflicts. vSphere Admins didn't want us IaC writing, YAML slinging, Azure DevOps pipeline running hipsters in their vSphere. We didn't want their GUI clicking, couldn't write code dinosaur tails in our Kubernetes. We finally said "Meh, Azure Kubernetes is cheap enough, we will stick there."

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dstew74@reddit

> but I don't know what kind of uptake VMware's people openly made fun of it and VMware's marketing approach around k8s. So I'm assuming not much.

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sofixa11@reddit

They're still trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Bolting Kubernetes on top of vSphere, dragging a lot of legacy cruft on things designed to get rid of them. Also, they're trying to get at it from a VMware admin angle, which are among the worst possible people to approach for containers. From conversations with peers, Rancher is a lot more popular than Tanzu.

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Professional-Fee2235@reddit

No wonder, VMware was build "enterprise menu clicker" first and foremost, kinda hard to just rebuild that and fight competition that build it for scratch for cloud

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CanORage@reddit

An entire set of holdings spanning everything you listed really isn't quite the same as a monopoly. That'd be more like if they bought vmware as well as a competing virtualization platform, or consolidated multiple AV products.

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totallynotbluu@reddit

Didn't they spin Symantec off to create GEN Digital or something?

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OlayErrryDay@reddit

VMWare has been losing a lot to cloud computing. They have done some interesting things lately, particularly with the cloud + on-prem Virtualization connection with Azure to create a cohesive vision between cloud compute and your on-prem infrastructure, but their days of infinite growth are long dead. They will always be a big player, but cloud is here and will continue to grow and get better as time goes on. The main negative with the cloud is the lack of experience and skill by those managing cloud environments. Most places have IT people that don't know how to maximize value in the cloud by building infrastructure that leverages what the cloud has to offer. Most admins are just migrating systems to the cloud and leaving them as-is. There is no money to be saved in that design. So, cloud providers will continue to build tools and make them easier for admins to use and manage. Eventually there will be an easy way for a low-knowledge admin to create a cloud cluster that automatically reduces high speed usage outside of business hours and app usage peak hours. It's writing on the wall, but it will take time. Now is as good of a time to sell as any, as their product has reached its pinnacle and they have no where to really go from here.

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DarkAlman@reddit

VMware + Dell had their chance to be a big cloud player and messed it up

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addyftw1@reddit

Well this sucks. VMWare is going to be shit now.

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earthmisfit@reddit

Oh, no comms either. That is so dirty.

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AbleDanger12@reddit

Literally got an email yesterday from VMware about it

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earthmisfit@reddit

I haven't received anything from VMWare. Does it say anything about their free tier being impacted?

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AbleDanger12@reddit

No. It was just corp speak and noting they've changed from Inc to LLC

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Karthanon@reddit

Just wait, licensing will change from 'per-core' to 'per-Mhz allocated'. Gotta make back that investment somehow!

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RichB93@reddit

We started renewal on our vSphere licenses recently and our distributor has not been able to get ahold of them at all for the past week to confirming pricing. This bodes well.

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forever_zen@reddit

*Calm down, we'll tell you the price when the time comes.* Sometimes I feel like ransomware gangs are more honest than vendors.

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jpmoney@reddit

Hey, it takes time to update the tables in the sales schema to use longint for prices.

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januszeal@reddit

🤣😭

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Ivanow@reddit

> Sometimes I feel like ransomware gangs are more honest than vendors. I used to work with dialer (basically a malware that turned your dialup number to premium rate) malware company in 90s/early 20s. I’m pretty sure statue of limitations ran out already, I made enough cash to set me up for life, so fuck off. Their “customer” (more like “affiliate”, no one gave a fuck about poor schmucks who got five digits phone bills) support absolutely blew away anything I encountered back then and since then.

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malikto44@reddit

Sometimes they have better support. /s

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matthieuC@reddit

They're busy adding 0s

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dstew74@reddit

I used the pending Broadcom purchapocalypse to get a 3 year pushed through in Q1. Feeling okay about that one.

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networkwise@reddit

Same here

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obliviousofobvious@reddit

This is exactly what happened with Symantec. We couldn't get a renewal on Endpoint Protection after 2 months and jumped ship.

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BickNlinko@reddit

When this happened with Symantec we were able to pay for our renewal for SEPM however we couldn't log into either the Broadcom portal or the old Symantec portal to retrieve the licenses and/or latest MR. We would have jumped ship if we had not already paid(and they wouldn't give us a refund). That was the last customer we purchased SEPM for. Total nightmare.

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madscoot@reddit

This doesn’t surprise me. Every single internal system is in limbo right now as they swing an axe on anything that isn’t core.

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Royal_Engineering329@reddit

Scale Computing. Made the switch years ago..

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

That's at least somewhat understandable with the holiday, and the chaos they are in. The question is how soon they get back, which will show how bad it is.

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post_break@reddit

We struggled with this too. They stopped accepting credit card payments, wanted us to create an invoice, send it to them, etc. Was the most pain in the ass thing when last time it was 60 seconds.

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Mid-fartshart@reddit

Yikes. That's like IBM getting bought by Fisher-Price.

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occasional_cynic@reddit

To be fair, given what IBM has turned into I would probably shrug my shoulders if that were to happen.

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Mid-fartshart@reddit

I meant more at the height of their power/popularity. VMWare leads the world in Virtual Server infrastructure, and Broadcom is mostly known for making budget quality "cheaper Intel alternative" nics, and networking equipment.

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sofixa11@reddit

>VMWare leads the world in Virtual Server infrastructure, And IBM leads the world in mainframe infrastructure, but that's not where *most* of the future of computing is.

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Banluil@reddit

> And IBM leads the world in mainframe infrastructure, but that's not where most of the future of computing is. You do realize that without mainframe infrastructure, there isn't any cloud infrastructure either....right? You do understand how that all works, right? You think that the cloud exists right now without IBM? Guess what, it doesn't. At all.

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r3rg54@reddit

What do mainframes have to do with cloud infrastructure?

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sofixa11@reddit

>You think that the cloud exists right now without IBM Absolutely, yes. But I don't see how alternative history theories are relevant? IBM and Oracle and VMware all had their place, and were revolutionary in one way or another. That doesn't tell us anything about their relevance for today and tomorrow, does it?

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Banluil@reddit

> That doesn't tell us anything about their relevance for today and tomorrow, does it? All are still absolutely relevant for today and tomorrow. You have no idea of what you are talking about if you think that any of those 3 aren't relevant today or tomorrow. IBM is still in the top 10% of the Fortune 500 companies, and isn't going to go away, and most of that is because of infrastructure. Oracle isn't going to disappear either, since java and SUN, and everything else they have their fingers in isn't going to just up and go away. It's still used by more things, and will be used by even more tomorrow, and the day after. VMWare is going to continue to be one of the industry leaders in virtual machines. Whether you like it or not. You really don't know much about how this industry works, do you? Or are you just shilling for a VMWare competitor?

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sofixa11@reddit

All three are massive, highly profitable, and highly embedded in many organisations and aren't getting out of there any time soon. And all three are dead ends with very limited growth potential because they're technically obsolete and replaced with better more adapted to what organisations need alternatives. Mainframes aren't going away, but it's not a growing business like an AWS is.

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Banluil@reddit

> Mainframes aren't going away, but it's not a growing business like an AWS is. You do understand that AWS can't grow without mainframes.... Right? You do understand how that works... I really don't think that you do..... AWS runs on mainframes..... It really does.... AWS wouldn't exist without IBM mainframes... (or a competitor that doesn't match up to IBM). But ok...you think whatever you want...that they are going away... Ok....

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Gronk0@reddit

"AWS runs on mainframes" That is the most wrong thing I have read for a long time. Thanks for the laugh.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

It's funny how they just stopped posting here after making all these confidently incorrect comments insulting everybody else

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sofixa11@reddit

Uh... Are you sure you know what you're talking about? AWS are relatively open about their hardware, and I can't imagine anyone who has checked their public information on Nitro or Graviton would somehow mistake those for mainframes.

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Professional-Fee2235@reddit

> You do understand how that all works, right? You seem to not realize how all of that works, at all. > You think that the cloud exists right now without IBM? Guess what, it doesn't. At all. You'd be hard pressed to find any piece of IBM equipment in any of the big cloud providers.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

Their point was about the *future* of computing. IBM bought Red Hat because they saw where the market was going and wanted to capture some of that growth, because they know it's not in their mainframe business.

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Banluil@reddit

The future of computing still requires mainframe systems to be there and setup. You think that the cloud doesn't run on mainframe systems? I mean, do you think it's just running on a .... cloud? >because they know it's not in their mainframe business. Yeah, that is what they know.....sure.... Ok.....

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primetimerobus@reddit

I’m pretty sure most clouds don’t run on a mainframe but commodity hardware.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

OK, but it's clearly a business that is slowing down while other compute workloads are growing far more rapidly. This is an objective fact, just look at the revenue numbers. AWS is doing more revenue per quarter than IBM is doing in an entire year for their mainframe business. Infrastructure revenue (aka mainframe business) in Q3 was down 2% YoY -- before taking into account inflation. Infrastructure revenue in Q2 was down even more at 14.5% YoY. Your snarky attitude like you know more than everybody else just makes you look like an asshole.

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FatStoic@reddit

Without copper wire there isn't any fiber, but that doesn't mean that the future of networking is those phones with the spinny dials

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Banluil@reddit

> Without copper wire there isn't any fiber, but that doesn't mean that the future of networking is those phones with the spinny dials You are making a completely incorrect comparison there, and you know it.

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FatStoic@reddit

They're both technologies that were once revolutionary, but now are on life support, with shrinking market share. Mainframes are still used and are highly performant when they are, but I very much doubt that companies without mainframes are gearing up to buy mainframes and migrate existing loads to them.

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gehzumteufel@reddit

Can you elaborate on the AWS and mainframe usage?

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NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit

That was the old Broadcom. Avago bought broadcom and reskinned itself as Broadcom.

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signal_lost@reddit

You sir, never had a X710.

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sofixa11@reddit

Whenever anyone mentions "enterprise" "quality" hardware, or hardware compatibility lists, or Intel or VMware "quality", that's my goto. This card was such a piece of shit for more than a year, while Intel and Dell happily sold it and VMware happily had it on its HCL saying it's fine. *For more than a year*.

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lost_signal@reddit

>This card was such a piece of shit for more than a year, while Intel and Dell happily sold it and VMware happily had it on its HCL saying it's fine. > >For more than a year VMware doesn't pull things from the HCL, they: 1. Reach out to the vendor to fix the firmware. 2. Can potentially block a re-cert on a new major release. 3. [Share the fun work arounds to make the card act stable](https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/53749). (Note, I largely drafted this KB, as it was based on a personal blog I'd written). I'm only aware of 1 case of a device being outright removed, and that was before the ReadyLabs team was initiated. To be blunt up until vSphere 7 the HCL testing of NICs test hadn't been upgraded in years, and needed an overhaul. It's actually pretty robust, and the vSAN extra qualifications for RDMA add another gate that found a lot of fun weaknesses (on high number of RDMA connections). FWIW I spoke to Dell's purchasing agent about the quality problems on this NIC. At the end of the day the ODMs tend to care more about what the OEMs think than a software company is what I've learned over the years.

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MrPatch@reddit

> Share the fun work arounds to make the card act stable. (Note, I largely drafted this KB, as it was based on a personal blog I'd written). Genuinely laughed out loud at > **Solution:** > There is no solution.

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lost_signal@reddit

That was added by Broc I’m pretty sure, he’s got a sense of humor. Vmware long ago did actually pull something from the HCL, and it actually caused a lot more angry customers, because they basically felt abandoned arbitrarily. The closest I’ve seen since was a SSD that was deprecated after firmware to fix most of the issues was released. For any remaining customers who are impacted the vendor would quietly swap them for newer gear that could solve the problem. Publicly, shaming hardware vendors, tends to make them not want to share. What’s really going on with firmware/driver bugs with you, as an OS vendor, the best you can do is document the problems and quietly work with them with your engineering to get a fix. The server OEM tend to make multibillion-dollar commitments pretty far out on supply consumption promises , the best you can hope from them is to just give you another NIC for free. Honestly, outside of some pre-spec 25Gbps SFP28 issues NICs have been a lot more boring since the qualification tests have been beefed up. Internally a lot of fuss was made about this specific card (the Intel ceo at the time heard about it). I’m currently chasing a more general networking performance bottleneck, but it looks like it’s more just we need to raise the number of internal TX queues (or more people use RDMA), and it’s relatively mild compared to this issue. The performance engineering teams actually do a lot of good work to push the limits and find corner cases. A lot of the generative AI stuff is really pushing the limits of how much IO I personally thought anyone would ever want to push through a host.

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sofixa11@reddit

The X710 was unusable (problems ranging from PSOD, even when doing nothing in maintenance mode to random network issues like certain VMs losing connectivity on certain vNICs - and no, there was no workaround available outside of use a different driver that had slightly rarer PSODs) for more than a year. Honestly I don't care who dropped the ball thinking it was someone else's responsibility, everyone shat the bed here. Dell shouldn't have kept selling it, Intel should have pulled it, VMware shouldn't have kept it on the HCL. It was a product which simply didn't work, all approved by "enterprise" vendors. It is simply inexcusable. What's the point of paying for "enterprise quality " if that quality isn't there?

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3MU6quo0pC7du5YPBGBI@reddit

> Broadcom is mostly known for making budget quality "cheaper Intel alternative" nics, and networking equipment. They are huge in the higher end networking equipment space though. Most major network vendors (Arista, Juniper, Cisco, etc) are using Broadcom chipsets for at least some of their product lines.

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gregsting@reddit

IBM in the 90s: We won't sell hardware aymore IBM in the 2020s: We won't sell services anymore IBM in the 2030s: We won't sell anymore

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gordonv@reddit

If Fischer Price hybrids a Thinkpad with an unbreakable laptop at an affordable price... I dunno. That seems like a win.

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ranhalt@reddit

Well that’s most of IBM since Lenovo bought everything x86 from IBM.

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squeamish@reddit

IBM is #65 on the Fortune 500 with REVENUE of around the same price this entire deal was for. IBM is gigantic and important.

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lost_signal@reddit

Their mainframe revenue is shrinking.... At a -2% CAGR a year lol. IBM waited till everyone tried to get off AS/400 and zOS to Redhat and.. Bought Redhat. They can legit just BUY whatever you move off of their platform to, before you can migrate again.

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squeamish@reddit

Mainframes aren't IBM's main source of revenue. They constitute part of "Infrastructure," their 3rd-largest business segment. A segment which is growing (zSystems was up 36% 2022 over 2021).

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lost_signal@reddit

The mainframe revenue is also kind of funky to track because its leased systems that IBM floats debt to sell. Reading their balance sheet to understand, cash flow as always hurt my brain.

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dstew74@reddit

This. How IBM does all its financial engineering is damn near insanity. It probably would be insane for others to follow suit but works for Big Blue because of all the weird legacy components.

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Polymarchos@reddit

Lenovo bought IBM's consumer product lines. Those were always a small part of what IBM was.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

IBM is still one of the biggest computer companies in the world. They're very big in storage, field service, cloud services, software, contracting, consulting. Their mainframe business still makes them billions. The x86 stuff was some of their least profitable stuff. The fact that it's what most of us deal with doesn't mean IBM cares about it.

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markca@reddit

Fisher Price would be a step up from Broadcom. At least we know we would probably see “My First VM”.

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Mid-fartshart@reddit

that's entirely my point.

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Loveable_Sort@reddit

I don't see the problem. They both principally see themselves as hardware companies.

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Mid-fartshart@reddit

/s

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WhittledWhale@reddit

Come. Join me on the Nutanix side. Been using it for over 5 years and I love it more every day.

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bob_it@reddit

I like Nutanix too, but I don't think you're going to save much money compared to VMware. Not much point migrate all your infra to save 10%.

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WhittledWhale@reddit

It was far more than 10% for us. Administration time and general overhead was much lower too, so there's manpower savings to be had as well, especially when it comes to OS / firmware / software updates compared to VMware. And besides, we all know the prices for VMware are about to get jacked up anyway, so the savings are only going to increase from here.

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wavvo@reddit

Agreed. No longer in the game but I miss the days of working with Nutanix.

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Morgoth_89@reddit

I remember when they bought Symantec. It went only downhill from there on...

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enz1ey@reddit

It still takes me 20+ minutes and several attempts to log into my SCEP portal. After resorting to resetting my password every week out of frustration, I just decided to start piloting Sophos.

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LookAtThatMonkey@reddit

> I just decided to start piloting Sophos. Do you just not like yourself or something?

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jake04-20@reddit

I see this all the time here, what do people hate so bad about Sophos? We use it as endpoint AV and it's been relatively set and forget. It plays nicely with all of our industry niche software. Even in our latest pen test the tester said it was intrusive as hell and even with our assumed breach model that relaunched their remote beacon every 30 mins, it still took him dozens of attempts to pivot to pivot cause if he looked at the remote shell wrong it would terminate his session.

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EditorAccomplished88@reddit

Sophos has been rock solid for us too, I rarely have to touch it. I've heard stories of the scanning being incredibly resource heavy on older hardware but that hasn't affected us at all. We're almost entirely bought into their product stack outside of ZTNA.

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jake04-20@reddit

Yeah I'm confused by the hate for Sophos. Meanwhile many have downvoted my comment and moved on without providing any explanation.

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isanass@reddit

I have frustrations with the company and my rep, but as far as the anti-virus goes and the MTR/MDR/XDR/whatever they're referring to it now solution, it's been stable and solid. The worst hiccup we hit was a flag on a component of our ERP system, but that was from a definition update for a malicious product calling the same Microsoft framework product, so it wasn't a crash and burn for Sophos, just part of the job. And that was once in 4ish years of using it. Compared to some other A/V products, I've been pleased aside from the price overall.

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joey0live@reddit

Sophos is great.. and then macOS got an update and it broke! The Wi-Fi portal for public places is horrendous. Since Sophos is blocking it. And it seems Sophos and Apple won't come to an agreement with each other... Even Sophos KB says, "Upgrade to macOS Sonoma for a fix".. and it's still broken.

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ericneo3@reddit

> I see this all the time here, what do people hate so bad about Sophos? Sophos is great when things are good, but when things are not good the documentation is god awful. You mainly had to rely on forum posts to understand how it works.

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enz1ey@reddit

Haha, I'm certainly open for suggestions

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LookAtThatMonkey@reddit

Whatever you get as a recommendation, you'll get 100 responses saying its crap. So I might as well start the ball rolling and my recommendation is Sentinel One with Vigilance Pro. We've used it for 18 months now, and its rock solid for us, being lean resourced, Vigilance Pro is a great add-on too.

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cpujockey@reddit

they are making up for moral regressions of a past life. they might be catholic.

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ApertaPrincipium@reddit

My company uses Symantec, this now explains many things.

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FanClubof5@reddit

They now own CarbonBlack since VMware acquired them a few years ago. I wonder if they will kill one of them or just rebrand.

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omfgbrb@reddit

Downhill from Symantec? Surely you mean the Upside Down? /r/unexpectedstrangerthings

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AmiDeplorabilis@reddit

Correction: it went _further_ downhill, faster. Used to work there, it was a hamster wheel.

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RoastedPandaCutlets@reddit

Haven’t used VMware in my Datacenter for 5 years. Been using Hyper V and plan to stick to it.

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dRaidon@reddit

If we all poke veeam to add proxmox support, we can all switch.

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Murkk3d@reddit

Really going to miss the VMUG's :(

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achbob84@reddit

Oh for fuck’s sake.

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johnknierim@reddit

Why 90% of Mergers and Acquisitions Fail - And How to Beat the Odds  [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-90-mergers-acquisitions-fail-155000525.html#:\~:text=According%20to%20multiple%20studies%2C%2050,lack%20of%20planning%20and%20expertise](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-90-mergers-acquisitions-fail-155000525.html#:~:text=According%20to%20multiple%20studies%2C%2050,lack%20of%20planning%20and%20expertise).

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DonCBurr@reddit

its because Dell does not want to get caught with their pants down as sales of on-prem systems dwindle as enterprises move to cloud....

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DonCBurr@reddit

This is super OLD news, where have you been

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NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit

Wellp. Time to start paying redhat. Rip VMWare.

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whatever462672@reddit

Yikes, I am so sorry.

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Compkriss@reddit

I don’t have a big VMware footprint anymore but I’ll be looking to alternatives now for sure.

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Dolapevich@reddit

A bit more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31517184

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BloodyIron@reddit

It's comedic how only a few years ago, everyone was scared of Proxmox. Now I see so many people acting like it's only suddenly now "production ready". lol, been having it in production for over 10 years now! To VMWare I say: "Bye Felicia".

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StatisticianNo8331@reddit

Why does this article read like it was written by someone in marketing?

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Workadis@reddit

Oh Broadcom, where great products go to die from obscurity.

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ClumsyAdmin@reddit

Did anybody else go through the Symantec -> Broadcom acquisition? \*Grabs popcorn\* This should be fun.

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DarkAlman@reddit

"It's like finding out your uncle has terminal cancer"

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jafnet@reddit

why the hell did I happen to read your comment... :/

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microcandella@reddit

Crazy to think that amazing little program on a single 3.5" floppy could do so much then. And now where it is. Wish they weren't acquired though.

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jafnet@reddit

QNX ?

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wavvo@reddit

Broadcom: where products go to die

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captain118@reddit

I wish for these sorts of things that they would have to consult their customers. I don't know anyone in IT that wanted this to go through.

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captain118@reddit

I look forward to not being able to renew my licenses next year.

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r4x@reddit

I can’t wait to see what they do with Horizon and AVI. /s of course

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ScotTheDuck@reddit

> Embarking on a transformative journey, Broadcom has announced the triumphant acquisition of VMware, heralding a watershed moment in the sphere of infrastructure technology. Who the hell wrote it like they're writing for Pravda?

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r4x@reddit

Don’t forget the robotic voiceover like all those YouTube videos use.

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cyberentomology@reddit

Wow, that reads like an AI that trained its LLM on non-native speakers of English.

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DarkAlman@reddit

https://youtu.be/YAb_Ikuv5e8

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AmSoDoneWithThisShit@reddit

Broadcom is where good companies go to die.

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ORA2J@reddit

Didnt that happen a year ago already?

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bulldg4life@reddit

The initial offer by Broadcom was made last May. It's been 18mo of integration planning, regulatory approvals, review between the two companies. The deal finally closed last Wednesday after China's regulatory approval was granted (that was the last one to occur). This morning is "officially" day 1 of "VMware by Broadcom". There's supposed to be 8-10k layoff notices going out at some point today.

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ORA2J@reddit

Oof, sounds like a typical monday in Silicon Valley with the layoffs. Guess it's time to abbandon ship and go proxmox.

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malikto44@reddit

Looks like the [layoffs](https://www.businessinsider.com/broadcom-vmware-layoffs-employees-face-job-cuts-acquisition-2023-11?op=1) have already begun. Broadcom definitely got axing the people as soon as China approved things. Of course, this sucks big time. Things like VMWare Fusion and VMWare Workstation will be hamstrung, if not tossed, other items like VMUG Advantage likely will be scuttled, and future advances that will keep VMWare relevant may wind up killed. As for pricing, who knows... it may end up like Symantec and VMWare pretty much moved out of the market for all but a few customers.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Judging by what Broadcom focuses on, the core VMW services are probably going to be fine (vSphere stuff). I'd be a bit worried about cloud services or non-traditional VMware things that are still getting off the ground. Of course, BC is also known for ending R&D and squeezing money out of big customers.

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Cyhawk@reddit

> udging by what Broadcom focuses on, the core VMW services are probably going to be fine For now. Broadcom follows Oracles/Microsofts method of acquisitions without the last 2 steps. The core will remain, but they will only focus on the top 10% of clients and start squeezing the hell out of them from license fees to support fees, everyone else can get fucked. They'll also kill off most development, so what you see right now is what we get, basically forever. They also may start killing off common features in the poor/free tiers to try to encourage businesses to increase their spending (example off the top of my head would be, charging $5k/server license fee for HA or something stupid. Low enough big businesses wouldn't bat an eye to keep it, but high enough medium sized business would leave or just do without) Though the company has already been gutted by EMC's tenure, not sure how much more they can cut. Theres always Proxmox (getting better every update) and Xen.

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FatStoic@reddit

> There's supposed to be 8-10k layoff notices going out at some point today. Damn, VMWare was supposed to pay very good salaries too. Hopefully those engineers had equity before it got acquired.

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bulldg4life@reddit

Yeah, if everyone kept their rsu til close, then you’ll get a pretty decent premium. I kept stuff that vested this year. The severance package (for us) is good too. We get warn notice non working period plus 2 months plus a week for each year you’re at the company. So, effectively a minimum of 4 months

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outerlimtz@reddit (OP)

Not sure. It popped up in my feeds this morning with todays date on it. According to quick google search, all reports are they closed today on the sale. Maybe it was just announced some time back.

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ORA2J@reddit

Yeah, deal was completed today, but it was already all filled out a year ago. So no big news here really.

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Anonymous3891@reddit

It was/is a big deal internally and will be for us users soon. Not every VMWare employee was guaranteed an offer from Broadcom and those finally went out. Some people didn't get them, so you may have some different VMWare account people soon. Anyway it's the start of the fat trimming. They can do anything they want to VMWare now. First order of business looks to be soliciting buyers for Carbon Black and Horizon, and consolidating much of the rest of the core suite under VCF.

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Marathon2021@reddit

This is typically the pattern any time one publicly-traded company seeks to acquire another. All the regulatory bodies involved typically get to have a say in the matter, typically working from a monopoly prevention perspective.

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FarceMultiplier@reddit

This was news a year ago.

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zvii@reddit

No, the sale was just completed. You may have heard talks over the last 18 months, but not an official sale.

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earthmisfit@reddit

What other tech did Broadcom send to the grave?

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double-you-dot@reddit

Symantec

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earthmisfit@reddit

Heard the name. Never used their security products.

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double-you-dot@reddit

Broadcom abandoned many existing Symantec customers, giving them no way to renew licenses for months. Resellers had no ability to help. It was a real shitshow.

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earthmisfit@reddit

No way to renew license is def unfair. But, would that leave the product inoperable?

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double-you-dot@reddit

Correct. Abandoned and inoperable with no communication whatsoever.

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NameEnvironmental358@reddit

The subscription model is already confusing as hell for existing customers. IMO, if you just need to run virtual machines and do backups, there are cheaper alternatives. Proxmox and xcp-ng is worth a look.

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obongogeddon@reddit

Oh No!

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ecstadtic@reddit

Pretty sure the free ESXi licenses will be going away soon... Not the best but was pretty good for small businesses !

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kiamori@reddit

If what happen to LSI/3ware is any indication expect prices to triple and quality to go down dramatically while support goes to 0.

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Electric_Ultramarine@reddit

Oh crap

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YetAnotherIT_guy@reddit

$69 billion was a good number to close it xD

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RudePragmatist@reddit

VMware is a strong brand identifier. I very much doubt they change the name too much.

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Canadian_Guy_NS@reddit

No, they won't change the brand much, but they will monetize it to the hilt.

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wayfaast@reddit

Didn’t this happen months ago?

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andrewdoesit@reddit

Acquisition finalized on Nov 22nd. The purchase was announced months ago though. These things take a lot of time like the Fire Eye and McAfee deal.

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wayfaast@reddit

Ah gotcha. Thank you.

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techw1z@reddit

haven't used vmware for years, so I'm fine with that. proxmox ftw and virtualbox for small projects on desktop

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krankie@reddit

I think I had a modem from them in the 90s.

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Fivebomb@reddit

Did anyone actually read the article? Literally just buzzwords probably written by some AI. I feel significantly dumber after having tried to read through it

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benduker7@reddit

I was thinking the same thing. I never noticed that before reading cybersecurity news, wonder if they had an intern write the article.

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m15f1t@reddit

Holy shit yeah. It's really bad..

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outerlimtz@reddit (OP)

I did and it does read like AI wrote the article.

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RedditNotFreeSpeech@reddit

Time to start taking proxmox more seriously.

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oopspruu@reddit

RIP Vmware. For such an iconic brand, I'm amazed and still shocked that broadcom will decide the fate of VMware products from now onwards. Let's hope they improve it further instead of ruining it for everyone, especially people who have spent years being VMware expert.

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Paradox68@reddit

Patiently waiting for the SEC to stop a single monopoly from forming.

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genscathe@reddit

So much government work will stop now due to being Chinese owned. Those working with vmware just learn azure or aws.

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cyberentomology@reddit

OpsRamp (HPE now) and public cloud and whatever your on prem non-VMware hypervisor of choice is.

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cyberentomology@reddit

Maybe VMWare will finally get virtual switching that isn’t hot garbage.

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james2432@reddit

vmware support on linux suddenly becomes *worse*

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cyberentomology@reddit

This isn’t news, this has been in the works for a long time.

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traitorgiraffe@reddit

Well shit

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SimonKepp@reddit

This article reads just like pages and pages of empty marketing bullshit using vague but positive terms describing the two companies. Can anyone enlighten me as to what specific synergies, are to be expected by a merger of these two companies?

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Computermaster@reddit

Guess I'm making my next home server UnRAID.

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jaredearle@reddit

So, Proxmox VE is good …

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Teenager_Simon@reddit

Consolidation bby

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mgerics@reddit

does this bode ill for those of us with VMWARE stuff all over the place ??!??

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surloc_dalnor@reddit

You could always use Open Stack. (Yeah I scrubbed any mention of Open Stack off my resume a while back, and pretended ignorance in interviews...)

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bbqwatermelon@reddit

Suddenly Hyper-V isn't looking so bad?

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kissmyash933@reddit

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

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demonfurbie@reddit

When my renewal comes up I’ll be switching to xcp-ng or xen server

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vondur@reddit

Broadcom are horrible. They will definitely try to squeeze as much money as possible from their customers.

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Obvious_Mode_5382@reddit

Booo/hiss

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bloodguard@reddit

We're a little bit over 50% of the way transitioning to proxmox. Not looking forward to moving over a few crusty windows server VMs. Kind of hoping I can moth ball them instead as they're just running legacy stuff anyways.

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AlexMelillo@reddit

How are you managing your backups in proxmox?

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bloodguard@reddit

[Proxmox Backup Server](https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server/overview). To a storage array and then to LTO8 tape sets rotated off site.

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madscoot@reddit

The thing that worries is me that list of core products that will be focussed on. VCF being the top one. VCF rolls lots of tech into one stack and I often see people not wanting VCF, just the other parts like Aria Automation. So no one knows yet if they will kill some of those products or not. Then there is mention of Tanzu. I haven’t seen a single project completed yet and put into production for Tanzu. So yeah, not sure how they arrived at that decision.

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StoopidZoidberg@reddit

My previous shop used to have a large symantec deployment. Broadcom bought it and it became abandonware in a year. They had to literally throw away about $5M usd in crap. VMWare is dead, I expect to disappear within a few years

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radialmonster@reddit

when broadcom bought symantec they dismantled it and only left whats remaining to the very top enterprise customers

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nikon8user@reddit

Those big enterprises customers will leave soon.

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C2D2@reddit

Where good tech goes to die.

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FreeBeerUpgrade@reddit

Abandon ship!

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GullibleDetective@reddit

Old news, https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/broadcom-acquire-vmware-approximately-61-billion-cash-and-stock But this is NOW finally going into production so we'll see what the results are the writing on the wall for this deal has been widely speculated upon already.

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Cyhawk@reddit

That was the initial announcement, this news is the official 'has been approved by various government agencies' announcement. Nothing has happened until today. Giant sales like this aren't finished until its approved.

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GullibleDetective@reddit

That's what I said :) That it's now going into production and passed

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90Carat@reddit

As a VMware user since the GSX days, and a former VMware employee, this bums me out. Not that VMware was a well run company, they missed out on some real advantages by being stubborn, stupid licensing, and product renames every 6 months hobbled the company. Though, the community has been fantastic and the base product forever changed IT.

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praetorfenix@reddit

F7U12

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FormerlyGruntled@reddit

Well, that'll be awkward. Broadcom drivers rarely work correctly out of the box.

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logicisnotananswer@reddit

Old news. The deal may have finally completed but it has been in the works for awhile.

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OsmiumBalloon@reddit

Yeah, but there were regulartory roadblocks that were raising the question of whether the deal would even go through. Formally completing the aquisition is news, even if it's not a blockbuster.

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Marathon2021@reddit

Or, if there were certain concessions that needed to be made by the merging parties in order to achieve regulatory approval. For example, the Sun Microsystems / Oracle acquisition many years ago was held up by EU regulators for quite some time, until Oracle made some commitments about what they would/would not do with MySQL (which Sun acquired in 2008).

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