Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads(virtualizationhowto.com) |
Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads(virtualizationhowto.com) |
I now use UTM to host Windows 11 Pro on my mac for exactly one Windows application.
With the exception of suspend, it does the job.
VMwware sure as hell did not invent the hypervisor, and we were damn careful not to ever claim that. The early unique IP was how to enable a hypervisor to use dynamic translation where required to work around non-virtualizable x86 instructions, we also did well with how to package a hypervisor to run on a host/share host devices etc. Over time that early differentiation went away as we helped encourage CPU vendors to include better hardware virtualization support. And the other big thing we had was just a market focus/desire to deliver value/delight nerdy users like ourselves.
Who is the granddaddy of hypervisors? It sure ain't KVM, and it sure ain't VMware. That would be IBM. They had decades of doing hypervisors on the mainframe when we were getting started as a tiny startup. They sure know a lot about hypervisors and had a x86 hypervisor research project in Watson labs. We were humbled when IBM fellow Rich Oehler came to us wanting to partner because he saw how far ahead we were. That was years before KVM even got started. The IBM collaboration, lead to years of great work with IBM, who helped VMwware get going with ESX Server. Although the focus of VMware since founding was always to end up focusing on the data center/server market we could not have done that so well and so fast without IBM and sales and GTM cooperation.
Now good on KVM and others for pushing open hypervisor technology, and any company in this space who actually cares about their users and customers. I hope KVM helps pound VMware/Broadcom into the dirt.
Edit: typos
I was a VMware workstation user in the late 90s.
I worked on the VMware monitor team back in 2007-2008, which probably put my employee number way in the 1000s. Ole Agesen, Carl Waldspurger, and other early folks were still there.
Back then "kvm" meant a remote keyboard/video/mouse device. Linux kvm was announced in 2006, and released in 2007, and required hardware virtualization, which was first released with AMD Pacifica in 2006. Back then VMware's binary translation was locked up in patents, so in the free software world we had Xen, colinux, and other hacks.
So for all you can say, VMware released a product to market that provided a server-based hypervisor before any of their competitors. They're not the first hypervisor, but they're the first server-based hypervisor for X86.
One of the nice things about vSphere in a lab environment was the ease of moving VMs between Workstation/Fusion and ESXi, and prior to the Broadcom acquisition, pricing for the desktop and entry-level server products was reasonable, including free products, generous evaluations, and perpetual licensing with update-only subscriptions.
There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.
I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned a lot about how different people approach the challenges of running a company and listening to employees.
Pre-Broadcom, sort of toward the end of my time there, there was a lot of unintended self-sabotage that didn't need to happen. We lost people that we shouldn't and shot ourselves in the foot for some really dumb reasons, which just a bit more coordination could have prevented. There were some innovative ideas that got lost in all this, and I believe could have fueled VMware's product line and put it in the right positions for where the sector ultimately went. Alas.
Avago's business model is to acquire cash cow businesses and then milk them dry. These VMware changes are consistent with that model.
You will make an insane amount of money and make the world a much better place!
For a visual representation of this see the "Edgar suit" from the movie Men in Black. :)
If you had to award bonds and/or equity and severance to the people you laid off in order to lay them off, you might have to look beyond the quarterly bump you got for treating customers, vendors, and employees like crap.
I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...
Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.
IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.
All automatable, I'm sure.
Love proxmox now.
Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.
Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually something that can be dealt with separately.
Yes? Do that for the hundreds of VMs, with a minimal downtime, bonus points for a dumb C-level on your neck.
You would quickly learn what "just converting disk images" is not enough for moving between hypervisors.
Just as an example: last year I moved a company with two Proxmox servers to ESXi. It took a 3 months and another server as a staging point. A minuscule in modern times 1TB+ VM took a whole weekend to be moved. Of course it didn't work in that time.
Why?
A friend of mine said that VMWare was still the best VM platform due to the ecosystem that built around it, so it'd be nice if it could be preserved for later resurrection.
I know time moves on quickly, but it'd be a shame to lose it entirely.
I know this is promoting criminality, but there's something wrong with society if this is deemed criminal.
Disclaimer: don't (be a hero)
So far the Proxmox experience has been pretty flawless. We run a several hundred k8s VMs orchestrated by Rancher and use the dynamic load balancing feature that came with 9.2 so no noisy neighbours. Haven't dabbled too much with Ceph as the VMs are backed with NetApp arrays but I anticipate it to be pretty smooth when we reach that point.
Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that.
How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways.
Some people just need to learn through pain.
Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't think we should feel "very little pity" for people like that (sympathy is human): but I'd instead say, I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.
Don't do it
It’s on prem
Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?
Big business never think of the future. Good example is when two companies merged the brought down the cost of poly. Took a couple years for gravitation to the mean to bring up the base cost. They kept thinking it would stay low form them with being so big.
The Big Business that are staying with VMWare really should be tasking to know the cost of replacement with estimated time frame with a known successor. Yet, MB are blinded by staying with a known working tool. Perform the task on a few servers to reduce cost while investing in the education to do so. Big MBs really don't have a clear idea of investing wealth.
It's sad to watch these things slowly perish
From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825
if you already pay for an ent backup product check if it can restore from vmware backups to another platform and you’re prolly fine (for now)
Buy declining companies with good customer bases, cut spending and raise prices.
Might as well rewrite it in Rust at the same time, two birds with one stone.
There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
I haven't touched Microsoft Hyper-V.
I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.
Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things. But we enjoy the thing in totality.
I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are just stripped down. If you need it you should buy System Center."
But, hey, The Reg says that VMware is now claiming that vSphere Standard was never really cancelled.
https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware...
I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.
Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)
Many businesses might do better pushing everything to web apps, but SaaS introduces a whole bunch of other issues in highly regulated worlds like finance. It's not always the right answer.
Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.
If they build their new Datacenter Manager offering into what vCenter offered and abstract away all the ugliness (imagine creating a "distributed" switch on Proxmox with two clicks) I think they will make a killing.
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.
OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
IMHO, I think it was never going to be an easy shift. But after Pat left for Intel, leadership never seemed to recover.
The company began to grow fast in the years after I joined. VMware's early culture was amazing (a template for any company, imho), but it's hard to maintain that with fast growth. Not a unique situation, but I feel it had an impact on how we addressed certain challenges.
ESX was big, and we wanted to figure out the next big thing. There were a few initiatives, some gambles. Reorgs didn't always match and some initiatives got starved, others over-fed.
Let me take the opportunity to say that we did have a lot of freedom in engineering to build and experiment, which I always loved. This was a strength of the company. Personally, I got to figure out and build Unity in our Workstation product (it let you pop windws out of a VM into the host -- SUPER challenging), the whole remote VM infrastructure for Workstation (took 3 years with a major rewrite), WSX (early-days HTML5 client for accessing VMs using just a native browser and a network connection), amongst others.
But the world changed and we didn't really nail this. Case in point, The Cloud. (And later Docker.)
In early Cloud days, we were trying to figure out what that all this really should look like, how we fit in. We had things in the works that didn't get released or got restarted, we had some really useful bits that got spun out. What we should have built was more obvious in retrospect, but not so much at the time.
I think we had a lot of really good people in the management chain, and overall people were trying to do the right things there. But we did have a few high-impact bone-headed decisions (some short-term cost savings at the expense of longer-term strategy in parts of some departments) and some people who shouldn't have had the responsibilities they did (in my opinion). Some of these decisions may have made sense at those levels at the time due to factors they were dealing with that I don't know about, but these did damage.
Bear in mind, it was a big company in a quickly-evolving industry, and it's not always easy to get things right. I would NOT say "corporate greed" or "screwing over customers" or anything like that. Not while I was there. But missteps and hard questions to answer about the future.
All that said, I enjoyed working there. I left to work on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org) full time in 2013, and then my old team disbanded in 2016, but much of the team still gets dinner every month, 10 years later. Still sees movies, still hangs out in a Discord. I wouldn't trade working there for anything.
And that was with the help of a backup-recovery solution which did support Proxmox, mere 6 months before that I would had stuck with an agent P2V migration of a VM to VM - which would had involved way more moving parts (can't P2V/V2V to a hypervisor which is not even installed yet) and more pain.
Ultimately, the purpose of a system is what it does.
We've structured our society such that performing this type of activity is extremely lucrative, and financial engineering is by all appearances the endeavor that humans value above all others.
That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.
No?
Problem with incentives, I would say.
Waste of money
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)
(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
I gave a 5 min lightning talk about this a couple of years back: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
People talking here about Proxmox make me laugh.
We have a (what I thought was) large nutanix setup at $dayjob for epic emr... we have like 10-12 sysadmins for ~500 servers (end user apps, and backend infra like Citrix), and even that seems like a lot.
I don't think SCVMM is as bad as you portrait. I've used both SCVMM and vCenter. vCenter is so far ahead. And SCVMM was getting there until 2022. When they stopped trying.
If you think about it, all hyperscalers are hardly any different from old timesharing OSes, the only big difference is the way we get to log into the platform.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
First, someone has to pay to migrate apps, and as often as not the resources to do that aren't available. Sometimes you do the math and it doesn't make finacial sense to allocate those resources. And sometimes you just can't move apps. The vendor might not support vm/cloud/web deployment. Or, very common in manufacturing, you have an app that runs a machine and requires a very, very specific hw/sw environment to be supported.
Next, there's that whole regulated thing. We spend a lot of time in front of federal/national regulators explaining how we do things so that we don't screw up your mortgage or whatever. And those regulators take careful notes. So if I've spent the last 10 years explaining how we have this amazing VMWare deployment that ticks all the boxes, they're going to want some very, very detailed explanations of how HP VME or Proxmox or whatever is going to tick all the same boxes at least as good as VMWare did. And we're inviting a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years to make sure we did it right. It's a lot of work.
Sometimes you weigh everything, not just 'it costs less' or 'Broadcom are a bunch of assholes' or 'we don't want bros on HN to think we're suckers', and the answer is legitimately "the divorce isn't worth it".
And I was like... what virtual host?
What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack.
A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.
But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).
If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.
(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)
I disagree. protoculture's core statement seems to be:
A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
Having said that, I expect that a lot of people think Vmware Workstation is Vmware's pinnacle product because they've never heard of vSphere, ESXi, or anything else the company has made. "People have no knowledge of like 95% of what most companies do." is always a solid first guess when trying to work out confusion like protoculture's.
[0] Please spare me the "But how can it be a pinnacle product if it's not useful to you?" retort and ones like it. I've deliberately made a distinction between a product's usefulness to me personally and the sophistication of that product.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
24/7 support will be available starting in October:
* https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/company-details/press-relea...
The other thing perhaps worth noting that the entire stack is open source, even Proxmox's 'special sauce' for management. Depending on your organization, if you can solve a problem with Debian (and Qemu) you can solve a problem with Proxmox.
Better to just use same automation you use for VMs to just keep fleet of bare Debian + KVM machines.
Proxmox is for when you don't have a bunch of Linux experts on board. And that's also kinda what enterprises want to pay for, removing "liability" of having to keep very competent team.
...the fact that ends up costing them more everywhere is of no concern to middle management
Proxmox gives you centralized management of a fleet of clustered systems with a very handy GUI (as well as CLI and API) that's used by many thousands of installations, which is a lot better than try to cobble together something yourself IMHO. Just because you have "a bunch of Linux experts on board" doesn't mean they have to 'waste' their time on re-inventing the wheel for management of VMs.
At my last job we had plenty of Linux folks and primarily ran a whole bunch of OpenStack, but we still used Proxmox for standalone management of VMs for 'tier zero' services (e.g., DNS, SMTP, LDAP, NTP) of various sorts that OpenStack itself depended on.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/private-cloud/sf/private-clo...