
VMware's Stumbling Cloud Adventure - liquidchicken
http://chrisdodds.net/blog/vmwares-cloud-adventure
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walterclifford
Can a mod (or OP) change this submission's title? "VMware's Stumbling Cloud
Adventure" is an editorializing of "VMware's Cloud Adventure", especially
since the word bumbling never occurs in the post.

@OP HN guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading
or linkbait"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I agree with your suggestion (despite the fact that the additional word might
be very accurate in this particular case).

~~~
outworlder
Also, the article's cloud illustration is not of a sunny day.

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zurn
Despite being critical this sounds like the author is still wearing quite
VMware-colored glasses:

> Unfortunately, the world that they built is now eating them. Hypervisors
> became commodity, where "good enough" is an acceptable target. Hyper-V, Xen,
> KVM: they all became good enough for ecosystems to be built around them

In reality VMware (and VirtualBox) were leapfrogged by platform native
hypervisors quality-wise, at least on Linux. Which is inevitable since there
isn't really any way to ship robust proprietary binary-only kernel drivers of
this complexity there.

(ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a
whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to
instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a
cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical hypervisor-
vs-hypervisor benchmark)

~~~
josteink
> (ESXi might be another story, but it's also not just a hypervisor, it's a
> whole stack of enterprisey proprietary infrastructure that you commit to
> instead of open systems, and hopping on that train is more a
> cultural/strategy/mindset choice than something based on technical
> hypervisor-vs-hypervisor benchmark)

I may be wrong here, but I thought ESXi was the lightweight hypervisor-only
product (which at the time was offered for free!), without all the enterprisey
features or requirements.

Basically Microsoft Windows Hyper-V without the need to boot an OS of its own.

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op00to
Well, yes. It's a hypervisor only product. It also requires you to use
VMware's tools to manage, and that closed architect poses road blocks to
integrating it into a larger hybrid cloud environment. To basically do
anything resembling what a real business would want, youd need to throw big
bags of money at VMware to get more features. You can build all that in the
open with KVM.

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jacques_chester
> _They 've already started that with containers. Docker orchestration
> platforms like Kubernetes and Mesos are still rough around the edges and
> there is room in the space for VMware to get in and leverage the benefit of
> their size and engineering bench._

VMWare started doing this circa 2010-11.

Eventually that project turned into the first version of Cloud Foundry.

Edit: forgot my usual disclaimer that I work for Pivotal etc etc

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jeletonskelly
Let's be honest though, CloudFoundry isn't a cloud. It's deployed onto a cloud
provider like AWS and runs your apps on virtual machines inside an EC2
instance. It's useful if you want to abstract away your cloud provider, but
it's not a cloud provider in and of itself.

Disclaimer: Currently working with a customer deploying to Cloud Foundry.

~~~
jacques_chester
It just depends on what you mean by "a cloud".

I usually refer to Cloud Foundry as a PaaS. It sits on top of an IaaS like
AWS, OpenStack, Azure or vSphere, managed by BOSH.

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latchkey
The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and
tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.

~~~
jeletonskelly
To be clear, Cloud Foundry is not a cloud provider. It's an abstraction layer
between your applications and an actual cloud provider.

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josteink
This article here might be relevant to the discussion: "Technology Lab /
Information Technology VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company
restructure"

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/01/vmware...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/01/vmware-fusion-workstation-team-culled-in-company-
restructure/)

So they've lost the cloud... They're firing the desktop guys. Where do they
plan to go?

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ghshephard
I wasn't even aware that VMware had a cloud service, and I follow this stuff
reasonably closely. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, Linode, Joyent -
these are all the companies that I think of when I think of "Cloud Services"
\- I would have bet money that VMware wasn't providing this as a service.

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elcct
I've been using VMWare Workstation for years and it is awesome product
reasonably priced, but other VMWare products are too expensive. I think they
have missed opportunity there big time. There is nothing in their offering for
startups for example.

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tlogan
VMware is 3Com of today.

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pfarnsworth
It wasn't myopia. VMWare suffered from the same thing that other companies
have gone through. They tried/are trying not to cannibalize their main source
of revenue, and the world has moved on without them. CloudFoundry was their
way of attempting to control the conversation, but it failed.

They couldn't go from a lucrative private cloud revenue stream and then
somehow convert it to a public cloud and expect to make the same amount of
money. During that time that was mentioned, from 2006 until probably
2010/2011, AWS was great for small companies, but there were still issues with
security, availability, reliability, etc, so VMware could get away with
selling the private cloud.

I mentioned this is another post that got a lot of vehement comments, but
virtualization itself is dying. Not dead, but dying. Many large companies with
their own datacenters are running off of bare metal, and this will be the
trend going forward. Yes, virtualization is still in many private datacenters,
but bare metal is how newer companies are going, and in 10 years, I bet
virtualization will be gone from all but the slowest of private datacenters.
It's a level of overheard now that has been completely circumvented as
unnecessary for the most part, and it will fall into disfavor as more and more
people learn techniques on how to avoid it altogether.

This doesn't mean that VMware will be gone in 10 years. Even WinZip to this
day has something like $50-75M/year in annual revenue. But it will be
relegated as a legacy app.

~~~
tw04
I literally don't know of any large companies moving away from virtualization
to bare metal. Where is that information coming from?

I know of some that are deploying some things back to "bare metal" if that's
what you want to call containers, but even in those instances, it's a very,
VERY small subset of the larger environment.

~~~
mugsie
I do know a few companies are using tools like OpenStack Ironic to do "Metal
as a Service" \- basically using a full machine like a VM.

That said it is usually deployed beside a cloud like thing, and only used for
select workloads.

