You know, I always used to think that e.g. Amazon talking about “customer obsession” was stupid. Of course a business is focused on its customers? That’s where the money comes from?
Then I got to see the conversation about subscriptions at VMware. The storyline was always “wouldn’t it be great for us if we switched to subscriptions? Look how good all the math gets!” The customer barely appeared as a background character.
Especially entertaining when it came to things like PWS. After the acquisition VMware shut it down — because it didn’t have any real customers — and then in the push to subscriptions the new folks in charge of TAS were like “Great idea everyone! What if we provided Cloud Foundry… as a Service!” The engineers who had been around long enough to see the whole cycle tried to explain but I don’t think it got through.
At most companies it is an uphill battle to advocate on behalf of the customer. It's really important that those values start at the top, and get support at all levels of management.
The best story I heard on this was from Zappos and Tony Hsieh. Zappos was famously customer focused (which probably played a big roll in Amazon acquiring them). The story goes that after a night of drinking they had someone call Zappos to find pizza for them, and Zappos customers services helped them out (not knowing the CEO was there listening).
If they were customer focused they'd focus on cutting their profits to give lower prices to consumers.
Did you hear about the CEO that told institutional investors that the company missed projections, but that they shouldn't worry about it because he'd help them order a pizza?
Me neither, but it shows how absurd this sort of story is if the shoe were on the other foot.
Low prices are not the only thing customers care about. They are a factor, but not the only factor. A company that has the lowest prices, but does so at the expense of customer service, and various other factors, will likely be hated by consumers. They might get some business, but customers will curse them while handing over their money, and the second something better comes along, the customers will leave.
Costco shareholders were very vocal with the founder of Costco, wanting him to do things that were against the mission of the company, all in the name of making a quick extra buck in the short term. He told them to get bent, and Costco has a lot of die hard fans who will defend Costco until their dying breath. You can't buy that kind of loyalty with some extra profit after treating customers like shit.
And obviously, if a company is going to spend extra for excellent customer service, the business needs to be able to support that. Operating at a loss, thinking they'll make it up on customer service, is not a business plan. That isn't what we're talking about here.
Quite often, higher-profit higher-margin businesses are more robust. If you have a 1% margin, and costs increase by 2%, you're bleeding money.
If you have a 50% profit margin, you're not sensitive to small (or even medium) fluctuations.
That's not a universal. I can give a half-dozen counterexamples (including Walmart) which, for example, operate with extreme efficiency, or achieve massive scale. But it's a good rule-of-thumb.
Running a business, there are sometimes more important things than profit. Robust businesses are more pleasant to run and to work in than ones with razer-thin margins (even if bigger and more profitable). As an entrepreneur, if I were to pick:
1) Guaranteed income of $200k for the rest of my life (inflation-adjusted) with fun work and reasonable work-life balance
2) A $20M payout with 50% odds
I think I'd pick #1.
Ergo, we see a lot of lifestyle businesses, businesses which don't try to grow, or otherwise. Yes, one can make a lot of arguments about fiduciary duty, shareholders, etc. Some of those are even correct for a large, public corporation. But most don't apply to a founder-owned founder-run business.
I read The Messy Middle some time ago, which mostly documents the process of Behance's CEO joining Adobe post-acquisition and then switching their entire suite of products over to their new subscription-based model, Creative Cloud, and sunsetting their perpetual license model.
This is described in the book as a fantastic achievement for Adobe but one that was quite difficult to get off the ground. On reflection I do not share that assessment and while it may have been personally successful for the CEO/author of the book, it was done entirely at the expense of the customer and their experience. I would in fact consider renting software that takes up storage on your own hardware to be anti-consumer.
> it was done entirely at the expense of the customer and their experience.
this is what it means to be a monopoly.
Adobe may not be one by the legal definition, but it certainly is a monopolistic suit of products, as their "customer" does not have a way to switch, regardless of other competing software.
I personally think that the current legal idea of a monopoly is too narrow. I say the definition should be focused on the customer's cost of switching - and if it's higher than some reasonable threshold, the provider of said service/product must be considered a monopoly.
I used to work at a company that talked a lot about "customer obsession", too. However, in reality, the way the company operated reminded me of that scene from The Wolf Of Wall Street: "Fuck the clients. ... Move the money from the client's pocket into your pocket." And it all started at the top.
Just because the two both use subscriptions doesn’t mean their business models are in any way similar.
JetBrains, for instance, also does subscriptions. They are generally lauded as doing them right. I would never compare JB to Amazon or VMWare just because they both do subscriptions.
To be fair, JetBrains did attempt to get rid of perpetual licenses too at one point, the plan they backed away from - after massive blowback - was to brick customers' IDEs as soon subscriptions lapsed.
And the reason the backlash worked is because there are at least viable alternatives to intellij (at worst you go back to eclipse, or switch to vscode or any number of other lesser known IDEs).
Therefore jetbrain cannot afford to alienate their customer base. Unlike vmware or adobe.
My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?
Don't forget about the open-source XCP-ng[1] to which you can add Xen Orchestra (which is like vCenter; a key reason people use ESXi) which has a flat-rate (no socket, host or VM limits) $2600/year Enterprise license. And XCP-ng even supports migrating from VMware[3].
While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast answer for this new change in the virtualization realm.
Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the change except the price, and unless other platforms include all the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sure how fast adoption will be if at all for stacks like Proxmox.
I am not defending the business model or the tech offerings of Vmware, Microsoft, etc -- far from it. They're extremely bloated, buggy, and unless you happen to be one of VMware or Microsoft's most expensive customers, the support might as well just be a sin tax. Even for the "biggest" clients, they were not able to get Vmware or Microsoft to budge on some pretty obvious and complete blocker bugs that would drop production environments entirely.
Enterprise is weird -- I would be extremely happy if not a bit exhausted supporting a large OSS virtualization infrastructure for clients, but I just do not see it happening without a lot of "carrots" for such companies from the virtualization vendor. Enterprise business is basically about shifting responsibility and liability for your tech-stack to someone else -- yes, it requires strong tech skills to use these tech-stacks, but the more maintenance/liability that can be shifted to the vendor, the more preferable it is for most companies.
I don't know what the businesses will choose -- I'm hopeful medium and smaller businesses will shift to more open solutions and from this business, the open solutions will be able to grow and become more attractive choices for enterprise, I'm just not sure that such solutions will avoid the tech industry's obsession with subscription licensing and feature bloat to check boxes.
We would have to see a 2x minimum YoY cost increase just to justify a poliot program to consider moving to something else
Keep in mind it is more than just shifting all of the VM workloads to a new platform something not easy in the first place
But you also have to factor admin training, backup and recovery systems, monitoriting systems, automation tooling, etc.
We have been using vmware since version 3 or 4, our entire team is almost exclusively training on vmware, with limited knowledge on hyperv and virtually none on anything else
Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it.
It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this.
Honestly VMWare has not been increasing its prices as aggressievly as other vendors anyway, of my software licensing fees I pay annually vmware is one of the cheaper vendors I have, not even breaking into the top 10, I pay more for Veeam, Windows Server, and many many many other things than i do vmware
> Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it.
Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens and an access control system to allow for safe automation.
There are also Terraform providers and Ansible modules for those that do not want to use the API directly, or use those automation tools already.
There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there, but most of those are unrelated to the outer hypervisor, so one can still use their preferred backup solution for those parts just fine.
Central monitoring is possible through the external metric server integration.
Further third-party integration is a natural chicken-and-egg issue.
For a lot of third party integrations you might just need to ask the vendor of said third party if they can support Proxmox VE, as long as they receive no inquiries as admins won't even ask if it would be possible, they have no incentive to add support for anything.
But it's getting better, and more eggs are hatching.
> It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this.
The migrations I saw in our enterprise support had way lower cost. IMO 3x the cost would need some heavily specialized workload (which IME fewer admins actually really have than they might think) and/or admins that are just heavily against any change (as yes, they must relearn how to do some things, there are training courses for a few thousand bucks that cover the whole stack though) or having an anti-FOSS/Linux'ish mindset. I.e., come to us with so many prejudices that it's hard to make them realize that, while there are surely things that can improve, that just the same on the other side of the "pasture", but overall the grass is quite green enough for most use cases already.
>>>>Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens
I am sure it does, that would then require enterprise to build their own tooling. I clearly talked about integration with 3rd parties that were built into the product, I do not know many IT Teams that have either the human resources to devote or in many cases the Knowledge to inhouse dev their one tools on that level. They purchase 3rd party tools in lieu of bespoke tooling.
This is a common point of contention when I interact with people in developer or devops communities like this one, they have forgotten how traditional IT shops work. We are still out here, and we are most likely the primarly customers impacted by this change. The DevOps shops are in the cloud...
>>>>There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there
PBS is not a replacement for veeam even for Guest-Level Backups, It is about 5 years behind if not more in Backup Tech.
Veeam Provides (that ProxMox does not)
* 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, Sharepoint, etc
I think this is different than what you call "Application Level", as an Application Aware Backup will use technology to flush cache, finish tranactions, prune logs, etc to put the application in "saved" or "backup ready" state, PBS creates "Crash Consistent" backups only, basically as if you just pulled the power from the VM, some applications this will corrupt data, Application Aware backups work to prevent that corruption
* SQL Transaction Logs backup in per minute intervals with cross location functionality
* Continuous Replication
* Isolated / Automated Restore testing with reports
* Awesome Compression and Duplication rates in the backup files
* Builtin Support for S3 Storage with out having to do OS Level hacks (PBS depends on something like rclone to do this)
* Builtin Support for Block Replication with having to do OS Level Hacks
* Help Desk portal for File Level Restores that allow for RBAC Security
* Integrated Agent based backups for physical systems that provides a Single Plane of Glass for Backups
* Change Block Tracking (CBT) support
* Immutable backups repository
Comparing PBS to Veeam, is like Comparing pfsense to Palo Alto Pan-OS firewall, sure they both block traffic, but 1 in 100x more advanced
> They purchase 3rd party tools in lieu of bespoke tooling.
Besides the fact that I explicitly also talked about third-party tooling, which definitively is available, even if not yet as broadly (cue chicken and egg), lots of such extra third-party tooling makes one's infrastructure dependent by many more projects than required, each adding complexity and reducing reliability. But as said, this is a complaint for the third-party tooling provider.
> they have forgotten how traditional IT shops work. We are still out here, and we are most likely the primarly customers impacted by this change. The DevOps shops are in the cloud...
Yeah, we certainly did not forget that and cater that group extensively already.
But currently the ones that use PVE or PBS are the ones favoring independence, i.e., FOSS and projects that only have to answer to their user, but no profit optimization machine, either by being bitten way to often by such changes already or understood early enough that having core infra on a proprietary platform including any 3rd party tooling is rather reckless for the long term (cue at this thread).
> Veeam Provides (that ProxMox does not)
s/ProxMox/Proxmox VE/
There's no upper case m, and Proxmox is the company, the actual products are Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE), Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), Proxmox Mail Gateway (PMG), etc.
But, let's actually comment your points:
> * 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)
AWS wasn't in our scope, but we can add any target that has an actual open specification, i.e., not requiring a deal with the devil that would force us to do a low quality hidden proprietary implementation.
> * Application Aware processing for common applications like SQL, Sharepoint, etc I think this is different than what you call "Application Level", as an Application Aware Backup will use technology to flush cache, finish tranactions, prune logs, etc to put the application in "saved" or "backup ready" state, PBS creates "Crash Consistent" backups only, basically as if you just pulled the power from the VM, some applications this will corrupt data, Application Aware backups work to prevent that corruption
We sure have that since decades, we use the QEMU Guest Agent to bring the guest, and applications like DBs into a safe state by issuing a freeze/thaw command when creating the dirty-bitmap.
> * Continuous Replication
Can be done by Proxmox VE's Ceph and ZFS.
> * Isolated / Automated Restore testing with reports
Wasn't done with PBS <-> PVE di
> * Awesome Compression and Duplication rates in the backup files
Yes, PBS has a content addressable storage with great deduplication and compression.
> * Builtin Support for S3 Storage with out having to do OS Level hacks (PBS depends on something like rclone to do this)
This is indeed lacking, but we're working on it, I'd think we have something read until mid of 2024.
> * Builtin Support for Block Replication with having to do OS Level Hacks
Not sure what you mean here exactly..
> * Help Desk portal for File Level Restores that allow for RBAC Security
We have a role based access control system for all our products, this can be already done...
> * Integrated Agent based backups for physical systems that provides a Single Plane of Glass for Backups
You can use the CLI client already, but yeah it should get some UX improvements for making that nicer OOTB.
> * Change Block Tracking (CBT) support
This is supported since years by Proxmox Backup Server.
Sorry, but at this point I have to ask, did you even test Proxmox Backup Server or is your list just guessed, or partially AI generated?
> * Immutable backups repository
The PBS allows that too, we have explicit permission rights that can only add backups, never remove, plus on sync to off-site one can also disable any pruning, those features and our tape support makes it easy to have ransomware protected backups.
> Comparing PBS to Veeam, is like Comparing pfsense to Palo Alto Pan-OS firewall, sure they both block traffic, but 1 in 100x more advanced
As most your points above are already supported I'd take 1.5x at best, but thanks for your feedback, some of it was quite valuable.
The problem here is what you think "supported" means
for example
>We have a role based access control system for all our products, this can be already done.
So you have a web portal where a Help Desk Tech can take a user request for a file to be restored back to a vm, open a web portal search for the indivual file then either download that file and email it to the user, or restore it back to the VM, or restore it to a completely different VM depending on the use case???
Veeam Does
>>Can be done by Proxmox VE's Ceph and ZFS.
Sure you can do it that why, but veeam has support for this in their product, in the UI that is already part of my work flow, this is what I consider a "OS Level or Storage level hack" it is not really part of Proxmox, but part of the underlying linux OS or Storage solution.
>>Builtin Support for Block Replication
Veeam use ReFS or XFS to only store one version of a block no matter how many backups are taken, this is done in the veeam software and works with their VBK file format. ZFS has some dedup which is what proxmox relies on but it works differently than Veeam, and seems to be less effective. These Block Cloning also works with the Data Format uploaded to S3 to massively save on storage costs
>> I have to ask, did you even test Proxmox Backup Server or is your list just guessed, or partially AI generated?
About 3 years ago...
Have you ever used Veeam? I have been using Veeam since version 9.5, and hold a VMCE certification
> So you have a web portal where a Help Desk Tech can take a user request for a file to be restored back to a vm, open a web portal search for the indivual file then either download that file and email it to the user, or restore it back to the VM, or restore it to a completely different VM depending on the use case???
There's a web portal that can be used for that, both inside PVE and PBS.
Download to inside a VM is possible.
It surely isn't as integrated/polished, but that it's just not possible is far from true either.
We're polishing release for release, most of those things are not complicated, but need a bit of time.
> Sure you can do it that why, but veeam has support for this in their product, in the UI that is already part of my work flow, this is what I consider a "OS Level or Storage level hack" it is not really part of Proxmox, but part of the underlying linux OS or Storage solution.
Yeah, replication is built-in to Proxmox VE's UI/workflow/API whatever too...
> Veeam use ReFS or XFS to only store one version of a block no matter how many backups are taken, this is done in the veeam software and works with their VBK file format. ZFS has some dedup which is what proxmox relies on but it works differently than Veeam, and seems to be less effective. These Block Cloning also works with the Data Format uploaded to S3 to massively save on storage costs.
Yeah no, that's complete BS, we nowhere rely on ZFS dedup at any point, that would be completely useless for PBS...
We have our own content addressable storage, as, again, already mentioned, and thus refer to every block only once, no matter how many backups taken.
> Have you ever used Veeam? I have been using Veeam since version 9.5, and hold a VMCE certification.
Yeah, but I hold no certification and left basically all proprietary EEE/blackmail software for good since years, thus luckily do not even need to start think about such "migrate or get squeezed big time" situations for any infra of mine.
But sure, use Veeam, that's totally fine, and it is very well integrated quality software, but for a lot of setups PBS is way more than enough to cover their use cases.
And this thread actually started of with Proxmox VE, so just tell Veeam you want to use their software for PVE, I'm to close to this so cannot say anything, but they surely got wind of those changes coming to VMWare and surely hedge against the doom Broadcom will bring, what do you think they'd do? ;-)
Anyhow, I wish you all the best in your future migrations and hope you find a solution that fits your needs and workflows without being held hostage by your core infra provider.
With all the 'investment' in ISO27001:* validation of the existing infrastructure choices and the like, I'd be astonished if any move in a large company was able to happen within five years.
From what I've seen none of them have taken this issue seriously, either, and won't until they get squeezed hard enough, at which point they'll have to... spend five years trying to move!
OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking.
The challenge is that companies architect their services and applications around what they have, and they may be very operationally dependent on specific features of vCenter and how they've configured those features.
There is also Rancher Harvester (https://harvesterhci.io/) which I think is a breadth of fresh air compared to VMware and OpenStack and then there is the Windows Server based Azure Stack HCI, too. In my experience, VMware‘s biggest moat is the vast support from software vendors. It basically is the default supported platform for almost every business application. This comes with well known best practices, many experienced admins, out of the box solutions from hardware vendors and highly standardized managed services. Most apps leave VMware for the cloud or Kubernetes but not another on-prem VM platform.
Or go vendor independent with pacemaker + drbd + libvirt. For that stack you can get support from SUSE, Redhat and Linbit and maybe even Ubuntu. Or just go with Debian if you don't need support.
Harvester has been great for me, except when I wanted to start using a real SAN with it. It's KubeVirt under the hood if I recall correctly, which is also a great project to check out.
Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great! Otherwise, prepare to invest in other ways. I'm not going to say VMware has a super intuitive system, but I've gotten surprisingly far at times without a lot of deep knowledge. Well, until the *nix-like kernel in the hypervisor misbehaves....
> Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great!
If you know (say) Ubuntu and Ansible, then there's pretty good automation with openstack-ansible and kolla-ansible. There are a number of moving parts, but an intermediate-level Linux sysadmin can get things going without too much difficulty. There are vendor-provided solutions (e.g., from RH) as well if you don't want to do a fully DIY, or want commercial support.
At a previous job we had a team of 4-5, and 1.5 FTEs split their time between our HPC cluster and our OpenStack cluster (20+ hypervisors, ~10 Ceph servers; >350 VMs/instances).
unless something has changed recently, openstack is a horror to setup and administer.
the point of vmware is that is fairly trivial to go from a single server with some VMs, to a massive cluster with live zero-downtime migrations. (and have funky storage, get working snapshots and backups.)
Sure openstack can do that. but its non trivial to setup.
We used Openstack for a while, but overall it was a nightmare. I'm sure it's better than it used to be, but it is not simple to spin up or maintain, and it's not designed to baby VMs -- if one acts up they expect you to delete and recreate it, which works OK for microservices but not for huge Windows terminal servers.
I see companies hire a team of experts who plan and architect for six months to a year before they are ready to deploy a new VMWare cluster. I've seen a two or three rack cluster cost a million dollars before the architecture team requisitioned a single piece of hardware or software.
I've seen a very small outfit spend six months with all hired consultants to set up a 3-server VMWare cluster.
proxmox is presently not an alternative to the VMWare stack.
Not even close.
Converting from the VMWare stack⭢ proxmox would be a giant shitshow.
I have been a paying user of WMware personally since the beginning and
I have worked on their enterprise stack for several years.
With the changes being made I cant see myself wanting to spend any personal
money on it I and I would not recommend someone to start fresh with it,
but for a lot of enterprises, they will, short term, have little choice
than to pay the fees.
I have no idea about the state of Microsoft HyperV.
The little I have worked with it, and that was quite a few years ago now
it seemed severely lacking in the tools department.
Oracle owns VirtualBox, and even if they started to build it out (or have they?)
going to Oracle to avoid high fees is not going to be a good idea.
> proxmox is presently not an alternative to the VMWare stack. Not even close.
Obviously that depends on how you are using the vmware stack. I’ve seen it being used in multiple previous employers in ways that most certainly could have been replaced by something simpler. I realize that’s because they’re not using the stack to its full potential, but that’s exactly my point. For a lot of people vmware is just “what you run vms on” because they were early in the game.
Microsoft is ending mainstream support of Hyper-V Server 2019 on January 9, 2024 and extended support will end on January 9, 2029. Hyper-V Server 2019 will be the last version of this product and Microsoft is encouraging customers to transition to Azure Stack HCI.
I'm very happy with Hyper-V for small environments. I've got a few clusters under my watch and it's okay. It's certainly not as rock-solid as ESXi, but it would do the job in a lot of the small vSphere environments. Having live migration and replication "in the box" w/o additional licensing expense is nice.
I really like the PowerShell applets for Hyper-V. I find them more well thought-out than PowerCLI. I do nearly all of my Hyper-V admin work at the command line.
If there is a shit show, it is ESXi. I know plenty who've migrated pain free to Proxmox. Back-up works great too. All for free.
VMware has a ton of stuff that others are nowhere near, although those offerings are useful for a minority who, as you say, will have to bite the bullet.
I was at the Apache Cloudstack conference just a few weeks ago and it seems most of the integrators are pivoting to moving VMware customers to KVM + CloudStack, and have even upstreamed an auto conversion tool.
Has OpenStack as an organization solved the problem where there’s not really such a thing as OpenStack? In terms of e.g. what APIs will be available and so on?
That’s basically what stopped it back in ‘14 or so. It was too hard to provide software that could run on an OpenStack because it was such a choose-your-own-adventure.
Soon we will have reached the point where software piracy is the only way not to build your company on digital quicksand. I sincerely hope we never get there because it would ruin the commercial software market, which did produce amazing tools in the past. But by now, it certainly looks like major participants are boosting their last remaining quarters (before the company implodes) by scorching the earth they walk on. First Unity, now VMWare. I really have no idea why a CEO might think it to be a good long-term strategy to throw the majority of your past customers under a bus.
It’s could be a great day for Open Source software.
Maybe we need to adapt Open Source so that cloud providers who use it have to pay for continued development instead of just using it for free or putting a control panel on top of something and calling it their own product, but that’s the solution we came up with the first time proprietary software vendors started trying to lock the universe down into perpetual upgrade nonsense.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit Open Source licenses with a fresh, sharp pencil and an eye towards making all these systems compete with cooperative, collective-interest development again. We definitely need to find models that don’t cut the investment valuation so hard, as that’s been a huge problem for the Open Source companies.
Down markets and cost saving periods are when Open Source has seen massive adoption, as companies look to save money…
Maybe I’m wrong but it’s been on my mind a lot lately.
As someone who uses software but rarely writes anything more than automation scripts, I personally look for self-hosting and community minded software companies to have my company throw money at (cause I am high enough to influence purchasing decisions for my group).
Favorite software that a share with everyone who mentions workflow diagrams is draw.io, https://www.drawio.com/about , let's you have a local copy - format is open source - and it just works how my engineering mind wants it to work
If all some companies are doing is throwing a flashy control panel onto FOSS and reselling it, perhaps FOSS should refocus a bit more on the user experience and provide the control panel themselves?
This is already the case in at least some large, boring businesses. Think like bank IT departments. There’s a whole generation of CTOs out there whose mentors got fucked over when Oracle pulled almost the exact move that Broadcom is pulling with VMware. Some of those people have billion dollar budgets and serious religion about OSS.
I kinda don’t think it’d be possible to build a business like VMware’s today tbh. Certainly not after Broadcom is done with them.
I think the thing to watch here is Tanzu. In theory most of the software under that brand has an off ramp onto some other vendor. It’d be painful (ripping OpsManager out of a TAS installation is no joke) but basically straightforward technically for the right person at the right price.
Ah, I see that Broadcom is working on speedrunning the "lose all your customers" game. Not what I would do if I dropped eye watering sums of money to purchase those customers, but you do you, Broadcom.
This has always been Broadcom's MO. They buy a company, determine which of that company's 150/250/500 customers overlap with their core 500 customers, bundle the acquired product(s) with everything they already sell those customers, and then jack up the price on the entire portfolio. Anybody not on the refined core customer list either gets explicitly cut, or is spun off into a second-tier digital sales program where they are ignored until they leave on their own.
I was periodically buying a software product they acquired, very small volumes. The sales process and support did improve a bit. It was a low bar, though.
Because they know no one is going to be swapping HV out that fast.
Most likely people will wait for a hardware refresh to make a change, if they change at all to that will be 2 to 7 years the increased rates
and we have no idea what the increase rates will actually be, if it less than 2x most company will just eat it, that would still be cheaper than switching for many
2-4x, you will see an aggressive change in the next 12-36 mos by many customers
over 4x any you might see the aggressive pull out people are are expecting by this announcement.
> VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments.
Yea, a one-time cost wasn't predictable enough, instead a subscription number that will be changed each year on a whim is predictable.
Doublespeak at its finest - unless one is to interpret "predictable investments" as investments by Broadcom, which will indeed become easier once all customers are turned into digital serfs-- sorry, subscribers.
This might be a serious issue for my current client since their entire stack is build on VMware and I was helping to build a massive project that would lift their current setup to a full self service private cloud setup. They were already worried by he acquisition but this...
With the current budget cuts puts the entire project at risk.
I would feel bad for them but today I was informed by my PO that the budget cuts also affect my contract so it will not be extended. The only bitter taste is that the project was meant to improve the infrastructure for citizen services. Kind of have a bad feeling for how this will turn out
1. switch to subscription model <- we are here
2. jack prices to maximize profit among the proportion of customer that can pay higher prices.
3. smaller startups migrate to other cheaper tools
4. cheaper tools slowly become mainstream
5. vmware is irrelevant and dead. ~ 7-10 years, maybe less.
The problem with this strategy here, is that unlike Photoshop (sorry gimp) there _is_ alternatives.
We're entering a post-growth economy in the near future, so the only way for companies to have reliable revenue streams is to create subscription services. Get ready because y'all are about to be rundled to death.
Good luck doing it in a corporate environment. One visit from BSA and you will get wrecked. IT departments will take the major blow from this because we are the ones sitting down with CEOs and trying to explain the costs. Now a major cost increase about a subject they can't even comprehend.
This “everything is a subscription” thing just cannot be sustainable. I mean, sure, some companies with a huge moat can probably sustain this well enough, but eventually consumers and businesses will simply run out of money, and then can’t buy anything anymore. Not to mention that it means that no one can make investments anymore, and can only piss away money every month. I have no clue how to stop this from happening though either from a regulatory perspective or a free market perspective.
Standard business model. Buy a company, lay off everyone, do no new development, move to a subscription model, keep shifting the decimal point every year or two, and by the time you're down to two customers, who cares because you're raking in a million dollars a minute.
A big hearty fuck you to all the regulators that allowed this to go through. You are derelict and negligent in your obligations to protect the public.
This is unfortunate. The writing was on the wall already with vSphere+, but I can't really commit to a subscription for VM infrastructure. Broadcom would be able to hold the whole company hostage with price increases.
I’m not sure yet where we'll end up, but the small cluster of 8 machines of ours will not run vSphere in 2025.
The whole point behind VMware products was that they offered full control to orgs that want it. That's what made some large orgs choose them over aws or google cloud even when the later are more cost effective. It's fascinating to see VMware (Broadcom?) fumble their only real uvp like this.
On the plus side, there is now a nice big clearing for new competitors to pop up. I hope open source uses this chance to catch up and offer something good to compete with nsx-t Datacenter or, at the very least, the SDN component of it. We have decent open source solutions for vms but no real open source solutions for software-defined networking or software-defined data centers. At least not any that I know of.
Either way, I think this is very good news overall. VMware was far too strong.
It's probably not the first thing on the chopping block as there's plenty of revenue to be squeezed from vSphere; over the next 2-5 years I don't see a world where the free ESXi will be left unmonetized/uncrippled.
Yes it's totally free. They have a subscription for enterprise (which isn't all that expensive really). But I have run it in production (for a bit to demonstrate use) and in my homelab for free.
Acropolis is free but severely limits your choices when it comes to hardware and expansion down the line. I always felt like you were putting yourself over a barrel to consolidate both hypervisor and physical infrastructure to a single vendor.
I would not choose it for a greenfield project unless I knew that they had a particular module for more enterprise-grade stuff like doing hardcore/proprietary interconnects.
I know(? it's been a while) that Nutanix focuses on HCI, so maybe less of an issue, but for me, even at home, all my storage backing is iSCSI over 10G. Nutanix CE purposefully doesn't support 10gbps NICs.
Just took a look at their website, and they don't even allow people to download their "Community Edition" without first providing an email address (with some basic validation of it), first and last name, phone number, job title, and company name.
Fuck that. They can go and fuck themselves sideways instead. :(
I intensely disliked xcp-ng when I tried it a few years back. It's more of a move fast and break things indie type of project. Proxmox feels more stable and trustworthy.
I don't know how managers aren't paying for RedHat products excitedly. It's the only business which competes with itself and where an acquisition by a private equity firm will, by the application of the typical strategies, destroy it's own customer base in days.
Not like open-source won, more like proprietary eats itself.
They are, but Red Hat is driving people to kubevirt which I’m not sure is ready for all vsphere customers. But it totally makes sense for anyone wanting to make the container journey eventually.
Totally forgot that Pivotal was acquired by vmware - that makes the whole thing even worse. AFAIK Spring is huge in the java ecosystem, but it's also mainly open-source, right? So maybe the community will take care of it.
I'm not sure I have clarity on this, but if your service and support agreement expires, do perpetual licenses get locked out of esxi patching? It's unclear based on what they're saying. Update VIBs were always available even to foundation and essentials, but companies like HPE paywall locked bios updates and certain support installer a few years ago and even legally went after people for distributing them. We usually use use the commands from https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ to run updates. We use vmware 6.7 and 7 extensively for small business along with Veeam to make recovery and snapshotting better.
Question: What is the best alternative for VMWare Vsphere?
I am so sick of this subscription game. They will lose me as a customer and anyone who will ask my suggestion in the future for virtualization. Their license upgrade model was already frustrating and now there is not even a year break from the license hell. At least I could get the license and upgrade the hosts for a few years before upgrading to the next version (ie: Vsphere 6 to 7 to 8).
It will be a pain to migrate and restructure but I won't accept subscriptions as the core of my business solution. Broadcom go to hell.
I'm used to corporate marketing speak, but damn this is impresively corporate orwellian. This is real copy/paste from TFA, not some parody that I wrote.
> Q: Why is this good for partners?
> A: The industry has already widely embraced subscription and SaaS, and many partners in our ecosystem have already developed success practices in this area. Subscription and SaaS models provide an opportunity for partners to engage more strategically with customers and deliver higher-value services that drive customer success. It also helps accelerate their own transition to a business model focused on annual recurring revenue.
I think we could call this e13n in the sense that a current product offering, with some degree of stickiness, is being made worse for the benefit of the seller.
I wonder at what point does SaaS become a national security risk in the event of a solar event, (biggest-ever) cyber attack, terrorist attack, or some other calamity that takes down the internet for an extended period? Having virtualization software like vmware as-a-service would cause 2nd-order effects if it couldn't phone-home to renew activation.
Then I got to see the conversation about subscriptions at VMware. The storyline was always “wouldn’t it be great for us if we switched to subscriptions? Look how good all the math gets!” The customer barely appeared as a background character.
Especially entertaining when it came to things like PWS. After the acquisition VMware shut it down — because it didn’t have any real customers — and then in the push to subscriptions the new folks in charge of TAS were like “Great idea everyone! What if we provided Cloud Foundry… as a Service!” The engineers who had been around long enough to see the whole cycle tried to explain but I don’t think it got through.