We were very *very *close to replacing our ~700 office Cisco SD-Wan environment with VeloCloud, which is owned by VMware. The Broadcom merger put the brakes on the project completely, they missed out on a few million dollars on that effort alone. The Velo guys were totally in the dark on what was coming down the pipe for them, Broadcom forced them to change hardware vendors on day one, for example.
This may be a silly question, but what are VMs generally used for in a corporate setting? Is it the same use case as docker?
In large scale computing, a server will have VERY powerful hardware. You can run multiple VMs on that one machine, giving a slice of that power to each VM so that it basically ends up with multiple individual computers running on one very powerful set of hardware instead of building a ton of individual.
The other key feature being cost. A VDI terminal is much cheaper than actual PCs for employees. When I was working IT for a large company, we were able to get them in bulk for about $100 each. A PC cost us at least $800.
VMs provide a meaningful security boundary between applications. Containers (docker, etc) do not.
VMs are for actual isolation. Containers are for overcoming limitations of previous century package managers. They are not the same. =)
Running a virtual server allows you to run a server application on its own virtual machine, this eliminates the chance that (when running multiple applications from a server) the underlaying requirement for each apllication conflict.
In comparison to docker the full server can offer more native capabilities for some applications, while other applications simply only run on a full OS.
So by virtualizing the servers one large piece of Hardware can be used to run multiple servers and you can (sometimes dynamically) allocate resources as needed.
The backups can consume all computing power put of office hours while the other applications share during Office hours as needed… sometimes a bit more for VM A and sometimes a bit more for VM B.
Off course monitoring overallocation is a thing as you might end up with bottlenecks caused by peak loads that occur at the same time… the issue would be bigger when running on dedicated hardware.
And off course having multiple hardware platforms interconnected allows for a VM to be moved from hardware platform to hardware platform without interruption (license required) meaning you can perform hardware maintenance without an outage.
Pretty much. Isolated environments to run a single service usually, although someone with more familiarity can comment further
Similar to docker, but the technical differences matter a lot. VMs have a lot of capabilities containers don’t have, while missing some of the value on being lightweight.
However, a more direct (if longer) answer would be: all cloud providers ultimately offer you VMs. You can run docker on those VMs, but you have to start with a VM. Selfhosted stuff (my homelab, for example) will also generally end up as a mix of VMs and docker containers. So no matter what project you’re working on at scale, you’ve probably got some VMs around.
Whether you then use containers inside them is a more nuanced and subtle question.
Good.
My VPS provider also migrated away from VMWare - got an email saying VMs would be down temporarily during the move, and the main website no longer contains any references to the virtualization tech. I miss my /64 IPV6 😭 but i’ll happily give that up if it means Broadcom’s dumpster fire comes crashing down as big customers pull the plug and migrate
Would guess that they probably migrated to proxmox
I know several large companies looking to Microsoft, Xen, and Proxmox. Though the smart ones are more interested in the open source solutions to avoid future rug-pulls.
Xen looks great for VPS stuff, and seemed to have good support for vGPUs. That’s what I’d choose as a provider. I wish I used it at home but I ended up going with good ol’ Linux KVM for USB and PCI support.
So is Xen.
I thought Xen and OpenVZ etc. became obsolete with KVM? But it’s probably for the best that Xen is still used.
Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, KVM is a type 2 hypervisor
It runs on the bare metal itself as dom0
Doh I meant LXC 🤦 instead of KVM.
Yes…? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren’t looking that way.
Nutanix is another one.
Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.”
Interesting way to word “we charged as much as we could possibly get away with”
Nearly the strongest possible language I can imagine being used.
That analyst doesn’t work for Broadcom; it’s a third party. It could say, “they charged as much as they could possibly get away with” but I think “prices just below the pain threshold” is stronger language in a business setting.
To be fair, this is what every single company is doing right now. Stallman tried to warn you!
Why do people still use VMware? It’s not 2012 anymore.
Because up until Broadcom bought them, it was a good product with a ton of useful features, endless supported integrations with 3rd party software and hardware, relatively easy to learn/use, with good support, all at reasonable and flexible price points depending on your needs.
Of course Broadcom has now thrown all of that into the toilet…
Because if you throw enough money at them, they’ll trip over themselves trying to fix your production critical issue in 4 hours or less, and that’s valuable to business because they get to go “it’s not our fault the site was down and we lost $2 million, it’s our vendor’s support team that was inadequate”
Yeah, at a certain scale you’re not paying for the technology… you’re paying for a scapegoat.
Phase 1: Fuck around
Phase 2: Find out
Phase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will
Phase 4: Fucking do it again
“We just love our customers so much, it makes us crazy sometimes…”
“I don’t want to lose you but the shareholders make me do it.”
Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions
Fuck Broadcom. I liked VMware and their products and actually paid for them as a consumer. Broadcom is a had fisted money grabber and care little about anything else. This will not end well for any businesses they serve to. Why? Because they’re focused on milking the cow dry, not spending money on anything. Despite their R&D claims. They have a history and have shown who they are before, and said who they’re planning to continue to be. Flee while you can.
We are also in the process of looking of ways out of VMware. Have also cancelled projects investing further into the stack. (NSX)
It sucks in a way, I’d rather work on other things than system migrations but has to be done.
We have about 10.000 VMs for reference
What solution are you looking towards? I work in a massive organization with 20,000+ VMs and we’ve been having weekly virtual working groups across the country (our overseas depts have been doing their own) to try and discuss finding other solutions. We haven’t been very successful, as the biggest pitfall we’ve seen is no one offers lifetime licenses so if we don’t renew a yearly maintenance our VMs won’t stop functioning properly. That’s one of the main reasons we’re looking to off board from VMware.
I have been using Proxmox with a couple thousand VM’s and have been very happy with it.
If you haven’t tried Nutanix, you really really should. I’m a six year veteran and there is absolutely no way I would ever bare metal again with VMWare in spaces I didn’t have to, and that’s Prior to the Broadcom buyout.
Download The Nutanix Bible and start reading.
[edit] And I’ll add that their support team is mother fucking second to NONE. Every ITS team should take lessons from them.
How expensive (or cheaper) Nutanix compare to VMware
That’s a very broad question. I can say by switching I saved the firm $60,000 the 1st year out of the gate. This included purchasing the Nutanix hardware as well, to run what was at the time, a six node cluster, replacing a 6 node VMW setup (on premise).
After the 1st year we replaced the VMW setups at the remote office and the COLO. It was a no brainer. That was also close to $60k each site as well, though we had other cost considerations.
You will spend more money for competent Administration over a VMW farm in the short run unless you/your team are *nix capable. If you are a *n ix/CLI house, you’re going to absolutely wet your pants with joy, possible #2 as well.
I like the idea of spending money on team member rather than VMW service. :D
Better ROI for sure.
I’m honestly glad he got slapped with such a huge bill. Maybe it will prompt other corporations to start putting real money into the open source projects all their billion dollar businesses are built off of.
VMware is owned by broadcom now so…
Fucking good. They should go down in flames for what Broadcom is doing to VMware. Our company switched off it too. Not as large but we have a couple thousand servers and they are all now slowly moving to hyper v
“Hey guys, we bought VMware and ate all it’s seed corn. Please remember to like and subscribe, and ring the bell!”
i love seed corn
I’m convinced VMware started downhill when they dropped the hard windows client for the web based admin panel.
They claimed it was for multi os compatibility… But they wrote the thing using ActiveX. For the youngsters, ActiveX shit was Internet Explorer and M.S. only. So the idiots wrote a UI that still only worked in Windows, and was now 5 times slower than the thick client.
BTW, I run proxmox clusters in my garage. Its awesome
