Remember:
There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses
NUTANIX AHV BITCHES! Download The Nutanix Bible and start learning it.
The not owning anything is ridiculous. We need clear regulation that makes it so companies cant do bullcrap like this. If I buy something, I own it, period.
100% agreed.
Here’s a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
At this point, why would anyone do business with broadcom at all?
Because they make all the cheap ethernet chips that go on motherboards.
Other than that, can’t think of a good reason.
This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn’t exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.
There is a KVM equivalent on MacOS, Apple’s Hypervisor virtualization framework.
KVM is just the kernel side, you need QEMU (for example) on userland. On MacOS you have now UTM.
Proxmox is the way to go in businesses right now to replace Vmware
And virt-manager is pretty solid for hobbyist tinkering too.
I realize there’s all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I’ve got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I’m using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn’t use it if there’s a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
- for large installations, it never scaled as well as VMware. We saved millions on licenses when we switched, but had to buy a lot more hardware. In particular we were doing software QA where we needed many VMs but they didn’t need much resources, and hyper-v just couldn’t scale in that direction. More standard use cases probably won’t have this problem, plus this was 4 years ago so I don’t know if anything has changed
- for special case installations, hyper-v was a horrible experience on my laptop. I had the resources, but couldn’t pass through usb devices, and it kept messing up my networking.
I’d say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn’t overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren’t really a Linux person, then I’d wager hyper v is the right direction.
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.
Yeah, if you’re used to Microsoft servers and have a Microsoft network it integrates really nicely and is great to manage. Plus, it’s free.
Its not free. You need to license the base windows server. They killed the free hyper-v server offering.
That’s basically free compared to vmware
It’s also basically free compared to a mountain of gold. But xen and proxmox and virt-manager and a bunch of others can be really free.
Another vote for Hyper-V.
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don’t be afraid of it, it’s worth the look. Especially for a single node like you’re talking, no reason not to in my opinion.
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
What would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
So, it seems that companies’ infrastructure was already entrenched with VMware, and now Broadcom is trying to leverage the fact that VMware is already being used to squeeze more money out of its acquisition?
You can do live migration like that with qemu, I do it all the time with Proxmox, which uses qemu under the hood.
You’re not wrong in 2025. But VMware was able do it in 2003.
True. Your response just seemed to imply that the two aren’t comparable in 2025, and they absolutely are.
No problem. I just thought I had covered that when I said:
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
This being said I don’t think even in 2025 proxmox and things like vsphere are comparable. XCP-ng I do think is though. It’s open source and matches features.
I stupidly bought a VMWare Workstation license when I first got on the Windows 11 train. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and all that rubbish. My experience was such shit that I abandoned it all for Linux and Virtualbox.
Fuck Microsoft, fuck VMWare.
I was a happy camper with Hyper-V on server operating systems, was always a PITA on desktop versions though. Wonder if that’s changed. (Doubt.)
qemu ftw.
This is another good reminder to not use VMware nor VirtualBox for any reason.
I primarily use mac and when I need to quickly spin up a linux machine, parallels needs you to buy a new version every year or they wont support much, and fusion supports everything but its…vmware
It’s free and works for me, why should I stop using Virtualbox?
and what to use instead? run qemu commands and all the preparation by hand?
there’s proxmox, but that’s not a desktop solution.
Virt-manager works ok
Virt-manager is a GUI for libvirt, which can use several hypervisors, including KVM/QEMU, and it works great.
There’s several other clients for libvirt, including GNOME Boxes, Cockpit (web based), and virsh (CLI).
Because it’s owned by Oracle and they’re the kings of malicious licensing. Using their software, even as an individual, with no intention of ever using it for work, gives them more power. Of course, if you ever even think about using it for work, then be prepared for the company you work for to be paying a huge bill or be sued.
It’s for personal use only. Should I be switching to native Linux virtualization with KVM or something?
I would recommend it. I also started with VirtualBox and made my way over to GNOME Boxes. Anything else will have a learning curve, but in the end, I found the alternatives work better once you wrap your head around them and you don’t ever need to worry about Oracle pulling the rug from under you.
Given how VMWare apparently is pulling this is wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll give it a shot. Worst case I learn something new!
I’m out of the loop. Why not virtualbox?
Because Oracle sucks donkey balls.
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Dunno, Larry well understands what he does unlike most tech CEOs and owners today. Oracle was allied to Sun at some point. Larry has that demonic appearance, but he’s less of a threat than literally anybody else of them. Especially since Larry already has enormous power which he abuses less than expected.
You’re talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted? The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
Yes, that guy. If you compare it to the guy getting children addicted to gambling and manipulating elections, or to the guy destroying workers rights and manipulating the press, or to the guy firing half of the federal workers while doing the Nazi salute, changing the name of a project or a frivolous lawsuit here and there is the least of our concerns.
You’re talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted?
Oh. That part I didn’t know.
The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
Yeah, that was just the habit probably.
I’m not sure why you would buy an open-source company/product, particularly a GPLv3 one, if you didn’t understand or agree with the premise. It’s probably the stupidest decision he made. I’m not saying I agree with his other decisions, but most of them made some kind of business sense. With this one, he would have saved a lot of time and effort and received the same value if he’d just spun OO.o off ASAP. The linked timeline kind of says it all.
I don’t get your confusion.
Sun buys StarOffice, Sun opensources it into OpenOffice and supports its development, Sun goes under and gets bought by Oracle with all its stuff.
Then yeah, Oracle killed most of what Sun was doing altruistically (or as part of their desktop\workstation strategy that didn’t transpire, who knows). Including OOO.
Bruh they’re a copywrite law firm (read as patent shark) with a database and a tech company attached. Pretty much all they do is fuck other people over
with a database and a tech company attached
There are three real DBMS options for enterprise - Oracle, PGSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle is the most powerful and least problematic of them.
Citation needed on literally all points. Fuck Oracle, fuck Sun, and fuck Larry Ellison
Fuck Oracle,
Suppose so
fuck Sun,
Either you are so ignorant you don’t know what Sun was, or you are out of your fucking mind.
and fuck Larry Ellison
That’s up to everyone, I personally don’t find him that attractive
I do know what Sun was, and now they’re owned by Oracle. Fuck Sun
And “fuck” literally means “don’t fuck”
there’s no sun anymore. It’s oracle
Isn’t VMWare out of support anyway?
Not that I fault the users of it - a perpetual license is a perpetual licence and good luck with the C&D, but there are other options. Though I only know of OpenShift on RHEL.
Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
At first, I thought the products you were listening were “good softwares going to die”. I was like “wut. Proxmox is fucking epic.”
Proxmox is amazing.
I really want to use Nutanix but they are the same price as VMware VCF and they don’t support my existing hardware so I’d have to buy all new servers, just to pay the same price.
Proxmox ftw
We told them to go fuck themselves. We retain lawyer specifically in case we have legal concerns, and the way we use their products, price jack up would be so extreme that it’s entirely worth risking it while we migrate away.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
A move this dumb will totally work out in thier favor. /S
They’re trying to kill it. Anything they can squeeze out of existing customers in the meantime is just gravy.
Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
The RIAA special
It’s also the business model of Oracle I think and they are wildly successful.
Who are Oracle’s customers?
The CIA
Anyone who uses Oracle DB or virtualbox in a corporate environment
I’m forced to work with Oracle databases, FML I hate it so much
Why? I get that the company is awful, but the database is quite good, isn’t it?
Not only is it worse than Postgres by almost every metric, they actively sue people who criticize it. I.e. even Hacker News took this post down: https://archive.is/ryseO
MBAs
Right? That’s what encouraged me to sail the high seas.
I think it had something to do with Broadcom wanting to go for a few big customers and don’t want to deal with the small fry anymore.
It’s a valid business strategy to kick your low-paying customers to the curb and focus on the big spenders. Did the same with my little PC business back in the day. The small fry cost shitloads to support and are generally more bitchy.
But HOLY shit did Broadcom kick 'em down. I’ve never seen such an in-your-face business move to squeeze the cash cow as hard as possible, tank the company, grab the money and run.
People can say, and have been from day-1, “I’ll never use their shit again!” That’s fine with Broadcom, it’s literally their plan.
Surely no competitors will grow in the small and medium business market to eventually be a competitor…
Broadcom knows they bought a dying platform. Their strategy is to isolate the customers incapable of ever migrating and charge them as close to near bankruptcy as possible. They’ll get their initial return on investment in under 5 years and then eventually just let VMware die because new businesses that are still nimble all moved to other platforms anyway. They’ll hit Lotto tickets with a few whales and keep 5-10 devs on to patch stuff for those whales and print 100-1000x return on costs in perpetuity.
That is … bleak.
I suspect you are correct.
RemindMe in 5 years
#I know that doesn’t work hereI think I’ve seen people using this on Lemmy, but I’m not sure if it works: https://fedi.tips/is-there-a-reminder-bot-for-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/
(And that god that bot doesn’t work here)
Capitalism is the woooooorst…
