After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related "unease"

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/broadcom-ceo-admits-vmware-changes-have-brought-unease-to-customers-partners/

by RyeCombinator • 2 years ago

11 16 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

lnxg33k16• 2 years ago

You know there are few technologies that I like, take C#, it's an awesome language, but satan forbid investing efforts to make myself subjects to a change of CEO, an acquisition, anything, one thing I take from all of this Broadcome situation: always use only open source

nobodywasishere• 2 years ago

C# is open source

lnxg33k16• 2 years ago

Its very dependent on a corporation, maybe I could rephrase it as only choose software not tightly coupled with a single corp

nimbius• 2 years ago

if you're still using vmware for virtualization i feel like you get what you deserve at this point. KVM has been around for over a decade, powers most clouds, and has easy to use and powerful implementations.

VMWare by comparison is hot garbage. Want to migrate a VM? thats a fee. Want to clone a VM? thats a fee. need a way to configure more than one hypervisors networks at a time? thats a fee. want iSCSI? you've gotta dedicate a full network port to the traffic and cant converge it with the existing trunk. need ARM? tough shit. want support? good luck, if youre calling VMWare you are truly desperate, and some of those 2800 people cut from the rank and file probably had byzantine ESX style answers for you.

cvalka• 2 years ago

VMware is more than a hypervisor.

j_spencer• 2 years ago

At $WORK, we use VMware - and the "hypervisor" part of it is honestly not even close the selling point for anyone doing serious enterprise workloads - and VMware knows this.

Smaller firms with a few VMs here and here could probably lift and shift into another platform super easily.

For the bigger firms with large on-prem investments is where the vendor lock-in is the most difficult. Take two parts of VMWare:

- NSX-T ([1]): The SDN and networking overlay component of VMware. It provides overlay networking and micro-segmentation (like your AWS VPCs, etc.), as well as service insertion for firewalls, etc. Pretty much nothing competes in this market for on-prem that's actually integrated with the hypervisor.

- vRA ([2]): Does all your infrastructure automation, monitoring, and optimization. Again, it's actually integrated with the hypervisor.

Not at all part of the hypervisor, but components that are part of virtualization infrastructure you just can't go without.

Now, I'm sure you could argue that there's other systems you could fit in here, or tooling that exists that solves these problems - won't argue with that. But the big part is integration - there's basically nothing that you can buy off the shelf that does all of this under one roof that doesn't become some cobbled mess of poorly-integrated tools.

Is VMware perfect? By no means. But at the end of the day, most companies want 1) something that works, and 2) someone to call if it breaks. Broadcom knows this - hence why they placed a bet that companies too deep into it couldn't shift off quickly enough - and I fear they've betted correctly.

The closest would maybe be OpenStack? Who knows where things will end up in the next few years!

[1] https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/index.html [2] https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Automation/index.html

After 114 days of change, Broadcom CEO acknowledges VMware-related "unease"

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