Broadcom Ends Support For Free ESXi Vmware Hypervisor - Slashdot

Broadcom Ends Support For Free ESXi Vmware Hypervisor

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• I'd say Xen has largely gone away for 'new adoption' as well. The dom0 concept meant your 'host OS' was almost, but not quite your host OS, and while Hyper-V has a similar architecture, it's less broken about it. Every Linux-leaning shop I've seen goes qemu-kvm as the virtualization/emulation approach nowadays.

  But either way you slice it, I agree that VMWare's customer base are largely businesses that decided to do x86 virtualization about 20 years ago and have never taken a pause to evaluate alternatives as they became available and matured.

  • This is just more value extraction. There's no need to maintain the onramp when you've already got your customers.

    "Krause told investors that the company actively pursues 600 customers -- the top three tiers of the pyramid above -- because they are often in highly regulated industries, therefore risk-averse, and unlikely to change suppliers."

    https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

    • Exactly, and this isn't the first time that exact pyramid appeared in a Broadcom acquisition strategy either. They are explicitly happy to lose 100,000 accounts in the name of gouging the hell out of 600.

      • Re: Nail in the coffin for Vmware

        We have about 150 hosts on ESXi and have started migrating basic server solutions to KVM. We will put some development time in to handle many of the same automations we had done or used VMware tools to do so prior. We will be off VMware in 2024, but this process had been decided min-last year for us.

        • Re:

          Man, I'm not envious unless you need the work. Good luck. There's a good reason the thing they call it at my work is BroadSCAM.

      • Re:

        I understand that the plan is that those 600 customers will be willing to pay more since they are "locked in" for the forseeable future and that means they can cut developer time / support to just focus on the needs of those few customers.

        Meaning they don't have to bother about working on features needed by the other orgs / smaller businesses, or have enough support staff to support the 10000s of smaller customers.

        Presumably they will be able to cut alot of cost and milk those few customers and still profit

    • Re:

      Typical short-term (and mediocre CEO) thinking. A few years down the road, the next CEO will have to explain to the shareholders why the company hasn't been growing and how he's going to remedy that.

      • Re:

        The operational word is 'the next CEO', so the current CEO (who incidentally doesn't give a crap about the business beyond his next stock vesting) makes out like a bandit while burning the business to the ground.

        So that CEO would take issue with 'mediocre', from their perspective it all worked out amazing.

      • Re:

        I am not sure Broadcom is taking the wrong strategy here.

        Virtualization is a commodity product now. No libvirt+qemu+kvm isnt a drop in replacement for VSphere, but what is missing is mostly glue, not 'high-tech' stuff, in other words you can probably contract for a few devs to build whatever specifically you need.

        Continued development of ESX probably represents a lot of cost for a market segment that is only going to get smaller, no matter what you do. Even if there is a move from the cloud back to the corp

        • Re:

          Keep in mind that without a competitor, Hyper-V won't get much love, like File and Print Services for Netware (FPNW), Microsoft's Netware killer, kind of died on the vine after 2000 or so.

          Install NT 4.0, license 426-1111111 and then put FPNW atop it and you had the functional equivalent of any Netware 3.11/3.12 server with a size only limited by available bandwidth and compute. No wonder Novell died. Same trick MS was pulling with Hyper-V.

          • Re:

            Frankly, does Hyper-V need 'much love'? It's certain they'll keep it up to date with the platforms which is necessary, beyond that it is pretty much 'done'.

            It will continue to face competition from the likes of Proxmox and RedHat.

            Frankly, vSphere hasn't changed anything fundamental much in years, despite some version bumps. They painted themselves into a corner with no logical place to go (all the cool stuff was on top of actual operating systems, and they were very much trying explicitly *not* to be an op

            • Re:

              I imagine you weren't at Ready in Vegas in 2019 when all the fist pumping and bellowing - full monkey boy dance mode - about getting VMware running on Azure. Sort of. Anywho, MSFT thinks VMware as a gateway to Azure is a big deal and competing with Hyper-V was important from that perspective. Absent a real competitor - c'mon, Proxmox doesn't even figure on their radar - they won't even bother. They seriously considered making 2019 their last version of Server.

              On-prem infrastructure at MSFT is getting li

              • Re:

                Was this last version as in "Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows, it's now a rolling release" or last version as in actually discontinuing the product?

                I would say that even if it were the latter, competing with VMWare wouldn't make them work *harder* on their on-premise solution. Microsoft has been full tilt burning any on-premise to the ground, because it's just not as profitable as holding the customers hostage to a subscription.

              • Re:

                I wasnt but of course MS wanted VMWare running in Azure - that is obvious path as far as lift and shift migration of on premises to the cloud. However beyond - it works and you can manage and support it organizationally 'well' enough to allow you to migrate those tricky hosts, what more is needed? The point is allow places that are seeking to go 100% cloud to get that done more quickly so companies can shed the local DC costs sooner and start renting compute time from M$ sooner.

                Long term how "good" VMWare

        • Re: Nail in the coffin for Vmware

          Plenty of glue is out there. Nutanix, Proxmox, XCP-NG, Ubuntu, Red Hat, pretty much everyone has feature-complete, near drop-in replacement for whatever you want in VMware for a fraction of the cost.

          You can migrate about any VMware infrastructure without even needing to buy new hardware.

          • Re:

            But commercial backup systems don't support the more esoteric ones. For instance I use Nakivo and it only supports VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV and I hadn't even heard of the last one until now.

      • Re:

        This seems unlikely; "VMWare" isn't "the company" anymore, it's Broadcom, and Broadcom has been following this strategy for some time now. Its shareholders seem happy with the way things are going--their stock price is 5x what it was four years ago, and >20x what it was ten years ago. Revenue is up 14x over that same period.

        Personally, I hate these sonsofbitches and what they do to the companies they acquire and their acquisition of VMWare has certainly screwed me in the mid to long term, but the share

    • Re:

      The only problem is that virtualization isn't your normal Enterprise Lock-In. It's literally the abstraction that prevents it in the first place! VMware will be dead within five years, probably much shorter.

      • Re:

        You are thinking too logically. Logic has no place here, this is business IT.

        Some people were *convinced* that software couldn't run under virtualization versus baremetal unless the software vendor supported it.

        Now you have software which 'certifies' that it works under vmware. CIOs eat that up.

      • Re:

        Nah - if you use ESX / VSphere - things are highly coupled to your backup plans/software/equipment, hot/cold site fail over, storage design/controller choices etc.

        Is it hard like swapping out your ERP systems; but its non-trivial.

  • Re:

    I spent almost 14 years recently working for a Fortune 500 company. My severance package doesn't allow me to name them - yet. But I can tell you that they often made decisions on finding another company to blame if stuff went wrong. For example, my department used completely free Linux versions for years but eventually they made us switch to a commercial variant so we had someone to blame if anything went wrong with it. When I was last there, we were starting to move a few customers to AWS instead o

• Re:

  Xen hasn't been a serious part of the picture for most considerations for close to a decade, perhaps longer, due to the overall complexity and inflexibility of deployment. It's heavy coupling to storage location/container is a particular agitation...