Alienation of the future

[RWalker_Acrisur]

I'm curious, is anyone at vmware telling their new Broadcom overlords how much of a grass roots movement against vmware they're causing?

From many industry worker perspectives, choices like this are clearly short sighted money grabs that will result in long term alienation of an entire generation of upcoming techs. 

The vast majority of current senior engineers, architects, and IT leaders found vmware as a free option almost twenty years ago as a convenient alternate to multi booting or removable drives.

I myself remember well showing professors how amazing vmware server running on server 2003/XP, and hosting multiple systems on it was for learning quickly.

This continued as I hit help desk and kept playing at home, learning. 

 

Now? 

 

Now they're going to run Proxmox, or XCP-NG, or just rhel/etc. Or dare I say, hyper-v on their windows desktops.

 

And in 10 years? What are they going to recommend. What are they going to be most comfortable with. 

 

Removal of the free tier is short sighted and naive at best. The entire approach Broadcom is taking is alienating swaths of the industry that doesn't trust Broadcom - and for good reason as there are MULTIPLE software companies Broadcom has bought and ruined. Many had existing dominance in their markets, only to lose it.

 

How has no one discussed this? I searched the community and have found nothing on it. But it's all over every single other public and private forum I'm in, including inside VMUG itself. 

[Mohamed Hamdy Boraik Ahmed]

concerned of this ...

 

 

[RWalker_Acrisur]

The silence is deafening. It's clear to me that no one at Broadcom cares. They're going to burn the product to the ground for everyone except the massive companies that can afford to pay the extortion rates, and the rest of the SMB market be damned. It'd be one thing if the less expensive tiers had feature parity to other competition, but they stripped too much from those. 

Oracle, Microsoft, et Ala are likely laughing and sharpening their pencils, ready to take market share. 

 

Why would Broadcom care? They'll make more money on less by simply charging more. Never mind that they destroyed another technology from being the undisputed leader. 

[sstx]

Well said RWalker.  I remember 15 years ago when we first explored virtualization of our entire infrastructure.  Everyone wanted to push us to Hyper-V and I fought for VMWare because I had been running the free ESXi for lab purposes for a few years.  And it turned out to be a great decision.  Working for a SMB, it actually saved us some money by visualizing on VMWare.  Support was awesome, environment was more stable, life was good. 

Now?  I am really worried about the future of the product.  Broadcom seems to not care about SMB's AT ALL.  Not everyone has servers in a cloud.  Broadcom rips away the software that our infrastructure depends on and replaces it with something they say will definitely cost a lot more but will include all this other software.  Software that WE DO NOT USE OR WANT.  As an SMB, we don't need vSAN or NSX.  I am certainly not putting anything in a VMWare cloud now because as soon as you depend on it... rip.  They either raise rates or discontinue it.  Removing the free ESXi is just going to move 3rd party developers to another platform that is a lot more friendly.  Even Veeam is looking into ramping up support for Proxmox. 

 

I have spent almost 25 years of my career learning, supporting, and advocating VMware in SMB environments (since the days it only ran on desktops).  Really sad that one company take over can take such a great product to milk it for all the profits and doom it to extinction.  Leaving customers scrambling to figure out what to do now.  Not saying that is what is going to happen but it sure looks that way given Broadcom feedback and lack of concern toward their customer's needs. 

 

 

[RWalker_Acrisur]

Indeed.  

In 2006 when I installed VMWare on my 'lab computer' in college by upgrading the RAM to 1GB so that I could demonstrate why the removable 3.5" HDDs we were using were pointless, and that dual booting was equally obsolete... My professors were floored.  Even the die hard Red Hat nerd prof came in to see my presentation on the product.  

One could say that Virtualization is dead, long live container virtualization - but unlike where 98% of physical workloads could shift to virtual with little to no issue (yes, we had to wait on storage for things like SQL and even some large Database workloads can't truly be virtualized today) we can't do the same for most virtual workloads until things like AD/SMB/Legacy applications CODE can work with containers.  It's not a matter of hardware now, but of re-writing entire code libraries or programs, which isn't feasible for the vast majority of businesses.

So to abandon virtualization in the way they are is simply short sighted.  

The new guys starting in the SMBs, the MSP and VARs, they're going to feed the market into the direction they can best exist.  That won't be VMWare except in niche cases.

Some will say 'well Standard isn't expensive' and sure maybe, but Hyper-V as a stand alone is just fine and is 'build in' cost wise if you're a Microsoft shop; and if you're a linux shop, then there are MULTIPLE options (that don't make as much sense if you're not familiar with CLI/Linux). 

You don't want to cluster it in Hyper-V unless you enjoy making your life a living hellscape, but at that point VMWare made sense.  

I don't honestly know why no one from VMWare has spoken up. Maybe they're under gag orders as part of their new contracts, or fear being fired.