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plactagonic ,

It will be probably more. I talked with sysadmin from some smaller provider in my country few months ago. And he told me that the migration will take them for most systems about 2 years (depreciation of hardware) and for some machines about 5 years.

So lot of customers are in process of replacing it but it will take multiple years.

BearOfaTime ,

Many SMBs will walk away at next server refresh.

VMware is walking dead.

We’re currently testing Nutanix and Proxmox for smaller clients.

Proxmox support is similar (~65%) in cost to VMware licensing, but it’s not likely to pull this sudden increase BS. Plus it’s capabilities are significant for SMB.

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

I wouldn’t be afraid to use Proxmox for small and middle size business. It’s solid and based on solid, opensource tech. As long as people make sure they get paid, I’m sure they’ll get even better.

Good on you for making sure your clients pay for support, that’s how opensource thrives.

BearOfaTime ,

Paid support is a requirement for business. Tryinto avoid that is Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

When shit goes tits-up, you really need the support resources right now.

Win-win in my book.

Brkdncr ,

That’s the point. Broadcom focuses on only the top consumers and desire everyone else to go away. They then focus only on what those top consumers want and their support staff can be cut down considerably.

It’s an interesting tactic that they have mastered.

jonne ,

Eventually even those customers will look at alternatives too if there’s only like 50 companies worldwide using it.

JustAnotherRando , (edited )

Yeah, this is one scenario where the principles in F2P games like MOBAs applies to the business world. Focusing only on the top X companies and losing that market share has a cascading effect where it’s harder to find competent administrators, it’s harder for those administrators to find support online (which then means they have to call for the support they pay for - which while good in the short term for VMWare, is frustrating for the customer, and means that the extra money they’re charging has to partially be used to cover techs to provide said report). The little fish in a market like this help to provide what is essentially free troubleshooting online via stack overflow etc. And giving that market share to competitors gives them the cash flow and experience to build a support system online and improve their product, and then win over the big fish.

BearOfaTime ,

Bingo.

Where does the next gen of admins come from, if they’re been using Proxmox, etc, to learn on?

All my peers started with VMware years ago because they could get ESXi for free and run it on test boxes, then have the experience to deploy in client sites.

PriorityMotif ,
@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

It sounds like every large sas company tbh.

BearOfaTime ,

You’re not wrong!

I think Broadcom overplayed it on this one, as this example shows.

Or, they’re playing a game we can’t figure out. A 20,000 VM client is in the “large customers we want to keep” category.

BearOfaTime ,

Except this is a top customer with tens of thousands of VM’s, walking away.

Brkdncr ,

SMBs aren’t running 10k vms.

KISSmyOSFeddit ,

yep, my employer is one of them. Only around 200 VMs but my former employer (an MSP with several hundred customers, among them the administration of the city I live in, all schools, all kindergartens and the church) was also in the process of migrating when I switched.

Trainguyrom ,

My friend who works at an MSP said they’re migrating most of their customers to HyperV, but these are mostly extremely small companies with a dozen or so employees and only a handful of services

expr ,

I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.

But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.

lemann ,

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

Oha ,

Would guess that they probably migrated to proxmox

Kata1yst ,
@Kata1yst@kbin.social avatar

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.

Oha ,

Proxmox is open source

vividspecter ,

So is Xen.

BeigeAgenda ,
@BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca avatar

I thought Xen and OpenVZ etc. became obsolete with KVM? But it’s probably for the best that Xen is still used.

ozymandias117 ,

Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, KVM is a type 2 hypervisor

It runs on the bare metal itself as dom0

BeigeAgenda ,
@BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca avatar

Doh I meant LXC 🤦 instead of KVM.

ozymandias117 ,

LXC is for containers, rather than virtual machines

I was just saying “obsolete” isn’t a good description; All three still have uses depending on your goals

LXC is probably better for most people, and I think Podman is one of the best rootless container options

Kata1yst ,
@Kata1yst@kbin.social avatar

Yes...? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren't looking that way.

barsquid ,

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.

BearOfaTime ,

Nutanix is another one.

Theharpyeagle ,

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?

Anubis ,

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.

ShunkW ,

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.

buttfarts ,

I have three VMs running concurrently on a decade+ old Dell T7500.

Even elderly enterprise stuff can do this.

Piwix ,

Pretty much. Isolated environments to run a single service usually, although someone with more familiarity can comment further

xantoxis ,

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.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

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.

noahm ,

VMs provide a meaningful security boundary between applications. Containers (docker, etc) do not.

iamjackflack ,

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

fluxion ,

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”

brbposting ,

Nearly the strongest possible language I can imagine being used.

jqubed ,
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

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.

SeattleRain ,

To be fair, this is what every single company is doing right now. Stallman tried to warn you!

LordCrom ,

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

mechoman444 ,

VMware is owned by broadcom now so…

SeattleRain ,

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.

ooterness ,

Phase 1: Fuck around

Phase 2: Find out

drasglaf ,
@drasglaf@sh.itjust.works avatar

Phase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will

Phase 4: Fucking do it again

hume_lemmy ,

“We just love our customers so much, it makes us crazy sometimes…”

AdamEatsAss ,

“I don’t want to lose you but the shareholders make me do it.”

redhorsejacket ,

I don’t understand diddly about the specifics of this article (I’m a member of the normie minority on this site who is neither working in IT, nor interested in the field), but I gotta say, I loved how it was structured and written. In a sea of AI generated crap, or simply parroting talking heads and calling it news, I found the way they laid out the article in two parts ("this is what happened, followed by “this is our subjective opinion on those events based on the wider context”) to be very refreshing.

macaroni1556 ,

Kudos for immersing yourself in it!

MeanEYE ,
@MeanEYE@lemmy.world avatar

We rent our servers from Ionos and price hike came as a complete surprise. Luckily Ionos took some of the increase on themselves, but had I been ready with different provider I’d switch in a blink. It seems price hike was a surprise to Ionos as well and am sure as hell hoping they are working on adding another hypervisor.

fruitycoder ,

Really looking forward to seeing more Rancher Harvester clusters out there.

VMWare stuff are a pain to work with and open source and more modern systems are needed anyways. Really want to see all of the crazy powerful stuff people do when VMs are just another type of container.

ramble81 ,

“We want to focus on keeping our large customers”

Loses large customers

Surprised pikachu face

Kushan ,
@Kushan@lemmy.world avatar

It’s entirely possible that 24,000 VM’s didn’t count as “large” by VMWare standards.

robocall ,
@robocall@lemmy.world avatar

We want to focus on keeping milking our large customers until they can find an alternative to us

Evotech ,

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

bassomitron ,

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.

Impromptu2599 ,

I have been using Proxmox with a couple thousand VM’s and have been very happy with it.

Deathcrow ,

In my workplace we worked tirelessly to get rid of all VMware VMs as fast as possible when new pricing became clear. Thousands migrated. What a huge fuckup by broadcom.

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