Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#121

Post by KronisLV » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 6:32 AM UTC

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #38

Mostly bitching to corporate IT to make it possible to use alternative tools and workflows. Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”. This is not my experience at one company but mu…

> We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc.

This is lovely to strive towards and going all in on containers (albeit not with Kubernetes) has worked out great for where I work; their resistance to the approach sucks, I'm sorry you have to deal with that. Hope it works out in the end.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#122

Post by tuananh » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:18 AM UTC

cbluth wrote: post #119

esseph wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a dominant percentage of banking workloads at this point.

I can confirm this, from my experience. Many organizations have foregone ms in lieu of redhat and oracle, and redhat is slowly injecting openshift where they can fit it.

but it's alright. getting out of openshift is rather easy.

getting out of vmware is a different story.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#123

Post by INTPenis » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:19 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #59

INTPenis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have been more clear then, definitely 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector I have experience with. It's kind of frustrating because it's such a tiny detail that could make them a real contender in this new power vacuum.

> ...definitely [a] 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector I have experience with. Well, their FAQ says: For different timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions in your timezone and your local language. Consulting the list of resellers that that page links to finds one that blatantly advertises 24x7 support, and it's…

That's excellent. The info a bit buried, and the lack of it front and center probably scares away a lot of clients.

Proxmox needs to better their reputation right now if they're going to be counted as a contender, and burying the fact that you can have 24/7 SLA is not a good way of improving that reputation of being mostly for the homebrew crowd.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#124

Post by tstrimple » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:37 AM UTC

Nux wrote: post #70

Microsoft gaining the most I reckon. Kind of sad seeing businesses getting screwed by closed source proprietary software, then making the same choices all over again. Nutanix also seeing huge demand. Not everyone is repeating their mistakes, with Proxmox and Xcp-ng seeing huge new level of business, as well, which is nice. I'm part of the Apache CloudStack project and that too is seeing unparalleled levels of demand.…

I'm seeing a fucking ton of cloud migrations to Azure and AWS from VMware. Even cloud VMs are pretty cheap compared to Broadcom licensing.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#125

Post by farseer » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

natebc wrote: post #63

Our 5 year ELA for VMware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. I work in Higher ed. Our Hyper-V environment came online a few months ago. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support. Granted, we have a separate team working on "genAI stuff." We started converting virtual machines about 3 weeks ago and we've gotten through ~500 of about 3500 or so. Our…

I think the following quote summarizes Broadcom's strategy with regards to VMWare:

"If you are a Global 2000 company, VMware wants your business — from the rest, not so much,”

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/4053783/broadcoms-vmwar...

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#126

Post by tstrimple » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

ikidd wrote: post #97

tiffanyh wrote: post #67

What’s next best alternative (regardless of cost)? Virtualbox Parallel Hyper-V Anything else? Which is best?

Did you just propose Virtualbox as a replacement for ESX?

We participate in a forum where people regularly recommend Hetzner. "Enterprise Grade" reliability is rarely a concern for the folks here. They have no limit of elbow grease to make sure all the shoddy solutions work together. And if they don't, they don't receive enough traffic for the difference to show.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#127

Post by phito » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 8:03 AM UTC

We are moving to proxmox

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#128

Post by p0w3n3d » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 8:15 AM UTC

ikidd wrote: post #97

tiffanyh wrote: post #67

What’s next best alternative (regardless of cost)? Virtualbox Parallel Hyper-V Anything else? Which is best?

Did you just propose Virtualbox as a replacement for ESX?

could you please tell what's the difference between VirtualBox and VMWare ESX? I mean what's the VirtualBox lacking as compared to ESX? I've never used an enterprise VMWare so I can't imagine what's different there? Especially if Hyper-V is proposed as an alternative...

--- EDIT ---

I've made some research and now understand that Hyper-V runs alongside the Windows Server (i.e. it is not an in-windows app). Therefore it would be hard to achieve the ESX performance close to ESX or Hyper-V even when deploying on linux. Or wouldn't it? Maybe considering a partition as disk for virtualbox? Idle Linux overhead isn't this much, is it?

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#129

Post by bob1029 » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 8:35 AM UTC

garganzol wrote: post #88

Hyper-V and Windows Server 2025. It ticks all the boxes, except being BigScaryCorp for some people.

Datacenter edition will give you the right to run unlimited windows server VMs on each host. It's a really hard deal to pass up if you're mostly a Microsoft shop.

Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

#130

Post by polski-g » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 8:48 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #108

sokoloff wrote: post #75

Broadcom turned up the heat on our pot fast enough that we’re evacuating over to proxmox. I and several others in IT had run it at home for a while, so when Broadcom made the definite losses to continue on VMWare far higher than the likely losses from any migration outage, it became a no-brainer to migrate. Migrating part of the farm and A/B testing shows good results and we’ll be able to complete it in-place before…

I place Broadcom higher. At least Oracle seems to want customers that pay. I can't find evidence that of Broadcom wanting customers.

The CEO explicitly said the only customers they're interested in is the 600 customers who are responsible for 80% of their revenue. The are actively trying to shed all others; it's simply not worth the overhead costs otherwise.