Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fork?
Are you under the impression that VMware is free open source software?
Yes, I was, actually.
Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
131–140 of 178 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#132Hi, im a presales engineer for OVHcloud, a cloud provider. OVH is a "pinacle" VMware partner, we are a huge reseller of VMware licenses, and were able to secure a 3-5 years contract with broadcom with only 5 to 15% of price increase.
Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my experience.
For some clients, change of technology would be more expensive than paying a bit more to VMware. You'd have to re-train half your IT department, and the migration could be long, risky and complexe. So in this case, a lift and shift move-to-cloud can be competitive, and frankly a serious option.
I see a lot of projects with Nutanix, but you'd be surprise of the price, which is almost the same as VMware. Nutanix comes with way more features than vanilla vsphere which explains the cost increase. You'd have NSX and vSAN packaged, plus replication features. Nutanix offers a great alternative. Actually, OVH proposes Nutanix too, so we can be agnostic and have a sort of leverage over Broadcom.
Some clients are ok to move to public cloud (equivalent AWS/Azure..). The smaller the infra the easier it is. It can be very cheap at OVH. Also it's great if you do containers because of the universal nature of them, they are easy to migrate. However, If the client has a lot of Windows Server, the cost is actually higher (at OVH the price of the Windows Server Licence is higher than at Azure..) because we cannot leverage the Windows Datacenter licenses
The cheapest viable option is to go to Proxmox on Baremetal servers. The features are close to a standard vSphere environnement. The lack of enterprise support is the thing that stops most clients to do this move.
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you under the impression that VMware is free open source software?
Yes, I was, actually.
fair enough, you're one of today's (un)lucky 10,000! (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
VMWare has always been proprietary, there's been some handwringing a few times about the fact that they borrow from FOSS quite a bit.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#134I work for an MSP, mostly with small to medium companies. Licensing costs went up a ton when broadcom acquired vmware. They went up a ton more this year with minimum core counts, current licensing costs are roughly $20k a year minimum. They might hike the price again, even medium businesses that see some value in avoiding an expensive migration want to avoid this uncertainty. Basically they don't want to deal with sm…
My organisation went down the Nutanix path with about 1/4 of the DC about 18 months ago. They're now just finalising the move away feom Nutanix. From a server and dev admin point of view we had really odd VM behaviour, poorer than expected process performance, and random instability that just couldn't be resolved. I believe other system owners had similar and that the VM admins had their own range of oddities to track down. Something behind the scenes was the catalyst for change away in a short period of time.
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's one way to do business. Run tour product into obscurity so there are few qualified managers and admins in the market after 10 years, and everyone has become familiar with cheaper and now more prevalent alternatives.
slow clap
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#136Mostly 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…
Im in the same boat, and it sucks. CyberSec rules the roost but have little to no care or knowledge of good DevOps, or process management considerations, so the result is tpu wind up talking to a human firewall whose response is always "no.". Organisationally we wonder why nothing improves.
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Parallels and virtualbox are designed for the end user ad hoc running a few VMs on their client system. The VMWare equivalent was VmWare Workstation, not ESX. ESX, Proxmox etc. are about orchestrating fleets of VMs running on clusters of hardware
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#138Hi, im a presales engineer for OVHcloud, a cloud provider. OVH is a "pinacle" VMware partner, we are a huge reseller of VMware licenses, and were able to secure a 3-5 years contract with broadcom with only 5 to 15% of price increase. Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my…
All good points, except perhaps the cost of the move. With VMWare licences anecdotallty increasing ~8x, the cost of moving could well be recovered quite quickly. Organisations tend to think and react strategically, and this will mean 3-5 year (or more) financial projections for major projects. If a $1m VMWare annual bill is now $8m, over 5 years thats $5m vs $40m. A change to a $1m annually cluster isn't going to cost you $35m, so you should definitely look at changing to minimise your expenses, assuming you get the support etc that you need elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good fit for the market they are in. Growth isn't the most important thing.
It helps that they’re not a publicly traded company [A]. If you’re beholden to stockholders, you’re beholden to a market demanding growth at all costs. Even if the leadership at the moment wants this stable strategy, all investor pressure tends toward aggressive moves to the contrary. [A] probably? I couldn’t conclusively determine this, and I’m not an expert
Indeed they are not. They are a Austrian GmbH, which is a special kind of company form that is not really comparable to a e.g. British or American Ltd.
Long story short, for being a publicly traded company, they would need to "transform" to an AG ("Aktiengesellschaft", where "Aktie" means "share of stock").
Re: Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's one way to do business. Run tour product into obscurity so there are few qualified managers and admins in the market after 10 years, and everyone has become familiar with cheaper and now more prevalent alternatives. slow clap
Reminds me of the saying that business's are either sowing or reaping investments.
Broadcom definitely seems to be in a reaping stage.