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

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

#141

Post by sgt »

tapete2 wrote: post #139
turtletontine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

As I understood it, GmbH is like an LLC but with more paperwork.

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

#142

Post by justinclift »

awesomeusername wrote: post #42

We use Proxmox. NVidia are pushing hard in the direction of combined accelerators and ARM CPU (i.e. DGX, Thor, Jetson, etc). Some of the upcoming hardware hits a sweet spot in terms of performance / $ / W. It's hard to ignore. But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. Which is a big mistake IMO

> But Proxmox is ignoring ARM.

If you're not already aware of this, then it might be worth keeping an eye on:

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1314

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

#143

Post by linksnapzz »

chungy wrote: post #55
linksnapzz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather a lot older than that. But, even if you restrict it to 'x86 virtualization', the alternative for the current crop of 'enterprise' OS environments is ...server sprawl. I'm a big fan of discrete hw for some things, but it can be a hard sell for everything.

The primary alternative to full system VMs is containers (or jails, zones... whatever your OS might call them). You don't need to go server sprawl or VMs as the only two options.

For many organizations & applications, containers are going to be a challenge. This is also why HyperV is a leading VMware replacement.

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

#144

Post by incomingpain »

Broadcom ruined vmware for me.

Seems to me everyone is going to Proxmox, Xen, or hyperv. Honourable mention but technically apples to oranges. Kubernetes and docker.

Redhat openshift? I have never heard of anyone trying to go to it. I like how they try to mix vms and containers... but i dunno it seems to suffer from the standard red hat problem.

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

#145

Post by eppp »

INTPenis wrote: post #4

This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden. HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho. I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most bus…

The lack of support for SANs and ISCSI really bothers me. I like the way this style of setup works, I would like to keep doing it.

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

#147

Post by bluGill »

anakaine wrote: post #135
polski-g wrote: post #130

Earlier 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

There are customers that cost more to keep than you earn - firing those customers is a useful activity at all levels of business. However Broadcom has a lot of products that we would generally expect to scale to a lot of customers and they are acting like they are bespoke things that don't scale. Their business model doesn't match what their products generally need.

I expect things like VMWare to disappear in a few years because some competitors taking those other customers will slowly make things better until those still buying VMWare go elsewhere anywhere because it is good enough. There is only so long they can sell bundles of everything before customers decide the total price is too high - so it might not even be VMWare's competitors are good enough so much as everywhere else is good enough and VMWare needs to be tossed too.

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

#148

Post by jen20 »

wayeq wrote: post #115
chanandler_bong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hock Tan's only goal is to increase stock value. Period. At the expense of anything and everything else, stock value.

aka fiduciary duty

That is absolutely not what fiduciary duty means, unless you missed scare quotes and a /s.

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

#149

Post by walterbell »

judahmeek wrote: post #140
anakaine wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Broadcom (cloud vs on-prem conflict of interest) is sowing cloud silicon for VMware refugees.

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

#150

Post by tw04 »

technion wrote: post #43
tw04 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7. Any serious enterprise software or hardware company absolutely has a 24/7 support option. They all have a base option that is not 24/7 for a significantly lower price. There’s no way you’re replacing VMware in any company of any size without 24/7 support.

Microsoft seems perfectly capable of advertising 24/7 support whilst never managing to call back within 24 hours on business crippling sev1 tickets. Just look at how often someone on /r/sysadmin is shocked to find this is the norm. I know thst youre right about the wording turning off orgs but I do wonder when the biggest enterprise organisation can barely offer it in practice what really is the show stopper for busi…

> what really is the show stopper for business.

The show stopper is explaining to your CEO that you don’t have 24/7 support on a piece of software that’s core to the business.

You can explain away horrible 24/7 support and keep your job. Not so much if you buy something that doesn’t even offer it and you have a hard outage at 5pm on a Friday.

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