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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?

#161

Post by mindcrash »

Happily want to give some options:

* DIY w/ KVM/Xen

* DIY w/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/

* ProxMox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/

* Paid OpenStack through one of their partners - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/

* OpenNebula - https://opennebula.io/

* Nutanix - https://www.nutanix.com/

If you want a solution that "just works", is simple to manage and can even extend to public cloud infrastructure when needed I can really, really recommend Nutanix. Migrating from VMWare is also really simple, they have a tool which makes that very easy. Do note that they use a heavily modified KVM as hypervisor.

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

#162

Post by esseph »

tuananh wrote: post #122
cbluth wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> getting out of vmware is a different story

Not really, wasn't difficult

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

#163

Post by xd1936 »

jesterson wrote: post #109
xd1936 wrote: post #79

Non-Profit Liberal Arts Higher Ed here. Trying to move to the Azure Hybrid Cloud as fast as possible. Going to have to eat one more year of 170% price hike in our current VMware contract. Heard from a peer school on the east coast that had to sign a 600% hike in their most recent contract. Absolutely evil.

I would not call it evil. Orgs are _voluntarily_ making the choice to lock in for expensive useless proprietary software by either being stupid or - actually evil - receiving kickbacks from those proprietary companies. Every manager signing off the contract with vendor lock in should understand possible repercussions. Its not a rocket science. Yep they will screw you along the way with prices. Yea, that sales rep say…

I understand all of that. We made a calculated risk, sure... back in 2007, and we've been happy to pay since. Only now, in one year, do the screws turn so tightly.

But at least shareholder value is going up somewhere.

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

#164

Post by tracker1 »

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'd throw IBM in that list as well... Unless you literally have money to burn, I've avoided Oracle and IBM for decades.

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

#165

Post by zamadatix »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #128
ikidd wrote: post #97

Earlier 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…

It's not really about performance. Imagine comparing AirDrop to a SAN on the basis both provide file sharing functionality. The topic wouldn't be performance, it'd be how they have entirely different use case goals that just happen to both end up using file sharing as one part in achieving that goal.

In the case of ESXi it's about the clustering, filesystem/network virtualization, management and orchestration for hundreds of servers, disaster recovery, enterprise security/software integrations, and so on. That VirtualBox requires a client OS is just a footnote in the comparison of functionality.

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

#166

Post by ohdeardear »

linsomniac wrote: post #101
ohdeardear wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Curious, I ditched our last VMWare servers ~a decade ago for KVM (via ganeti) for 100-200VMs running our dev, stg, and production loads, and it's been super reliable.

It's not curious at all; your workload was probably easy. The same program can crash constantly on one piece of _correct_ hardware, while working fine on a different piece of hardware.

I was torturing the hardware and KVM wasn't designed to do that, until about two years ago.

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

#167

Post by ohdeardear »

garganzol wrote: post #110
ohdeardear wrote: post #87

I hate virtualization with a passion, because it's just more crap that doesn't work written by people that shouldn't touch computers. In theory, it's great. In practice, if you need to get "support" from someone else, it's not so great anymore, as all these companies have been discovering. I would use VM technology if whoever wrote it would provide me with a contract saying that if anyone were to find just one progra…

The only kind of person who would say that they hate virtualization is a hardware vendor. Because of conflict of interests. In this light, Broadcom, a hardware vendor, who buys a popular virtualization product does a "smart" move - it supposedly eliminates the very thing that eats away their profits. But it only looks smart to the vendor itself. For everyone else, the move looks unprofessional and incompetent.

I never sold hardware, so there is that. I am rather anal about correctness and virtualization products are really complicated and as such almost nobody gets them to work reliably (if there is just one known bug, it's trash, IMO).

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

#168

Post by closeparen »

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

VMWare was for sale in the first place because it is obviously not going to be the case in 10 years that every dentist’s office and car dealership needs 3-10 instances of Windows Server in the closet. It makes sense to sell to someone who can extract as much value as possible from it on the way to zero.

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

#169

Post by tacker2000 »

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").

A GmbH is nothing “special”, its basically the most used corporate structure in Austria (and Germany).

Its a limited liability structure and most businesses from small to large that have private shareholders use it (Red Bull or Porsche Holding are GmbHs for example)

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