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Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

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Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#21

Post by Brian_K_White »

throw0101a wrote: post #4
uriahlight wrote: post #3

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenS…

Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.

Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.

The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#24

Post by firesteelrain »

We run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#25

Post by tstrimple »

ramgine wrote: post #9

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks…

I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#26

Post by throw0101a »

kiney wrote: post #8
throw0101a wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenS…

I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...

> I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...

Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":

* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...

There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).

A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.

I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)

(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#27

Post by throw0101a »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #21
throw0101a wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares. As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago. Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenS…

Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase. Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets a…

> The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.

Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#29

Post by Dylan16807 »

Daneel_ wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

Is a magnet torrent available?

There's a normal torrent avaiable from archive.org? https://archive.org/download/vddk_20260825/vddk_20260825_arc... From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825

Okay then magnet:?xt=urn:btih:bb5565a679e22985842c1243a93300f123762366

Re: Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

#30

Post by applfanboysbgon »

throw0101a wrote: post #27
Brian_K_White wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase. Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets a…

> The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more. Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.

The other aspect is that they want fungibility. As a corporation, you use off-the-shelf solutions so that when you do your big layoffs every few years you can rotate in some other cogs who already know how to operate the standard solution. Building in-house means valuing your employees long-term and we can't have any of that going on.
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