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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

#71

Post by tosti »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #47

Can someone exfiltrate the VMWare source so that it can be distributed at a later date once Avago (Broadcom) cease? A friend of mine said that VMWare was still the best VM platform due to the ecosystem that built around it, so it'd be nice if it could be preserved for later resurrection. I know time moves on quickly, but it'd be a shame to lose it entirely. I know this is promoting criminality, but there's something…

IIRC the guy who wrote a hypervisor for OpenBSD found severe vulnerabilities in VMware. It doesn't surprise me and I don't think a quasi-legal fork would be a worthwhile avenue.

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

#72

Post by spockz »

ramgine wrote: post #51
tstrimple wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.

I think that it boils down to that opex is considered speedy, flexible and agile. Whereas capex reflects slow/glacial but also stable. This is also why lease exists, why we have freelance contracts vs employee contracts for indeterminate amounts of time.

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

#73

Post by consp »

rrgok wrote: post #67
vmwarestole wrote: post #60

Most of VMware virtualization code was stolen from kvm and they never were punished. Our laws are a joke, our courts are largely illegitimate and so to is our government.

Really? I always thought KVM came to existence aftern VMware.

My guess is it's referring to ESXi's GPL'd (or not GPL'd) code and the 2016 suit which failed (on procedural grounds).

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

Neywiny wrote: post #13
nubinetwork wrote: post #7

Rather than converting the cold vm disk, couldn't you boot up the vm, dump the disks to stream, and send the streams into another format?

Probably better to get the vm into a ramfs or any other way to not be currently on it. Otherwise it'll likely be pretty corrupted

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by Flere-Imsaho »

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…

> quietly built a proxmox cluster

Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

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

#76

Post by Flere-Imsaho »

uriahlight wrote: post #38
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 emphasize most , not all . Most companies using VMWare even 5 years ago could have achieved similar infrastructure using Proxmox. It's been a viable alternative for years. It's always intrigued me how easily big companies get pulled into licensing nightmares because their execs get bullshitted into believing a sales pitch at a seminar. Anyone who has worked with Oracle's product lineup instinctively knows what I'm…

Also the support contacts, which require you to send system logs to VMWare of you want them to fix something. For a lot of companies this is a no go.

Waste of money

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

#77

Post by cloudie78 »

Flere-Imsaho wrote: post #75
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…

> quietly built a proxmox cluster Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

Legal/Compliance/Risk department along the lines of “ nobody ever got fired for buying ibm”

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

#78

Post by rwmj »

anonymousiam wrote: post #45

So the Linux qemu-img tool can still convert VM disk images from .vmdk into formats compatible with all the other hypervisors. Is there something more to the process of VM migration from VMWare than just using this tool (and manually creating the proper virtual hardware profile in the new hypervisor)? Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually some…

The problem is how you access the disks that are sitting on a VMware server. VDDK allows you to connect and read them (in raw format, in fact) at a reasonable speed, and also understands sparseness and change block tracking.

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

#80

Post by _joel »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #49
Jedd wrote: post #5

From TFA > VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ... Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'. IIRC the only small challeng…

Did the same thing a looong time ago. Was worried about how it would go, but it was surprisingly painless. Love proxmox now.

Proxmox been great for decades. I used it back in 2011 when I was sysadmin for https://sahanafoundation.org/eden/ - we had multiple live instance running for the site, wiki, translation, GIS. Just when kvm was getting support too (not openvz) so it was nice an snappy running on some donated poweredge 2950's (thanks zen.co.uk!)

Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.

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