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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

#81

Post by jasonvorhe »

I have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored.

Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that.

How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways.

Some people just need to learn through pain.

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

#82

Post by m4rtink »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #39
soamv wrote: post #34

As an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible…

You need to remember this isn't Broadcom the chip company at work, this is really Avago which took on the Broadcom name when they acquired the latter. Avago's business model is to acquire cash cow businesses and then milk them dry. These VMware changes are consistent with that model.

Broadcom/Avago, please buy Atlassian! I beg you, pretty please!

You will make an insane amount of money and make the world a much better place!

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

#83

Post by b3lvedere »

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.

It's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?

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

#84

Post by whizzter »

protocolture wrote: post #37
simoncion wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows... I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere , which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run. Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.

I remember reading some obscure customer doco that "The old fax server is running on the virtual host" And I was like... what virtual host? What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack. A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.

I think you're conflating different requirements/usecases.

Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.

But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).

If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.

(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)

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

#86

Post by vintagedave »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #81

I have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored. Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is…

It can take a lot of time to migrate. People who've known about Broadcom's behaviour for some time may still be working towards solving it.

Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't think we should feel "very little pity" for people like that (sympathy is human): but I'd instead say, I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.

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

#88

Post by WokeUp420 »

I'm in the middle of a massive Azure Local migration and noticed the VDDK was no longer available... Kinda funny because I was just telling a coworker how surprised I was that they offered it. Thankfully I saved off my copy but I have no idea how Microsoft is going to handle this going forward with Azure Migrate. Same issue with SUSE I believe

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

#89

Post by WokeUp420 »

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.

Proxmox is amateur hour. No enterprise support

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

#90

Post by WokeUp420 »

firesteelrain wrote: post #24

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.

Dell private cloud lock in would be the death of any company. You don't want to be isolated to one hardware vendor. We've told Dell to kick rocks many times for renewals and would not be able to do that if we were in their Cloud, which requires Dell hardware.

Don't do it

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