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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

#121

VMware is still seen as "platinum" level in my org compared to Proxmox, which I guess to a certain degree is true. But the features in use are basic VMs with vMotion. Proxmox provides that out of the box. Granted we've had a couple issues with a corosync wobble on larger clusters which was fixed long-term by putting corosync on a separate set of switches. So far the Proxmox experience has been pretty flawless. We run…

First time I read Ceph and "pretty smooth" in the same sentence, it is really that easy now days? I have always thought it was pretty heavy on operational knowledge.

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

#122
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you work that a single sysadmin manages 3000 VMs?

We're running a migration from VMware to Red Hat Openshift Virt for one customer right now which is over 150,000 VMs. That's a big one, but five figure number of VMs is very typical. I gave a 5 min lightning talk about this a couple of years back: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/ People talking here about Proxmox make me laugh.

> People talking here about Proxmox make me laugh.

We have a (what I thought was) large nutanix setup at $dayjob for epic emr... we have like 10-12 sysadmins for ~500 servers (end user apps, and backend infra like Citrix), and even that seems like a lot.

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

#123
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…

Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical. If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto…

At my last enterprise gig (financial, ~85k employees), when I inventoried apps for cloud migration, there were around 1500 what I guess you'd call 'thick apps', and about 75% of them were some variation of "stubborn thick client Win32 (or .NET) apps that are mission critical". Mission critical to someone, anyway, and the number of apps with 1 or 2 users was kinda eye opening. Noone was going to fund the effort to rewrite them to be cloud native or web based, so there was a lot of lifting and shifting going on.

Many businesses might do better pushing everything to web apps, but SaaS introduces a whole bunch of other issues in highly regulated worlds like finance. It's not always the right answer.

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

#126
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical. If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto…

Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure.…

Couple of things (having lived in this world). The people running this stuff aren't by default stupid (well, not always), and not assuming they are helps with understanding.

First, someone has to pay to migrate apps, and as often as not the resources to do that aren't available. Sometimes you do the math and it doesn't make finacial sense to allocate those resources. And sometimes you just can't move apps. The vendor might not support vm/cloud/web deployment. Or, very common in manufacturing, you have an app that runs a machine and requires a very, very specific hw/sw environment to be supported.

Next, there's that whole regulated thing. We spend a lot of time in front of federal/national regulators explaining how we do things so that we don't screw up your mortgage or whatever. And those regulators take careful notes. So if I've spent the last 10 years explaining how we have this amazing VMWare deployment that ticks all the boxes, they're going to want some very, very detailed explanations of how HP VME or Proxmox or whatever is going to tick all the same boxes at least as good as VMWare did. And we're inviting a lot of scrutiny for a couple of years to make sure we did it right. It's a lot of work.

Sometimes you weigh everything, not just 'it costs less' or 'Broadcom are a bunch of assholes' or 'we don't want bros on HN to think we're suckers', and the answer is legitimately "the divorce isn't worth it".

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

#127
post #98
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure.…

Reminds me of setting up VMware Workstation with USB ISA cards to keep a line running. Ugh

I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!

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

#128
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…

This is what happens when you let business school grads do whatever they want to make money; particularly, gutting the company over the long run without having to make considerations for the people who did the actual value creation.

If you had to award bonds and/or equity and severance to the people you laid off in order to lay them off, you might have to look beyond the quarterly bump you got for treating customers, vendors, and employees like crap.

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

#129
post #124

I'm kind of glad this is all happening because it provides a nice example to point to when I try to explain why I don't want to be dependent on a vendor for these sorts of things.

For real, it's been the most validating of my use-open-source ethos than any other examples I can think of! For this open source isn't about the cost, it's about the vendor dependence/neutrality, and that's quite important when it becomes essentially a business requirement.
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