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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

#131
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's bad enough already, please no.

I think OP left off a /s tag; I read their post to be suggesting that they'd love to see Atlassian's products go away.

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

#132
post #61
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…

Another ex-VMware here (9 years on the Workstation team). It's so very sad to see... I grew up there from a career standpoint and I was proud to be there, loved being there, and I just don't recognize it anymore. I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned…

What do you think was the root cause?

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

#133
just for reference most enterprise backup products are not affected by this and will have vddk for backups and restores. if your backup product supports cross platform restores likely migration is not blocked for you, and many free / trial editions are likely generous enough for most small - medium shops to migrate on the free offering

if you already pay for an ent backup product check if it can restore from vmware backups to another platform and you’re prolly fine (for now)

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

#134
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's bad enough already, please no.

I think that's the point: poke more holes in its hull so it finally sinks.

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

#135
post #111
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 have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively? Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are ju…

SCVMM may technically have the thing you're missing from vCenter... but it's no vCenter. It is a grotesque, MMC plug-in-looking application where nothing quite makes sense to someone accustomed to vCenter or Hyper-V / FCM. Maybe if you're into Azure and slap another layer on top w/ Arc you'll have something that... is less icky but still isn't vCenter.

But, hey, The Reg says that VMware is now claiming that vSphere Standard was never really cancelled.

https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/09/02/vmware...

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

#136
post #91

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.

You are hallucinating and don't have any clue what you are talking about (VMware employee #10/11 -- I lost count, First Director of PM at VMware). VMwware sure as hell did not invent the hypervisor, and we were damn careful not to ever claim that. The early unique IP was how to enable a hypervisor to use dynamic translation where required to work around non-virtualizable x86 instructions, we also did well with how to…

What he said.

I was a VMware workstation user in the late 90s.

I worked on the VMware monitor team back in 2007-2008, which probably put my employee number way in the 1000s. Ole Agesen, Carl Waldspurger, and other early folks were still there.

Back then "kvm" meant a remote keyboard/video/mouse device. Linux kvm was announced in 2006, and released in 2007, and required hardware virtualization, which was first released with AMD Pacifica in 2006. Back then VMware's binary translation was locked up in patents, so in the free software world we had Xen, colinux, and other hacks.

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

#137
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another ex-VMware here (9 years on the Workstation team). It's so very sad to see... I grew up there from a career standpoint and I was proud to be there, loved being there, and I just don't recognize it anymore. I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned…

What do you think was the root cause?

It's always MBAs.

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

#138
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)? Yes? Do that for the hundreds of VMs, with a minimal downtime, bonus points for a dumb C-level on your neck. You would quickly learn what "just converting disk images" is not enough for moving between hypervisors. Just as an example: last yea…

>A minuscule in modern times 1TB+ VM took a whole weekend to be moved Why?

Because it involved a full backup - which wasn't anywhere fast on Proxmox, reinstalling the host, a full restore and then tinkering with the famous "runs everywhere (and not Java!)" boot shenaningans of that flavour of Linux OS.

And that was with the help of a backup-recovery solution which did support Proxmox, mere 6 months before that I would had stuck with an agent P2V migration of a VM to VM - which would had involved way more moving parts (can't P2V/V2V to a hypervisor which is not even installed yet) and more pain.

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

#139

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.

As someone who has worked in this space longer than a lot of people currently in industry have been alive, VMware predated KVM by a number of years. VMware Server was released in 2001... KVM was announced in 2006 and entered the Linux kernel mainline in 2007. XenSource was formed and commercialized the Xen project with XenServer in 2006, the first open source Xen Project release was in 2003.

So for all you can say, VMware released a product to market that provided a server-based hypervisor before any of their competitors. They're not the first hypervisor, but they're the first server-based hypervisor for X86.

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

#140
post #78

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.

I suspect the bigger problem is simply the fact that VDDK workflows are already defined and integrated into migration software packages. Otherwise, there are other options to copy virtual disks from ESXi hosts to other destinations that preserve sparseness and don't require shutting detaching or shutting down hosts using the disks, e.g., cloning a snapshot to an NFS server that supports sparse files.
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