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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#221

Post by gregmac »

treesknees wrote: post #183
nimbius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory mi…

> KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough. VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, deleg…

> VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, delegate different permissions and roles to users/groups, manage upgrades, interact with PowerShell and other APIs, it has integration into Dell and Cisco solutions, all sorts of additional features you won't find running CentOS and KVM without adding more 3rd party software on top and cobbling it together.

This is it, really. For big companies this kind of stuff is important.

And "cobbling it together" is very much understating the effort involved to keep it running: eventually you'll upgrade one of the components and it will break something, because you didn't read the release notes of an upstream dependency that mentioned a breaking change that affects your particular setup.

Having the vendor (vmware) provide this as a delivered, tested, supported solution is so much easier.

Similarly, I suspect it would be significantly simpler to find IT firms and/or hire individuals with VMware knowledge than it would be to find the equivalent on KVM + Cockpit + the dozen other components you need.

Note: I'm not saying this is right or the way things should be, but simply pointing out the "enterprise" perspective. Boring technology is safe.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#222

Post by colechristensen »

vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their website, but I'm curious to know a bit more.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#223

Post by joedissmeyer »

laura2013 wrote: post #214
vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

I can only hope they let VMware operate independently and continue growing like they've done in the past decade.

It is best to set your expectations extremely low for this type of acquisition. My personal opinion: Broadcom is _buying_ its way into the Enterprise technology space by hook or crook. When Broadcom acquires a company their M.O. is to immediately install finance-driven leadership and focus strictly on cost cutting measures coupled with accelerated profit-making endeavors. The only thing VMware employees have to look forward to in the near future are layoffs, all types of cost reductions, team consolidations (i.e. you do more work with less resources) and severely reduced R&D. And the only thing that VMware customers have to look forward to are increased VMware costs, more vendor lock-in, reduced satisfaction with support, and almost zero innovation.

Again, this is just my opinion so I could end up be wrong. Or maybe I am just in a bad mood today... meh

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#224

Post by foobiekr »

treesknees wrote: post #183
nimbius wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but thats just it, this argument only ever works if you dont care about performance or features and believe the marketing. You make eggs, and your target fixation only allows you to see eggs, so these companies hold some mysterious value to you. KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare and handles migrations snapshots imports and exports without additional byzantine license agreements or mandatory mi…

> KVM performance is orders of magnitude better than VMWare Do you have any sources for this? I worked at a company developing NFV appliances, we always had much higher network throughput on VMware than we did using KVM without using some type of convoluted vswitch alternative or PCI passthrough. VMware isn't just a hypervisor, it's an entire ecosystem of VM management and orchestration. You can tie it into AD, deleg…

Same. VMware leagues better than the various horrible Openstack deployments some customers want to use.

I have in depth knowledge of kvm and the issue isn’t kvm it’s everything else.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#225

Post by foobiekr »

nousermane wrote: post #120
ghc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for a second, imagine a company that isn't a software company, but needs software to run its business. Think manufacturing, logistics, shipping, construction, food (industrial scale egg production, for example) etc. There's a lot of companies like that out there...in fact it's almost all of them. Those companies run all their boring, essential software (accounting, ERPs, etc.) on VMWare, Oracle, Azure, etc. Sinc…

Exactly. Most "enterprise" software competes with a team of 3 doing it all in excel. At this rate, $100k/yr is a bargain.

When people talk enterprise they are talking 2000+ person companies. They are not doing their ERP payroll etc using excel.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#226

Post by hodgesrm »

vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

VMware learned their lesson from OpenStack, where emerging upstream technology threatened their virtualization monopoly. They also were forced to go in this direction by their enterprise customers, who are very dependent themselves on open source technology.

One of the opportunities at VMware is monetize the open source investment more effectively, especially Kubernetes. I still don't totally understand how they plan to do that but wish them (you) all well.

Disclaimer: Former employee of VMware

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#228

Post by geodel »

colechristensen wrote: post #222
vkat wrote: post #196

For anyone who doesn't know, VMware has doubled down in open source in the past 3 years, especially Kubernetes. I don't think Broadcom really understands how investment in open source works or for that matter cares. Half of my org of ~500 engineers works on upstream projects. Disclaimer: Current employee of VMware

I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their websi…

They have this VMware Tanzu platform which is like Red Hat Openshift. A heavily customized application packaging , deployment management solution on top of Kubernetes. It can be deployed on any cloud and on-prem DCs. So kinda multi cloud bet. They are selling it in a big way.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#229

Post by indigodaddy »

mvdwoord wrote: post #197
999900000999 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels way too pessimistic, VMware got big before open source virtualization took off. I imagine someone could use docker instead of VMware in most cases, and if that's not possible then hire some people to make it so. Vendor lockin is a scary thing, the people who are really going to hurt here are mega super corps who are now going to have to pay out the nose. If you're a smaller company, you should be moving to…

Ever tried to manage 50.000 production vms? Whith a mix of applications which cannot be easily containerized... Vcenter, vrops, NSX, etc . You could reinvent, build in house. Or you can buy VMware with support. What would the regulator prefer? But, this does offer incentive for outsiders to create competitive stacks.

This 1000%. And this applies to a huge percentage of very large orgs/ISPs/telecoms/fortune 500s, etc. VMware for the most part “just works” and is entrenched in these companies, much like AD.

If you are rolling your own replacement of VMware, what happens if a couple (or even say 20 out of your 5000) of your “parent” hosts go down. Will all of your guests auto-migrate to healthy hosts?

And we are not talking about Kubernetes or similar here. That is very different. You don’t roll your own VMware alternative. You just use VMware.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#230

Post by depaya »

yobbo wrote: post #140
jjice wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a tax for stupidity and laziness I pay a barber to cut my hair. Sure, I could learn how to cut my own hair, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. I pay a mechanic to fix my car for serious repair. Sure, I could learn how to replace a transmission, but there's a good chance I'll spend a lot of time and still mess it up. If these (and the endless examples of paying profe…

> I pay a barber to cut my hair. Meaningless analogy. Here some other meaningless analogies: Why would anyone ever own a frying pan? Not only do you need to rent a stove, you also need to hire a chef to cook with frying pan, you need a station with chefs that prep ingredients and so on. Just go to a restaurant. You pay a mechanic to fix your car? Why would anyone ever own a car when you can rent a car whenever you ne…

There are other good replies to you, but one other thing I'll add: for a lot of companies it is much much easier to pay a steady $xxx/month than it is to pay a large amount up front and budget for unknown variable costs down the road.
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