Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 430 posts

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#241

Post by vel0city »

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…

Why would you pay for municipal water supply? Just laziness. Put a well in instead and maintain it.

And when putting in the well, why would you pay someone else to dig it for you? Just laziness. Dig it yourself!

And then when digging the well, why would you rent the drill? Just laziness, outsourcing the maintenance and ownership costs to someone else.

And then why bother buying the drill at some market where they're then manufacturing the drill for you? Pure laziness. Just make the drill yourself!

Or maybe, you just go with a trusted service instead of learning how to manufacture digging equipment when all you really want is running water.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#242

Post by scarface74 »

unabridged wrote: post #52

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

You should always outsource any part of your business that is not part of your core competency and doesn’t give you a competitive advantage - ie “the undifferentiated heavy lifting”.

I worked at companies as a software developer from 1996 - 2012 that had to manage their own infrastructure. But today, the only company that I worked for back then that would be managing their own infrastructure today is the one that has mainframes and hardware that handle the backends for lottery systems across the US.

By 2012, there was a slow shift to the cloud.

I first was exposed to how large enterprises worked in 2017. I was hired to lead two green field implementations. But at the last minute they decided to “move to the cloud” neither they nor I knew anything about the cloud. They hired consultants and a Managed Service Provider. Of course the internal IT department was vigilantly defending their turf and the “consultants” were old school Netops folks who only knew how to “lift and shift” and duplicate an on prem infrastructure and all of the red tape to the cloud and of course it was more expensive than just using a colo.

I spent the next six months after the decision was made studying AWS and getting a certification not because I value certifications (I don’t). But it gave me a guided learning path to know what I didn’t know. It did open my eyes to what I wanted to do - work with companies - specifically developers and operations to show them how to actually take advantage of cloud and not just do lift and shifts - ie true “Devops”.

I left that company and went to a small startup for two years where I learned everything I know about “cloud application modernization” and then ended up in Professional Services at AWS.

Until I started working with large enterprises and government organizations from the consulting side, I never appreciated the concerns of large enterprises and how they aren’t in the “tech” business and it does make sense to outsource that knowledge - not to ProServe we don’t do that type of work - to external partners.

As far as VMWare, as silly as it sounds on the surface. Companies actually use VMWare to manage hybrid infrastructure on the cloud and on prem as a “single pane of glass”.

https://aws.amazon.com/vmware/

I personally don’t deal with those implementations. I stick with app dev.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#244

Post by WanderPanda »

hodgesrm wrote: post #226
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…

Given the situation of Docker, it doesn’t look good for the monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I‘m not too familiar with Kubernetes)?

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#245

Post by scarface74 »

yobbo wrote: post #181
hnarn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that busi…

People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs. Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on. If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference. The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enter…

It doesn’t matter if Google Apps itself is superior. Google is not exactly known for its enterprise support. You also can’t count on the long term focus of Google. You know when you buy into the MS ecosystem you are going to get great enterprise support, they don’t have the attention span of a crack addled flea like Google does, it’s going to integrate well with the rest of their products, you get deep discounts from bundling.

Specs and benchmarks only matter to geeks.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#246

Post by scarface74 »

amenod wrote: post #199
hnarn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, the parent comment is on to something. "Brand name" enterprise software is a buoy that certain types of careerists handcuff themselves to Or maybe, just maybe, really big corporations that make software solutions are often really big because their solutions are, if not feature-wise the absolute best, by far the most stable and reliable? If one were to buy your argument, that would be like saying that busi…

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (th…

Gmail in no shape form or fashion a “market leader” in the enterprise.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#247

Post by outside1234 »

WanderPanda wrote: post #244
hodgesrm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given the situation of Docker, it doesn’t look good for the monetization of Kubernetes, or am I missing something (I‘m not too familiar with Kubernetes)?

The cloud vendors, that cooperatively are building Kubernetes, are making bank off of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is fine.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#249

Post by scarface74 »

vel0city wrote: post #239
amenod wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail is a market leader only because it is good enough (and at the start it was even better than competition) and because it was free - and still is for some cases. Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. Otherwise, I'm not sure I would put Google in the mix with Oracle / MS and others. They are firmly non-enterprise, in that it is notoriously difficult to get any support from them, even if you are paying (th…

> Can't comment on Google Apps, never used them. > They are firmly non-enterprise So you acknowledge you don't really have knowledge of the core enterprise suite Google sells to enterprises, but at the same time you're certain they're non-enterprise? Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps) is absolutely enterprise. They definitely have enterprise support contracts, and the few times I've had issues while…

> Google Workspace (the new-ish name for Google Apps.

You hit the nail on the head why enterprises stay away from Google. They are going to lose focus on it as soon as no one internally can justify maintaining it to enhance their careers and show “scope” and “impact”.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#250

Post by jodrellblank »

caymanjim wrote: post #59

I didn't know VMware was still a thing. What do they even do? Who uses any of it?

You can get three Dell servers and a VMware install ISO and have a hypervisor with a web interface, a distributed cluster filesystem replicating between the nodes, VM failover in case of hardware failure, live migration of VMs between nodes for maintenance (state and/or storage), a centralised update system, VLAN aware guest networking, isolated management networking, all up and running in production in half a day - less if you someone has already opened the boxes and racked it all up before hand. Without any great technical skills needed to setup any of it.

With a bit more planning and a larger environment and more licensing, and not much more tech skills, you'll have redundant trunked network links, it will migrate VMs between nodes to balance load, integrate with the node IPMI management to power hosts down when the load is light and power them on when the load increases, and for enough money on licensing it will keep two VMs on different host nodes in sync down to the CPU instruction in case one host fails nobody will notice. Also with not much tech skills.

And when I say "not much tech skills" you do need to understand enough about computing to plan it and cable things in properly and deal with VLANs and subnets and ISOs and DNS, routing, and VMware's way of doing networking, and the basics. But you need to know approximately nothing about /etc/ or XML or YAML, cluster quorums, elections, filesystem locking, heartbeat or watchdog services, distributed consensus protocols, package management, LVM, systemd, hypervisor subsystems, PAM modules, Kerberos, webservers, databases, Unix permissions, or etc.

I'm under no illusions that it's cheap, or bug-free, or that you never need to SSH in and poke it ever, or that it's the right thing for every task, or that it's the modern way. But it's an amazing packaging up of a lot of things into a worldbeating product, and its integration with Dell specifically - Dell hosts, Dell EMC storage - is such a good fit that makes me surprised and sad that Dell would sell VMware.

Post reply on HN