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

381–390 of 430 posts

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#381

Post by mathattack »

TomVDB wrote: post #216
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

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore. Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street c…

Consistent with my experience as a customer of other Broadcom purchases.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#382

Post by SulphurSmell »

TomVDB wrote: post #216
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

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore. Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street c…

This is exactly correct. Hock (love him or hate him) knows exactly what he is doing, and is entirely unapologetic. He looks only at margin. You have $10B revenue stream at 2% profit margin? Hock will happily cut that in half for a 10% margin he can depend on. It's all about ARR. Great for shareholders and those with a mountain of RSU's... but not so great for employees. Was at CA...saw it happen.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#383

Post by tlamponi »

scarface74 wrote: post #380
tlamponi wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxmox provides enterprise support staffed mostly by devs and engineers, and not some crappy outsourced service asking you the three questions from their predefined support handling sheet. It is also deployed in many many enterprise and government settings.

Again, you’re arguing about technology which is besides the point. A CTO in the enterprise is going to make the safe choice. Also, notice when you go to VMWare’s home page you see “referenceable clients” - ie well known companies that use the software? This is “Enterprise Marketing 101”. Besides, I can throw a stick and find someone who knows VMWare. As a (hypothetical) CTO of a non tech company, I don’t want “suppor…

This is my first reply to you, so how can I argue against your point again? Also it seems I can count myself lucky to work under a chief technology officer that actually thinks about technology and also understands actual benefits, not the ones just looking at the gardner quadrant of "who paid the most for pr". Besides that:

How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and at their bidding, their standard support reply is to install from scratch as otherwise the won't look at the setup. If you don't look at the technology POV (in addition to others) the choices probably won't be the best.

Notice how on Proxmox.com there's a testimonial page that links to enterprise and gov't customers, how's that different "Enterprise Marketing"?

Proxmox also has reseller partner all over the world: https://proxmox.com/en/partners/reseller

So we got enterprise support, world wide enterprise reseller network, enterprise features available for all, with or without support, not sure how much more enterprise vibes one can get..

vmware isn't really moving forwards since a while, the acquisition by broadcom won't help that either IMO, but sure they're currently still able to pay "bribe" some CTOs or sales people lunch, so they got that edge going for them, won't be enough to stay the #1 in the long run though.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#384

Post by bluGill »

nobody9999 wrote: post #117
sbarre wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big companies are starting to learn that free open source can be supported in house Sure but the problem here is can you find and retain the people who can do that work, if you are a big lumbering "un-interesting" company where tech is not your core focus? In most cases the answer is "no". There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importa…

>There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services. This. As a tech person with decades of professional services experience in the tech space, I couldn't agree more. Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities hire professional services (this isn't limi…

Those are all valid points. However those are also the counter argument: eventually the cost of all those services is more than the cost to do it in house, or find a competitor.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#385

Post by halo37253 »

bityard wrote: post #292
influx wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run esxi on my (admittedly beefy), home server. It is a fantastic piece of software that can be completely controlled through a web browser. I can easily spin up a couple of VMs, interact with the install without having to use a remote virtual keyboard/video switch, and the whole thing is rock solid. I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as l…

You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone is certainly miles better. Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is th…

As Someone that runs Proxmox and ESXI.

That is hardly true.

The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.

Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.

Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.

Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#386

Post by halo37253 »

unixhero wrote: post #368
nyx wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used both, though not for anything especially complicated. Your guess about the polish level is correct; ESXi blows Proxmox out of the water interface-wise, especially for some specific tasks like configuring networks or managing PCI passthrough devices. As far as "more limited" goes, I can't say I noticed much of a feature discrepancy, although being open and just sitting atop KVM, Proxmox doesn't have any of t…

Proxmox also has native container workload virtualization with LXC container support built right in and ZFS filesystem. Two killer features.

You are better off running a VM for dockers. That way that entire VM is portable.

The ZFS Filesystem is a nice feature

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#387

Post by sbarre »

bluGill wrote: post #384
nobody9999 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a reason major software vendors provide professional services. If their customers could reliably hire and (most importantly) retain experts on their own, they wouldn't need professional services. This. As a tech person with decades of professional services experience in the tech space, I couldn't agree more. Generally, there are three reasons why corporate entities hire professional services (this isn't limi…

Those are all valid points. However those are also the counter argument: eventually the cost of all those services is more than the cost to do it in house, or find a competitor.

Yeah but again, it's most often not about the money...

I work for a large enterprise and we pay or retain vendors to do things for us all the time, at a much higher cost than it would be to do it in house, because we cannot find/hire/retain the expertise to do it ourselves, and at some point we need to get the work done so that other more mission-critical work can happen to drive the business forward.

Plus, there is value in paying someone to make the find/hire/retain part their problem instead of ours.

We buy the reliability of getting the work done in a timely manner, on top of the work itself.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#388

Post by scarface74 »

tlamponi wrote: post #383
scarface74 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you’re arguing about technology which is besides the point. A CTO in the enterprise is going to make the safe choice. Also, notice when you go to VMWare’s home page you see “referenceable clients” - ie well known companies that use the software? This is “Enterprise Marketing 101”. Besides, I can throw a stick and find someone who knows VMWare. As a (hypothetical) CTO of a non tech company, I don’t want “suppor…

This is my first reply to you, so how can I argue against your point again ? Also it seems I can count myself lucky to work under a chief technology officer that actually thinks about technology and also understands actual benefits, not the ones just looking at the gardner quadrant of "who paid the most for pr". Besides that: How vmware is a safe choice is beyond me, their proprietary so one is mostly locked in and a…

This gets back to the other boogeyman “lock in”.

The average corporation is dependent on 110 SaaS offerings.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1233538/average-number-s...

No matter what it is a pain to migrate. Corps aren’t being bribed. They are making the safe choice.

For instance even if some unknown cloud provider is “better”, if something goes wrong, the CTO is going to be questioned. If Azure goes down and it’s already an MS shop, people aren’t going to question whether it was a bad decision.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#389

Post by mushbino »

TomVDB wrote: post #216
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

After being acquired by Avago, Broadcom ceased to be a single company. It’s a conglomerate of entities/BUs that are explicitly asked to NOT work cooperatively, so that each entity can be sold at moment’s notice if it doesn’t deliver the right financial results anymore. Chances are that the current leadership doesn’t care about how VMware operates, as long as it cuts enough costs to increase metrics that Wall Street c…

It's amazing our system rewards all of those things. Cutting r&d, cutting jobs, cutting downstream contractors, using profit for stock buybacks, etc

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#390

Post by AtlasBarfed »

joedissmeyer wrote: post #223
laura2013 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So Broadcom is just a better run IBM? IBM buys whatever product it wants for a foothold, milks it, chucks it out.

It used to be Product X becomes Websphere Product X, then disappears from their salespeople's lips about 5 years later.

Post reply on HN