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Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

reuters.com

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Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#411

Post by monocasa »

rrdharan wrote: post #407
monocasa wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is in "derived from". Very few people would say NT is derived from some random drivers that nobody at Microsoft had a hand in writing. Taking existing code and having it form the foundation of a new kernel and claiming it as all closed source is quite a bit more obviously derived from that existing code open source code. "Derived from" is the core concept in the GPL; it actually doesn't use the word "link" at…

They did publish the source to the GPL drivers as well as to the vmklinux “adapter”, and I don’t believe either the core hypervisor or the ESX kernel were derived from or adapted from the Linux kernel. My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem. Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver…

The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago.

The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDIS would be a stretch too. Hell, I don't think NDISWrapper even was ever upstreamed.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#412

Post by rsync »

edgyquant wrote: post #365
TMWNN wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list. On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cl…

> a well-known online backup company and I don't What’s up with this? Did their company steal the name of the tool rsync?

In early 2006 I asked the original author and the current maintainer for their blessing to use the domain "rsync.net" for (re)incorporating the offsite backup component of the ISP I started in 2001[1].

I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.

[1] "JohnCompanies"

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#413

Post by treesknees »

nimbius wrote: post #299
treesknees wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

colour me unimpressed. VMWare cheerleaders haul out openstack as their touchstone example of how hard VM's are in linux but forget that VMWare pales in comparison to what Openstack is, which is an entire full-stack cloud hosting provider with accounting, DNS, tenant metering and network delegation, and support for k8s. Start comparing VMWare against Proxmox, which is an out of the box solution anyone can use and incl…

You've missed the point a bit, and for the record I prefer to deploy Proxmox/KVM over VMware most of the time, I'm not a VMware cheerleader.

There are plenty of features Proxmox doesn't have that VMware does have. I've ran into a few of them

1. No ability to pin vCPUs to physical CPUs from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and set affinity for each vCPU's PID by hand if you want that.

2. You can't provision a VM with more vCPUs than physical CPUs. For example if I have a host with 8 cores, the max vCPU I can allocate to a VM is 8. And yes, I did have a use case for this.

3. You can't configure networked serial ports from within Proxmox. You have to drop to bash and edit the vm configuration file by hand if you want that.

4. Lack of serial port concentrator, which means you can't really use networked serial ports reliably when migrating VMs across hosts in a Proxmox cluster. In the NFV world this can be pretty important.

5. You can't manage multiple Proxmox VM hosts from a single UI unless they're clustered, which in many cases isn't practical to do. vSphere will let you manage multiple independent hosts from a single pane of glass.

6. (at least historically) lack of RSS/multiqueue in virtio networking. vmxnet3 on VMware supports this and allows you to scale better. But I will admit it's been several years since I've had a look at this area.

Again I'm not a VMware cheerleader. I'm sure I could generate a list like this for what Proxmox has that VMware lacks. But it's incorrect to state that it includes every single feature of ESX.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#414

Post by rrdharan »

monocasa wrote: post #411
rrdharan wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did publish the source to the GPL drivers as well as to the vmklinux “adapter”, and I don’t believe either the core hypervisor or the ESX kernel were derived from or adapted from the Linux kernel. My impression is mostly people are annoyed that VMware drafted off the Linux driver ecosystem and used it to help bootstrap a proprietary ecosystem. Eventually (once they were successful) they published a native driver…

The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago. The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDI…

You’re referring to the Console OS which they also did open source (it was just Red Hat, sources available upon request).

The relationship between the Console OS and the Vmkernel / hypervisor was very similar to the relationship between Windows/Linux/macOS and VMware Workstation/Fusion, which were also proprietary software not derived from any of those OSes.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#416

Post by qeternity »

SulphurSmell wrote: post #382
TomVDB wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's all about ARR.

You argued the exact opposite? You're saying it's all about EBITDA...

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#417

Post by monocasa »

rrdharan wrote: post #414
monocasa wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that it was the original driver stack and the system didn't have a way to run at all without that Linux code until a handful of years ago. The ndis drivers are the opposite, because the closed source parts weren't written by people even thinking about open source code. No one could say they were derived from Linux. And Linux had it's own network driver stack so saying that Linux was derived from NDI…

You’re referring to the Console OS which they also did open source (it was just Red Hat, sources available upon request). The relationship between the Console OS and the Vmkernel / hypervisor was very similar to the relationship between Windows/Linux/macOS and VMware Workstation/Fusion, which were also proprietary software not derived from any of those OSes.

No, I'm referring to the vmklinux driver stack which has always had the purpose of running GPLed code directly by hypervisor without the consoleos mediating access to hardware.

Also, does 'they' actually include 'you'? Googling your username seems to connect you with vmware code pretty intimately.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#419

Post by Turbots »

TMWNN wrote: post #334
rsync wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating … your very comprehensive list does not contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about: workstation and fusion.

You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list. On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cl…

No post body was provided.

Re: Broadcom to acquire VMware for $61B

#420

Post by Turbots »

awill wrote: post #266
geodel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does "They are selling it in a big way" mean? I've never heard of it, and neither have any of the software engineers who are next to me at the office. RedHat OpenShift also bombed. They had a great start 11 years ago, but then didn't innovate, and worse, released a 2.0 that wasn't backward compatible. They used the 2.0 release as an excuse to kick off all free plans. What a joke. There's a reason Red Hat isn't a…

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