Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
I really want to use Nutanix but they are the same price as VMware VCF and they don’t support my existing hardware so I’d have to buy all new servers, just to pay the same price.
Proxmox ftw
At first, I thought the products you were listening were “good softwares going to die”. I was like “wut. Proxmox is fucking epic.”
Proxmox is amazing.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
Right? That’s what encouraged me to sail the high seas.
The RIAA special
I think it had something to do with Broadcom wanting to go for a few big customers and don’t want to deal with the small fry anymore.
It’s a valid business strategy to kick your low-paying customers to the curb and focus on the big spenders. Did the same with my little PC business back in the day. The small fry cost shitloads to support and are generally more bitchy.
But HOLY shit did Broadcom kick 'em down. I’ve never seen such an in-your-face business move to squeeze the cash cow as hard as possible, tank the company, grab the money and run.
People can say, and have been from day-1, “I’ll never use their shit again!” That’s fine with Broadcom, it’s literally their plan.
Surely no competitors will grow in the small and medium business market to eventually be a competitor…
Broadcom knows they bought a dying platform. Their strategy is to isolate the customers incapable of ever migrating and charge them as close to near bankruptcy as possible. They’ll get their initial return on investment in under 5 years and then eventually just let VMware die because new businesses that are still nimble all moved to other platforms anyway. They’ll hit Lotto tickets with a few whales and keep 5-10 devs on to patch stuff for those whales and print 100-1000x return on costs in perpetuity.
That is … bleak.
I suspect you are correct.
RemindMe in 5 years
#I know that doesn’t work hereYou mean in 3.5 years because they purchased VMWare in 2023 and according to analysts they’re already well on their way to recovering and profiting from the 61 billion dollar merger
(And that god that bot doesn’t work here)
I think I’ve seen people using this on Lemmy, but I’m not sure if it works: https://fedi.tips/is-there-a-reminder-bot-for-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/
Capitalism is the woooooorst…
It’s also the business model of Oracle I think and they are wildly successful.
Who are Oracle’s customers?
They have some very big military contracts
Anyone who uses Oracle DB or virtualbox in a corporate environment
I’m forced to work with Oracle databases, FML I hate it so much
Why? I get that the company is awful, but the database is quite good, isn’t it?
Not only is it worse than Postgres by almost every metric, they actively sue people who criticize it. I.e. even Hacker News took this post down: https://archive.is/ryseO
MBAs
The CIA
Project Oracle babyyyy
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
Sounds like a them problem if their software won’t refuse to update without an active contract. If it keeps working and being able to be updated then it’s on them.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t do updates. This is just to scare people into paying.
The article says the letter demanded they uninstall updates to the point before their contract ended.
It also says this same letter has been going out to users days after their contracts expired, regardless of whether any updates had been installed and even if the user had migrated to another service.
Exactly, if their software keeps working and allowing updates and they don’t know what the end user is doing then it’s a them problem. If they didn’t bake in telemetrics to know what version each license key is using then it’s on them.
They probably have a good cease and desist on Broadcomm for automatically installing updates on their system against the contract.
That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.
The strategy, from day-1, was to dump low-tier customers and squeeze the big dogs. They knew this wasn’t a viable long-term plan. Broadcom knew they had captive customers in the large enterprise space who would take years to migrate. They want to rape all they can, cash out and kill the product someday. But hey! As long as they can squeeze, they will do so.
I mean, fuck me, Oracle is still in business and that’s the model Broadcom is going for.
Yeah. Let’s not get started on fucking Oracle. We’ll be here all day. Or year, possibly.
Broadcom is doing an excellent job convincing their customers to stop using VMware. Such a good job that at Red Hat we’ve shifted strategies with OpenShift Virtualization to pick up those customers. For the longest time our Virt play was just a stop gap to containers, now it’s a full blown product.
Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.
I stupidly bought a VMWare Workstation license when I first got on the Windows 11 train. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and all that rubbish. My experience was such shit that I abandoned it all for Linux and Virtualbox.
Fuck Microsoft, fuck VMWare.
qemu ftw.
I was a happy camper with Hyper-V on server operating systems, was always a PITA on desktop versions though. Wonder if that’s changed. (Doubt.)
NUTANIX AHV BITCHES! Download The Nutanix Bible and start learning it.
Very surprised that this is the only comment in this thread mentioning Nutanix.
I realize there’s all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I’ve got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I’m using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that’s deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn’t use it if there’s a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don’t be afraid of it, it’s worth the look. Especially for a single node like you’re talking, no reason not to in my opinion.
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
- for large installations, it never scaled as well as VMware. We saved millions on licenses when we switched, but had to buy a lot more hardware. In particular we were doing software QA where we needed many VMs but they didn’t need much resources, and hyper-v just couldn’t scale in that direction. More standard use cases probably won’t have this problem, plus this was 4 years ago so I don’t know if anything has changed
- for special case installations, hyper-v was a horrible experience on my laptop. I had the resources, but couldn’t pass through usb devices, and it kept messing up my networking.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen Nutanix mentioned at all here tbh. Direct competitor to VMware.
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
Another vote for Hyper-V.
I’d say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn’t overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren’t really a Linux person, then I’d wager hyper v is the right direction.
Yeah, if you’re used to Microsoft servers and have a Microsoft network it integrates really nicely and is great to manage. Plus, it’s free.
Its not free. You need to license the base windows server. They killed the free hyper-v server offering.
That’s basically free compared to vmware
It’s also basically free compared to a mountain of gold. But xen and proxmox and virt-manager and a bunch of others can be really free.
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.
Isn’t VMWare out of support anyway?
Not that I fault the users of it - a perpetual license is a perpetual licence and good luck with the C&D, but there are other options. Though I only know of OpenShift on RHEL.
Remember:
There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses
This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn’t exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.
Proxmox is the way to go in businesses right now to replace Vmware
And virt-manager is pretty solid for hobbyist tinkering too.
Yeah I’d second that. It’s good for discovering valid settings as you get start, and then once you want to do more complicated stuff, the XML option view becomes useful, and then if you want to try on CLI after all you can start using virsh to administer the same VMs.
At least that’s how I progressed through the stages as I started messing with a Windows VM for a game that doesn’t lend itself to hosting on Linux natively.
Our move to XCP-ng Hypervisors with XOA has been a great experience.
I would argue for Apache Cloudstack personally.
Though I have used and like Proxmox as well.
There is a KVM equivalent on MacOS, Apple’s Hypervisor virtualization framework.
KVM is just the kernel side, you need QEMU (for example) on userland. On MacOS you have now UTM.
The not owning anything is ridiculous. We need clear regulation that makes it so companies cant do bullcrap like this. If I buy something, I own it, period.
100% agreed.
Here’s a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
We told them to go fuck themselves. We retain lawyer specifically in case we have legal concerns, and the way we use their products, price jack up would be so extreme that it’s entirely worth risking it while we migrate away.
What would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
You can do live migration like that with qemu, I do it all the time with Proxmox, which uses qemu under the hood.
You’re not wrong in 2025. But VMware was able do it in 2003.
True. Your response just seemed to imply that the two aren’t comparable in 2025, and they absolutely are.
No problem. I just thought I had covered that when I said:
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
This being said I don’t think even in 2025 proxmox and things like vsphere are comparable. XCP-ng I do think is though. It’s open source and matches features.
So, it seems that companies’ infrastructure was already entrenched with VMware, and now Broadcom is trying to leverage the fact that VMware is already being used to squeeze more money out of its acquisition?
At this point, why would anyone do business with broadcom at all?
Because they make all the cheap ethernet chips that go on motherboards.
Other than that, can’t think of a good reason.