Posted by josephcsible 13 hours ago
There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.
I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned a lot about how different people approach the challenges of running a company and listening to employees.
Pre-Broadcom, sort of toward the end of my time there, there was a lot of unintended self-sabotage that didn't need to happen. We lost people that we shouldn't and shot ourselves in the foot for some really dumb reasons, which just a bit more coordination could have prevented. There were some innovative ideas that got lost in all this, and I believe could have fueled VMware's product line and put it in the right positions for where the sector ultimately went. Alas.
Avago's business model is to acquire cash cow businesses and then milk them dry. These VMware changes are consistent with that model.
You will make an insane amount of money and make the world a much better place!
For a visual representation of this see the "Edgar suit" from the movie Men in Black. :)
Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that.
How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways.
Some people just need to learn through pain.
Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't feel pity for people like that: I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.
I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.
Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.
And I was like... what virtual host?
What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack.
A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.
Sure, a type-1 hypervisor like vSphere is technically better since there's no host OS creating unmanageable contention and if you have guests with higher performance requirements then yeah it's settling for something half-assed.
But in reality, we have some similar shit to a "fax server" that has manually set up weird manufacturer printer settings (local admins tried to be automated/distributed) and old third-party software libraries that "infects" a system globally (2 versions of that library cannot co-exist on a computer).
If that piece of crap can be contained on a VM, as long as it's contained and keeps trucking after a restart/powercycle everyone is happy. What kind of VM container hosts it is really secondary.
(What the software in question is can probably be inferred from the comment, the software is liked by users at the client so it's not going away)
If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)
I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
Problem with incentives, I would say.
I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.
Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things. But we enjoy the thing in totality.
That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.
Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.
> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...
Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.
IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.
All automatable, I'm sure.
Love proxmox now.
Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.
Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually something that can be dealt with separately.
A friend of mine said that VMWare was still the best VM platform due to the ecosystem that built around it, so it'd be nice if it could be preserved for later resurrection.
I know time moves on quickly, but it'd be a shame to lose it entirely.
I know this is promoting criminality, but there's something wrong with society if this is deemed criminal.
Disclaimer: don't (be a hero)
Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?
It's sad to watch these things slowly perish