Hope those new ex-C suite billionaires enjoy the damage they've done to a previously reputable brand and product 🤷♂️ glad I went with libvirt for virtualization instead 4 years ago when rebuilding my homelab
Edit: fix virtualization spelling error
VMware has been dying because of the Broadcom acquisition since last year. They basically looked at all the fortune 500s that used the tech and said "hey guys, our new business plan is to jack up the price 500% because your stack is dependent on us" and ever since there's been a ton of positions for migration to cloud services and OpenStack.
Companies shouldn't be going all in on one piece of software anyways. Mine is going to all Azure, and I can see the pain train coming from miles away when they decide to jack up pricing or tank service. Kind of surprised to see so many companies putting all their eggs into one basket.
Its most likely the non-technical employees being laid off. The accountants, lawyers and sales. Broadcom already has those departments, they dont need duplicates. The developers will probably stay though. i'm sure vmware products will continue to be just as unreliable as they have always been...
Its kinda suprising how bad virtualisation front end software is. I use libvirt at home as well, virt-manager locks up and crashes frequently, and throws obscure errors if i get the config wrong.
VMware workstation at work will crash weekly, taking down the entire host machine. Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin to keep it alive, and even still requires a lot of downtime.
Years ago, I had a job where we were moving from Citrix to esxi. I was so excited because I had bought into the hype and Citrix had annoyed me to no end. 4 months into the migration project, we hit a major roadblock. Open a ticket - no response. Reach out to our contact for escalation after a week - no response. Our director reached out to the high level person on the VMware side of the deal - no response.
At least with Citrix we usually got a response within 24 hours with information or being told they were escalating. We stuck with Citrix because our director at least didn't fall into the sunk cost fallacy.
Disagree on vCenter/ESXi. Having a competent design, build, and initial deployment are usually the success factors. I've had ESXi hosts and vCenter that only need to go offline for mandatory security patching, and even then, it's easily covered by vMotion.
Agree that VMware Workstation is awful.
I had nothing to do with the design and build, or current management. It could well be that my experience is unique. But its not been positive unfortunately. :(
Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin
It's weird how I've worked in Large-scale Enterprise shops for more than the last decade, and ESX since about 4 has required absolutely no break-fix other than patching and whatever the underlying hardware needed. We're talking thousands of VMs, and flawless metro-vmotion of hundreds of hot-and-running streaming VMs at times, and over years. To see what you've written, it could be a very different product from the one I've used, as I've seen none of what you mention.
I hope you can see the same reliability one day, from the product where you've migrated.
I dont do the admin side of it, but as a user we see frequent outages (had one today :( ). I hope to one day I see the same reliability youve experienced :(
My experience as well. Yes there are problems sometimes but across 1k+ hypervisors that's going to happen.
Well, sounds like VMWare is dead now then.
Hope those new ex-C suite billionaires enjoy the damage they've done to a previously reputable brand and product 🤷♂️ glad I went with libvirt for virtualization instead 4 years ago when rebuilding my homelab
Edit: fix virtualization spelling error
VMware has been dying because of the Broadcom acquisition since last year. They basically looked at all the fortune 500s that used the tech and said "hey guys, our new business plan is to jack up the price 500% because your stack is dependent on us" and ever since there's been a ton of positions for migration to cloud services and OpenStack.
Companies shouldn't be going all in on one piece of software anyways. Mine is going to all Azure, and I can see the pain train coming from miles away when they decide to jack up pricing or tank service. Kind of surprised to see so many companies putting all their eggs into one basket.
Its most likely the non-technical employees being laid off. The accountants, lawyers and sales. Broadcom already has those departments, they dont need duplicates. The developers will probably stay though. i'm sure vmware products will continue to be just as unreliable as they have always been...
Its kinda suprising how bad virtualisation front end software is. I use libvirt at home as well, virt-manager locks up and crashes frequently, and throws obscure errors if i get the config wrong.
VMware workstation at work will crash weekly, taking down the entire host machine. Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin to keep it alive, and even still requires a lot of downtime.
Years ago, I had a job where we were moving from Citrix to esxi. I was so excited because I had bought into the hype and Citrix had annoyed me to no end. 4 months into the migration project, we hit a major roadblock. Open a ticket - no response. Reach out to our contact for escalation after a week - no response. Our director reached out to the high level person on the VMware side of the deal - no response.
At least with Citrix we usually got a response within 24 hours with information or being told they were escalating. We stuck with Citrix because our director at least didn't fall into the sunk cost fallacy.
Disagree on vCenter/ESXi. Having a competent design, build, and initial deployment are usually the success factors. I've had ESXi hosts and vCenter that only need to go offline for mandatory security patching, and even then, it's easily covered by vMotion.
Agree that VMware Workstation is awful.
I had nothing to do with the design and build, or current management. It could well be that my experience is unique. But its not been positive unfortunately. :(
It's weird how I've worked in Large-scale Enterprise shops for more than the last decade, and ESX since about 4 has required absolutely no break-fix other than patching and whatever the underlying hardware needed. We're talking thousands of VMs, and flawless metro-vmotion of hundreds of hot-and-running streaming VMs at times, and over years. To see what you've written, it could be a very different product from the one I've used, as I've seen none of what you mention.
I hope you can see the same reliability one day, from the product where you've migrated.
I dont do the admin side of it, but as a user we see frequent outages (had one today :( ). I hope to one day I see the same reliability youve experienced :(
My experience as well. Yes there are problems sometimes but across 1k+ hypervisors that's going to happen.