As an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible before its rapidly decreasing value goes to zero.
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.
Another ex-VMware here (9 years on the Workstation team). It's so very sad to see... I grew up there from a career standpoint and I was proud to be there, loved being there, and I just don't recognize it anymore.
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.
I have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored.
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.
I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?
I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.
Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.
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 actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.
> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows...
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.
Does your company have a ton of thick-client apps? I feel like so many workloads are on the web right now and thick clients are slowly becoming a thing of the past - but maybe in Enterprise there are still stubborn thick client Win32 apps that are mission critical.
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.)
Most high-security environments (banks, govt agencies etc) have a large on-prem footprint. Then there's specialised industries like manufacturing, science and engineering who typically have a bunch of embedded systems, often running ancient versions of Windows or something that needs to talk to a local ancient server. And many old companies have tons of legacy apps which are a PITA to migrate to newer infrastructure. So yeah, plenty of folks out there using omprem gear, it's kinda the reason why Broadcom is able to what it's doing - lots of suckers out there who're married yo vmware and can't get a divorce.
I've lead roughly $20M in cloud migration projects in the last two years away from vmware to cloud services as replacements. Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.
> Just insane what MBAs are willing to do to a product to squeeze short term profits. Even more insane that this country largely sees these people as a benefit to society and not the vultures they are.
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. :-)
Well, it's not actually a trap, since it's not the management who pays the price - it is investors, employees and the society at large that do, while the MBAs have already moved on to their next victim.
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.
The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.
I think that it boils down to that opex is considered speedy, flexible and agile. Whereas capex reflects slow/glacial but also stable.
This is also why lease exists, why we have freelance contracts vs employee contracts for indeterminate amounts of time.
> 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.
Proxmox been great for decades. I used it back in 2011 when I was sysadmin for https://sahanafoundation.org/eden/ - we had multiple live instance running for the site, wiki, translation, GIS. Just when kvm was getting support too (not openvz) so it was nice an snappy running on some donated poweredge 2950's (thanks zen.co.uk!)
Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.
So the Linux qemu-img tool can still convert VM disk images from .vmdk into formats compatible with all the other hypervisors. Is there something more to the process of VM migration from VMWare than just using this tool (and manually creating the proper virtual hardware profile in the new hypervisor)?
Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually something that can be dealt with separately.
The problem is how you access the disks that are sitting on a VMware server. VDDK allows you to connect and read them (in raw format, in fact) at a reasonable speed, and also understands sparseness and change block tracking.
Can someone exfiltrate the VMWare source so that it can be distributed at a later date once Avago (Broadcom) cease?
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.
IIRC the guy who wrote a hypervisor for OpenBSD found severe vulnerabilities in VMware. It doesn't surprise me and I don't think a quasi-legal fork would be a worthwhile avenue.
When one becomes too comfortable with one vendor way of doing things, you end up paying 10's of millions of dollars in the end. Move the work loads to KVM, and invest in your own employees, and you can migrate off of VMware easily.
> I am of the school of thought that even if Broadcom gives VMware Standard away free for a year, it would be hard to convince customers that they need to stick with the platform
Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?
We run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.
This is the only POSSIBLE rational argument for this approach. 4x price, on 1/2 the customer base is still 2x revenue with less customers to deal with. They want to keep the Big Corp clients that are happy to pay.
Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?
It's been years i played with Proxmox. Back then it wasn't as easy as Vmware Esxi was/still is: Just boot a pretty small os, define a datastore somewhere, just grow disks, migrate them, etc. All done with some clicks of a mouse button in a nice web gui. Maybe i should start playing with Proxmox again?
> […] could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
I have professional experience with all listed (both on vendor and user side), other than hyper-v. Nutanix is probably the closest true solution to VMware, although not 1:1. VMware is an excellent piece of tech run by people who DGAF and just want the $.
I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.
OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).
> I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)
(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
> The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
The other aspect is that they want fungibility. As a corporation, you use off-the-shelf solutions so that when you do your big layoffs every few years you can rotate in some other cogs who already know how to operate the standard solution. Building in-house means valuing your employees long-term and we can't have any of that going on.
I emphasize most, not all. Most companies using VMWare even 5 years ago could have achieved similar infrastructure using Proxmox. It's been a viable alternative for years. It's always intrigued me how easily big companies get pulled into licensing nightmares because their execs get bullshitted into believing a sales pitch at a seminar. Anyone who has worked with Oracle's product lineup instinctively knows what I'm talking about.
Most of VMware virtualization code was stolen from kvm and they never were punished. Our laws are a joke, our courts are largely illegitimate and so to is our government.
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.
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.
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
As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.
Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).
Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.
OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).
Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":
* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...
There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).
A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.
I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)
(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)
Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.
The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.
Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.
Waste of money
Buy declining companies with good customer bases, cut spending and raise prices.
From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825
Might as well rewrite it in Rust at the same time, two birds with one stone.
I now use UTM to host Windows 11 Pro on my mac for exactly one Windows application.
With the exception of suspend, it does the job.
And of course anyone can file a lawsuit…