What took them so long? Even before the Broadcom purchase, VMWare was enshittifying their product. They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
But other technologies have since come along to make VMs either a lot less important or baked in. For me too it was a sudden transition going from VM farms to docker/k8s, web apps, cloud services, etc. on the other hand that was years ago
They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren’t going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that’s capitalism for ya.
People are trying to switch to proxmox too since VMWare continues to go downhill and smart IT planners know you shouldn’t trust them long term.
I use proxmox in my homelab so my impression is biased as a home user, but it’s nice if you’re already accustomed to being a Linux command line user. They haven’t fully made everything configurable through the GUI. 90% of the time you can use the GUI but for certain things it’s still command line only.
I plan to use proxmox at home also “one of these days”. Currently my lab is a handful of raspberry pi’s and it suffices for what I normally do.
My work experience is mainly medium to large tech companies and none of them have used anything beyond VMware or hyper-v. I sort of assumed Proxmox didn’t really scale up that, based only on where people say they use it
My current company does cloud services, some on k8s and done on other docker. They’ve only talked about VMs if any kind as a temporary cloud transition
Proxmox is still niche and has better hardware support though. For small businesses I think it makes sense to save on license costs and you just use good ol’ knuckle grease and brain wrinkles to script and automate your own setup.
It could be just reliance on COTS products. Going from bare metal to VM is a lot easier than VM to container. With some COTS products it could be impossible.
What took them so long? Even before the Broadcom purchase, VMWare was enshittifying their product. They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
But other technologies have since come along to make VMs either a lot less important or baked in. For me too it was a sudden transition going from VM farms to docker/k8s, web apps, cloud services, etc. on the other hand that was years ago
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren’t going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
In short, going exactly according to plan.
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that’s capitalism for ya.
People are trying to switch to proxmox too since VMWare continues to go downhill and smart IT planners know you shouldn’t trust them long term.
I use proxmox in my homelab so my impression is biased as a home user, but it’s nice if you’re already accustomed to being a Linux command line user. They haven’t fully made everything configurable through the GUI. 90% of the time you can use the GUI but for certain things it’s still command line only.
I plan to use proxmox at home also “one of these days”. Currently my lab is a handful of raspberry pi’s and it suffices for what I normally do.
My work experience is mainly medium to large tech companies and none of them have used anything beyond VMware or hyper-v. I sort of assumed Proxmox didn’t really scale up that, based only on where people say they use it
My current company does cloud services, some on k8s and done on other docker. They’ve only talked about VMs if any kind as a temporary cloud transition
Proxmox is still niche and has better hardware support though. For small businesses I think it makes sense to save on license costs and you just use good ol’ knuckle grease and brain wrinkles to script and automate your own setup.
It could be just reliance on COTS products. Going from bare metal to VM is a lot easier than VM to container. With some COTS products it could be impossible.