Broadcom’s VMware division took a big step today, ending its free VMware vSphere Hypervisor. This is one of those announcements that we were expecting after we covered VMware End of Availability on Many VMware vSphere Editions and VMware Updates its EOA Plan Providing Guidance for Some Subscription Transition, but it is a big deal for many STH readers. It now sets VMware down the path of mainframes.
Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome
A massive blow for the homelab community.
I still don’t understand this. So much money just being left on the table here. Sell it off or spin it into its own company, but this would turnover millions a year without even trying.
I get in broadcom terms, it’s a rounding error, but it’s still a Lot of money!
Adurbe,
They are specifically focusing on a few large companies.
There was a number somewhere, but it is really small. And anything smaller is essentially ignored.
This way they can reduce the costs of revenue, and increase the prices on captured markets. Many of these large companies cannot (easily) switch due to legal reasons.
Unfortunately, this is a “winning” formula.
Just wow.
Building such a wide and enthusiast community around a closed source and very specialized operating system was an incredible achievement from VMware, and this clearly played a major role on their way to success.
Broadcom turning all this down is an utterly stupid move.
This could very well kill the whole platform in just a few years.
Proxmox VE and others are ready to take over every space left over by ESXi.
Once armies of techs around the world will have gained interest in new solutions and moved away from VMware, there will be no turning back.
Patrick Kennedy is damn right when he says “it now sets VMware down the path of mainframes”.
It’s even worse actually. ESXi is too specialized to survive.
At the time, it was easy to get running and the tooling was nice. Xen was around, but it was harder to get up and running with fewer supported operating systems.
We’ll see. The large companies who invested in VMware probably aren’t going to moved off of it, like they haven’t moved off of Windows or RHEL.
That’s kind of the problem. Linux, qemu, and KVM are an excellent combination with a low price, and they have allowed many new companies to get into the VM space. VMware was already getting squeezed, and it makes sense for them to focus on the high end.
This is more of a wake up call than a massive blow. In the end, I see it as a gift.
Virtualization, like the OS, is a perfect fit for collective / collaborative development ( Open Source ). This move by Broadcom gets an entrenched, popular, capable to be sure, and proprietary roadblock out of the way. Their funeral.
The Open Source options here are already absolutely amazing and this is just the shot in the arm they need.
For the homelab community, Proxmox with its incredibly easy and versatile management UI over KVM and LXC is simply amazing. My homelab centerpiece is an 8 core, 64 GB, 2013 Trashcan Mac Pro that I picked up for $200. It uses Proxmox to serve over a dozen VMs and containers incredibly well. It even hosts “remote desktops” ( Windows, macOS, and a couple flavours of Linux ) that I can remote into from anywhere ( via Wireguard ). What you can do with Open Source these days is a miracle.
Another option is XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra which is probably an even better fit for the VMWare diaspora. I believe there is even a migration tool available to move from VMWare to XCP-ng.
For desktop use, it is now possible to use VirtualBox over Qemu / KVM on Linux which I think is a really nice solution.
Yeah, I never really got why people shoved VMWare vSphere into their home labs. In a business environment, you have to deal with commercial software… but at home you can choose any one of the free open source solutions.
Hell.. XenServer is free and open source.. Use that instead. It’s the same product segment.
ok. I guess XenServer itself isn’t open source. Just XenCenter.
Still, qemu, virtualbox, vm-manager.