Broadcom Is Killing Off VMware Perpetual Licenses, Strong-Arming Users Onto Subscriptions (www.thestack.technology) 196
Ed Targett reports via The Stack: Broadcom is killing off VMware's on-premises perpetual licenses -- and getting set to strong-arm VMware customers onto subscriptions, by also ending the sale of Support and Subscription renewals for such customers. VMware described this to customers as part of its plan to "complete the transition of all VMware by Broadcom solutions to subscription licenses." "We are [also] ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today" SVP Krish Prasad said in a FAQ.
VMware perpetual licenses were described by its own Office of the CTO earlier this year in a short blog as its "most renowned licenses." The on-premises licenses for the virtualization software come with a license key, with SnS separately licensing users for support and software updates. Perpetual license keys never expire but the SnS lapses and now will not, seemingly, be renewed -- meaning that customers reluctant to shift to an alternative licensing model will be left without support or updates.
VMware customers "may continue using perpetual licenses with active support contracts. We will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments. We encourage customers to review their inventory of perpetual licenses, including Support Services renewal and expiration dates," Broadcom said rather menacingly, on December 10. The company is also announcing a new "bring-your-own-subscription license option, providing license portability to VMware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud Foundation," it added, without initially sharing details.
VMware perpetual licenses were described by its own Office of the CTO earlier this year in a short blog as its "most renowned licenses." The on-premises licenses for the virtualization software come with a license key, with SnS separately licensing users for support and software updates. Perpetual license keys never expire but the SnS lapses and now will not, seemingly, be renewed -- meaning that customers reluctant to shift to an alternative licensing model will be left without support or updates.
VMware customers "may continue using perpetual licenses with active support contracts. We will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments. We encourage customers to review their inventory of perpetual licenses, including Support Services renewal and expiration dates," Broadcom said rather menacingly, on December 10. The company is also announcing a new "bring-your-own-subscription license option, providing license portability to VMware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud Foundation," it added, without initially sharing details.
Everything will be a subscription (Score:2, Troll)
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You even subscribe to life
And when do you think this happened? That's just silly... no, stupid. Being born is not subscribing to anything and there's no company/entity whose services you depend on.
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I didn't subscribe, I was click-baited into accepting an EULA.
Why use VMWare? (Score:2)
Honest questions: Why do people use VMWare instead of FLOSS alternatives like VirtualBox?
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Is VirtualBox really FLOSS? It comes with a "Extensions" pack, which is not open source.
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is VirtualBox really FLOSS?
VirtualBox is owned by ORACLE, you know, one of the world's biggest law firms that happens to have a software side-business?
I've heard they've gone after users that were using it as 'personal use', but because it was on a machine they also happen to use for work (or, that can reach a 'work machine' that happens to be on the same network, or some such lawyer-conjured up nonsense) to extract license fees from them.
For this reason, I stay AS FUCKING FAR AWAY from VirtualBox as possible!
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VirtualBox itself is GPL 2, so in general, you can use it without issues, even in a commercial setting. Where you get in trouble is when you need any of the proprietary extensions, and those are where Oracle wants you to give up your firstborn, your soul, and all the cash you can potentially invest into the Larry Ellison giant yacht collection. I usually just install the basic server and launch an xterm somewhere else when I use it, but I'm also mainly using Linux on it and setting up test servers.
Unfortuna
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Try proxmox, thank me later.
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Wake me up when it gets support for clustering and something like vMotion.
Do you mean live migration from one server to another in the same cluster? I built a 3-server Proxmox last Spring and was able to do that just fine. Virtually zero downtime on the switchover. I did have to include Ceph storage to be able to do that - but all this is free, open source (if you don't need their paid support).
I have yet to spin my vSphere back up after doing Proxmox. But to be fair, the servers are almost always powered down.
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Informative)
It is the "Extension Pack" that is only free for personal use, and not for corporations. Standard VirtualBox only support USB 1.1, so for USB 2 or 3 and some other features one might nead the Extension Pack.
I'm not arguing for or against anything.
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Wait, what? Does VirtualBox license say you can't use it for work if you don't pay for a license? Uh, if that's true then I'm saddened greatly and have to agree that it's not Free Software anymore :(
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because VMware is used in business environments where things like VBox are not an option for a variety of reasons such as compliance, storage and centralized management.
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Insightful)
because its far superior. it can be installed natively on to the hardware using a small disk on chip right from the factory (dell). it supports SAN infrastructure allowing you to slice up and allocate storage with multipath links through optical fiber (vSAN) and shift VMs dynamically in your cluster based on hardware load. it supports software defined networking (NSX) allowing you to reconfigure your networks on the fly. its rock solid and stable with self updates through setting common baselines in your cluster which allows you to add nodes and get them updated without having to struggle through updating each host to the latest). it supports activedirectory natively allowing auth to the web interface easily for admins and users.
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Insightful)
To Add to this and clarify
For businesses its really about building a private cloud. VMWare as a product is not really about stand alone ESXi servers, which sure VirtualBox or any number of qemu front ends might easily replace. So much so the VMWare has given ESXi in standalone mode away for free in one form or another for a long time now. The 'value' is not in the virtualization or even the hardware support for things like host bus adapters. That part is available as FOSS. Even the code to do things like live migration and what not is in qemu.
VMWare's value is in the 'boring parts'
*Its the server software to keep track of loads and memory foot prints on each member server, its the rollup view of the virtual data center, its the stuff to quickly build and visual software defined network topology. Its the active monitoring and live replication to immediately recover vms on a non-failed host. Its as you mentioned all that Active Directory integration but also the complex permissions model on top of it to enable separation of duties. Its the integration of that into the template tools and clients to make things like virtual desktop environments easily managed. Its all the stuff that say EC2 + terraform + k8s but in your own datacenter(s).
About the only equivalent product suite out there is Citrix Xen. What I don't understand about getting rid of perpetual licenses is where they think the value is. There are always going to be some cleints that just wont put their stuff in the cloud but frankly for most its a question capital expense vs operational expenses. Your own cloud is a capex, AWS is opex. If you start pushing licenses (a huge part of the cost generally) toward opex (and the associated uncertainty with that), you are removing a key differentiation form the rest of the market place. If have to 'rent it' anyway that is one less argument for running a business running their own cloud, why would you Amazon can do all that hardware redundancy, etc better than you'll ever be able to afford to do....
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BTW Xenserver is being moved into their own business unit under the new Cloud Software Group after Citrix was bought out. Not sure if that's good or bad for them though. Same for Netscaler and Sharefile, btw.
That's the standard feature set (Score:2)
Seriously, any half decent server virtualization solution will do that. One example is ganeti. It can actually even migrate machines without a SAN as it can sync virtual disks between hosts in a cluster.
The big problem with vmware is of course, that it is designed as "enterprise grade" software, which means that it barely does what's advertised while having lots of "wont-fix" bugs that contractors know to work around.
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Yeah. Keep telling yourself that. My organization has about 1500 VM's scattered across 30+ hosts in multiple datacenters, and VMWare Just Works.
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd recommend using proxmox pve (based on qemu) and call it a day! Works great for us. I don't know if VirtualBox is suitable for large server deployments with automatic failover, snapshots etc. Is VirtualBox even fully opensource? Also VirtualBox == Oracle
For workstations, simply use qemu out of the box, I simply start it from the command line on any linux distro. I haven't been using vmware since ~2005.
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Every category theorist in the world would laugh at the sheer ignorance contained in this comment.
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I guess you don't know the difference between "equivalence" and "identity". Maybe you could pick up a cat. book?
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You really are a pathetic little twit, aren't you?
C'mon, use your real handle you homophobic knuckle dragging glue huffing flat earth palin supporting coward!
Those that know, know. (Score:5, Insightful)
Honest questions: Why do people use VMWare instead of FLOSS alternatives like VirtualBox?
The people that use VMWare are the same people who have many a good reason for self-preservation when the inevitable happens at 2AM in the corporate data center knocking the entire company offline.
You have two choices to present to the CIO/CTO: One involves contacting a well-known corporation that sells enterprise-grade support contracts with professionals and escalation available 24/7, and the other one more involves some neckbeard 4 time zones away on a forum who's hopefully not too stoned to provide a flossy-fix.
Like I said. Self-preservation.
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Note that those "neckbeards" are likely to be an IBM/RedHat employee or Microsoft employee. Turns out there's enterprise grade support contracts available for other platforms too.
But your point stands that if they used VMware yesterday, but today it's something else and you have an outage, your going to be at risk even if you do have the support contract.
Re:Those that know, know. (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that those "neckbeards" are likely to be an IBM/RedHat employee or Microsoft employee.
Unfortunately there is zero legally-actionable power behind that kind of support, regardless if I along with many are personally grateful and respect the skilled who dedicate their time and knowledge above to the FOSS/FLOSS world. Back in Greed-land, legally-actionable can make all the difference when it comes to self-preservation. Very few have ever been blamed for having the enterprise-grade support contract in place when the enterprise-grade fuck-up happens.
But your point stands that if they used VMware yesterday, but today it's something else and you have an outage, your going to be at risk even if you do have the support contract.
Agreed. From the CxO's in panic mode at 6AM, they might tend to tunnel-vision blame on the concept of you get what you pay for. FLOSS implies a price tag, and there was probably some valid reason a company was running VMWare in their yesterdays. If you're solving for an enterprise-grade problem with losses measured in downtime hours or less, self-preservation dictates you better have an equal enterprise-grade backup plan on the support side. Any reasonable BCP should justify the cost if risk analysis is done well. Might even benefit from choosing a brand and support contract that holds political clout if your enterprise is large enough to be sensitive to that kind of manipulation.
Re:Those that know, know. (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you cite a single court case where a software customer has successfully sued a software vendor because of a software fuckup? People keep saying about proprietary software that "you have someone to sue" when things go south, but I think that's just an urban legend. I don't think it ever actually happens.
This (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend runs VMWare for a large university. As in, hundreds of VMs spread across dozens of servers, as well as lab and desktop environments. There are pre-rolled tools do do nearly everything. Push VL activation codes to Windows desktops and servers. Cloning, snapshots prior to upgrades with automatic rollback, monitoring, load balancing and throttling... It's all fully supported by VMWare, and if anything goes wrong they tend to fix it pretty quickly.
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Fire and Proxmox (Score:2)
We recently had a major fire that knocked out our server infrastructure.
Our SAN and NAS were replicated to another facility but not our servers.
We had recently changed from HyperV to Proxmox running around 45VMs over 3 servers.
We had proxmox rebuilt on emergency hardware within 24hrs.
Proxmox is open source, and has amazing backup infrastructure.
It’s been rock solid for us.
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The VMware equivalent to Virtualbox would be VMWare Player/Workstation/Fusion.
When 99.97% of people refer to VMware vSphere when they talk about virtualization on VMware. vSphere and Player/Workstation/Fusion are different products with different use cases.
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I have to wonder what's going to happen to Fusion - which is currently free for personal use.
Actually I have a pretty good idea what's going to happen...
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Re: Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Funny)
VMware is like a Lexus, hyper-v is like a Ford Pinto, and virtualbox is more like a rodent of unusual size that will probably bite you.
Re: Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Funny)
VMware is like a Lexus, hyper-v is like a Ford Pinto, and virtualbox is more like a rodent of unusual size that will probably bite you.
I know I may be overstepping a line drawn by religion, but have you considered dedicating your life to product marketing? You have a gift my friend.
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I know it won't be a popular sentiment here, but - Hyper-V actually works pretty well. I've got Linux servers running under it and I'm not seeing any difference compared to others that are on KVM.
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Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, for one, we can skip talking about VirtualBox, not because of merit or lack thereof, it's because VirtualBox is strictly a competitory to VMWare workstation, and not even VMWare has really cared about that market in a long time.
The thing that they have their claws into is datacenter (the OS on the machine must be natively 'ESXi' and they at this point pretty much *have* to further be connected to a 'vCenter' instance.
So the competition is mostly libvirt based Linux or Microsoft's own.
I can't tell you why not Microsoft's own, I don't really use it. It seems like a slam dunk for a Windows shop, since the licensing I thought was so attractive compared to giving money to both vmware and microsoft versus just Microsoft. I suppose one may be put out at their strategic direction for Microsoft Virtualization is to tie up your local infrastructure in Azure to steer users to the real money maker: cloud compute.
On the Linux side, basically higher order management has been a bit of a stumbling block. Also, driver support for Windows lags (e.g. the spice graphics has been pretty much abandonware and hasn't gotten updates for Windows 11). They tried oVirt/RHEV which might have been a solid 1:1 competitor to vCenter in time, but they abandoned that because "not cloudy enough" and fixation went to OpenStack, which was always a nasty mess. So now RH is trying to put people in OpenShift, with the understanding that "qemu-kvm can run in a container, so a container platform makes sense for managing VMs". However as a 'boring' VM management platform, it's not great.
We use something of our own orchestrating libvirt and are happy with it, but if you asked me what's a good "canned" answer to a simple vCenter setup, I wouldn't know. Maybe ProxMox as I've heard good things, but if you have any Windows in the mix, it's going to fall short for you.
Finally, a lot of it is inertia. In the same way that IBM mainframe users are too afraid to change anything, VMware users are too scared to change anything. Generally speaking IT staff are not going to get rewarded for cost cutting, but they may well get fired if they decide to change platforms and problems result. So there's a lot of bias in an enterprise context to "just keep giving money to the people you gave money to yesterday".
Re:Why use VMWare? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't tell you why not Microsoft's own, I don't really use it. It seems like a slam dunk for a Windows shop, since the licensing I thought was so attractive compared to giving money to both vmware and microsoft versus just Microsoft.
Because, in smaller shops, Microsoft's licensing is stupid.
Windows Server Standard allows for two virtualized "operating system environments", while Datacenter allows for unlimited "Operating System Environments". Now, That'd be fine if it meant you can only have two virtual instances of the same Windows Server license that was purchased, but the way the EULA is written, it means that one needs a second Server Standard license (i.e. two more OSEs) to run three Ubuntu VMs on Hyper-V. It's not technologically enforced, but that's the EULA. Oh, and that's per-host licensing. Every host has the same limitations.
VSphere Essentials is about the same price as Windows Server Standard, but it's a much better value. A single license can be installed on three hosts, and there are no limits for the number of VMs per host. Want to spin up a thousand instances of DietPi? As long as you've got the hardware to do it, no problem. Want to spin up a dozen Windows 10 VMs as a pseudo terminal server because some software can't handle an RDS environment? As long as you have Windows 10 licenses, no problem. The closest thing to a limit is there's a total of six sockets allowed on a license, but it's rare to have an environment with more than six CPU sockets that doesn't end up hitting some of the Essentials limits (notably, there's no VMotion, so moving VMs between hosts requires downtime that VMotion avoids). Also, VSphere Essentials support is extremely limited...but no worse than Microsoft will give you at that level.
So yeah, there's a small business niche that VSphere Essentials fit at $600 that would cost $12,000 to get similar functionality from Microsoft.
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Also, if you are running more than 2-3 Windows workloads on your VMWare hosts you are buying datacenter licenses for those hosts anyway as it's cheaper than trying to license them under server standard. So you don't actually save any money on licensing.
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Honest questions: Why do people use VMWare instead of FLOSS alternatives like VirtualBox?
Have been a user of VMWare workstation for two decades since version 3 and purchased two upgrades over that time. The original answer is VMWare's emulation was far better and faster than anyone else's. Today with hardware support for virtualization and paravirtualization these things are all rather moot.
Upgrades were cheap enough and I had enough VMs it wasn't worth my time to screw with something else when workstation did everything I wanted. Also most of our customers with virtualized environments also
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Don't quite give up hope on Workstation yet. There was a blog post put out today by that team and it has the following in it:
Users will continue to be able to purchase and use our favorite desktop hypervisor apps the same way they have been for the past several years. As well, folks will continue to be able to download and use the “Free for Personal Use” editions of Fusion Player and Workstation Player the same way they did previously.
So maybe some hope that the Workstation product won't go subscription. Fingers crossed. https://blogs.vmware.com/teamf... [vmware.com]
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Support, probably. Or maybe VMWare was earlier than VirtualBox - ~1998 vs 2007. So they started with VMWare, have experts in VMWare, and VirtualBox would be a risk and changeover cost, more than just licensing VMWare.
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Because one is an infrastructure product with high availability, VM and storage clustering, and the other runs virtual machines on a desktop.
AND VirtualBox isn't really FLOSS-- bits and pieces are Oracle only.
Now, proxmox and xcp-ng have potential, but neither has the breadth or depth that VMWare has.
Yet.
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VBox is a bad example, but there are vSphere competitors that do have storage sharing and "clustering" (I've found VMware's clustering to be a bit of a gimmick, it's mostly just marking a group of targets viable for live migration, which isn't a huge difficult thing to have once you have live migration ready).
I think feature for feature, 98% of what people use vSphere for can be done elsewhere. The one off the top of my head is vmware FT, where it runs two VMs in lock step, which is technically interesting
Yay, another great acquisition (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seriously, companies should be wary whenever their software vendor gets acquired by another company. Very little good comes afterwards.
I'm sorry, what was that again? I'm afraid you're going to have to SPEAK UP in order for the former owner who cashed out and is now living on a private island far offshore to hear you.
Pay attention to their laughing. It's meant to offend after they dedicate a few dollars and years towards a for-profit venture in order to leave and enjoy life with Fuck You money.
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Oh yeah. CAD/CAE packages come to my mind.....
What really happened (Score:2)
"MAKE MONEY MACHINE GO BRRRR FAST!" - Broadcom.
Well at least they'll kill the company. Scale HC3 is better anyway.
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Interesting Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
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This charnel house strategy was CA's stock in trade back in the day. Buy dying properties and profit from their agony until dead.
Maybe Broadcom thinks they can move customers to their other products.
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Is there a name for the phenomena of companies in a diminishing industry bleeding their remaining customers dry in an attempt to make up revenue from the losses incurred by the customers who have already migrated away?
Yes, there’s a name for that:
Vulture Capitalism
A vulture capitalist is an investor who seeks to extract value from companies in decline. The goal is to swoop in when sentiment is low–and the company is relatively unprofitable, buy the company, and then gradually and then quickly strip it of all valuable property, both physical and intellectual, until the company is just a shell of what it was when purchased.
It’s also called Buy, Strip, and Flip:
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
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While this path is usually NOT profitable for the Parent Company, it is HIGHLY PROFITABLE for everyone in the upper echelons.
Why? Because they can reasonably infer (without relying on insider trading) that Parent Corp is going to Destroy Value of the new corp (E.g., Disney and Marvel), thus, they can all do 5-year long-term PUT shorts against Bought Company and make a fortune, personally.
It almost always works with a few historical exceptions, such as GameStop. It only fails i those instances when citizen m
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Paul Ichan did this with Target Corp.
You can read the tea leaves and see that the elites do these planned destructions in 3-, 5-, and 10-year increments.
E.g., Marvel was bought by Disney in 2009 and so its planned destruction would begin in 2019/2020. If you look at profit/loss of Marvel, that’s exactly when it started dying.
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While this path is usually NOT profitable for the Parent Company, it is HIGHLY PROFITABLE for everyone in the upper echelons.
Why? Because they can reasonably infer (without relying on insider trading) that Parent Corp is going to Destroy Value of the new corp (E.g., Disney and Marvel), thus, they can all do 5-year long-term PUT shorts against Bought Company and make a fortune, personally.
It almost always works with a few historical exceptions, such as GameStop. It only fails i those instances when citizen mobs see theses short positions and wage war against the vulture capitalists.
Toys-R-Us had this done to it. The same group tried desperately to do it to Musician's Friend / Guitar Center, but for some reason didn't manage to actually drown the baby in the bath. Though I suppose there's still time.
Re:Interesting Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to differentiate between a strategic acquisition (having a true parent company, like Disney vs. Marvel) vs. a non-operating parent, like Venture/Vulture Capital. If you're a strategic acquirer, you WANT the purchased company to do well, because your intention is to milk it and grow your revenue/profits (inorganic growth, since it's an acquisition). As someone said below, you can't even buy puts on a company you acquire, because guess what, their equity is now melted into yours. Unless you're a CEO that somehow has dramatically shorted their own company (which I'm sure would never get flagged by the SEC
Now contrast that to Private Equity. These are pure financial transactions, and in many cases, you heavily borrow to be able to buy the company, which you then transfer to that company's balance sheet (e.g., Leverage Buyouts like Toys'r'us). Now the company is being milked to make max profits at the expense of everyone else, in order to repay the debt they inherited from you AND to pay you dividends, for the privilege of being owned by you. The PE partners make millions while the company they bought slowly dies, with employees laid off 10% at a time and customers more and more pissed by being nickle and dimed. Now that's not all PE, but it's a known recipe that has been employed countless times. Truly parasitic.
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To add to this, unless the growth is a 45 degree slope a company is considered to be in decline.
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If you think VMware is just a hypervisor product, you're several years behind the times. VMware has had containerization products for quite some time now too.
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-shrug- fuck if i know, its just a bunch of loaded buzzwords from what I can tell LMFAO
https://tanzu.vmware.com/tanzu [vmware.com]
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Is there a name for the phenomena of companies in a diminishing industry bleeding their remaining customers dry in an attempt to make up revenue from the losses incurred by the customers who have already migrated away?
There is: Failure.
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That's a really bold move for a company to make regarding a technology that is becoming less relevant every day thanks to containerization. Is there a name for the phenomena of companies in a diminishing industry bleeding their remaining customers dry in an attempt to make up revenue from the losses incurred by the customers who have already migrated away?
Rent-seeker. The fact they've lost customers is just a coincidence. In the year 2023? Any company not looking at a way to create a permanent subscription stream for revenue is considered backwards and stupid. "Leaving money on the table." I work at a cabinet factory, and our marketing director is going absolutely crazy trying to figure out how to sell subscriptions to cabinets. This is the hype for profit focused people in the modern age. Don't make a better product. Don't provide superior customer service.
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I'm so glad we stopped enforcing anti-trust law (Score:2)
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Do we expect free updates forever? (Score:2)
Looks like just Service and Support is getting EOL'd? Kind of makes sense once you consider they probably have a team of 300 people in engineering to pay.
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VMWare is no longer necessary (Score:2)
Perpetual (Score:2)
"Perpetual"
They keep using that word but I do not think they think that word means what I think that word means.
Next step: Fire all developers (Score:2)
I mean seriously, VMware isn't a product that's going to get more customers. The customers that still use VMware are kinda locked in. Moving to another solution would be fairly expensive, so they won't do it. If you have those customers in a subscription model you no longer have to give them reasons to buy the newest version. They will just pay even if you don't pretend you're going to fix bugs in the next version.
From an economical perspective it makes no sense to go on developing VMware after they have mo
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That is basically broadcom's MO. see Symantec. they baught it, innovated nothing, and basically ran it to irrelevance. But they made their money so who cares right?
Well that's goodbye then... (Score:2)
We will run the version we're on now and spend the next couple of years moving to another platform. Goodbye VMWare.
That's why I _never_ use non-FOSS ... (Score:2)
... for anything mission critical. And that's why I also don't trust setups or the judgment of deciders who don't follow the same rule.
Workstation not affected (Score:2)
Re: Workstation not affected (Score:2)
Called it (Score:2)
The moment Vmware was acquired by Broadcom i started transitioning all clients away. Knew this was how it would play out.
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Yep. Not too great an achievement seeing this coming though ^^
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Eh when you are the dim lightbulb in a box of burnt out ones its still win. 3rd party vendors looked at me funny when I said I wouldn't use VMware anymore because of the acquisition. thought I was being paranoid. This is vindication, and I'm voicing it to the interwebs because I have no other mechanism to say "I told you so".
That is the way of proprietary software... (Score:2)
This trend has been continuing for decades. Pretty soon, the only software you don't have to pay rental fees for will be open-source software.
Long Live Virtualbox and LibVirt ! (Score:2)
Today it is "VMware Perpetual Licenses" (Score:2)
LOL (Score:2)
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Cisco's UCS platform will continue to support all the enterprise-grade virtualization platforms long-term-- VMware included.
That said, Cisco did discontinue HyperFlex this year which was their VMware-based HCI product. But that wasn't because of VMware. That was because of their terrible management plane/firmware. I was directly involved with a POC (proof of concept) project a couple of years ago for Cisco HyperFlex that failed so miserably that we told Cisco "don't ever talk to us about HyperFlex again". W
It's Resume-Polishing Time (Score:2)
On December 1, there was a story on SFGate [sfgate.com] -- the online component to the San Francisco Chronicle -- covering an email Broadcom management sent to all employees announcing:
Said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, "Remote work does not exist at Broadcom," but then clarified that sales workers and employees living more than 60 miles away from a Broadcom office would be able to stay remote. "Any other exception, you better learn how to walk on wate
Re:The BIZX/Logan Abbott Model (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly why I told Adobe to take a long walk off a short pier....there's plenty of equal if not better alternatives out there for your shit.
Re:The BIZX/Logan Abbott Model (Score:5, Interesting)
Fuck the *RENTAL* of software.
This is exactly why I told Adobe to take a long walk off a short pier....there's plenty of equal if not better alternatives out there for your shit.
+1. Want to see millions poured into making VirtualBox a full-featured drop-in replacement? Because this is how you get big companies dumping money into making it possible to dump you.
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Proxmox ftw.
It’s open source, has amazing backup features, is rock solid.
Virtual,Box is ORACLE.
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Fuck the *RENTAL* of software.
This is exactly why I told Adobe to take a long walk off a short pier....there's plenty of equal if not better alternatives out there for your shit.
+1. Want to see millions poured into making VirtualöBox a full-featured drop-in replacement? Because this is how you get big companies dumping money into making it possible to dump you.
Uh, I don't see that as necessary. VirtualBox has become better today than VMWare was when I first tried it. Admittedly there has been years in between, but it's been achieved.
But yeah, I would like that to happen, but only with terms that would not give the money dumpers any tiny bit of control over it. But I don't think it's likely to happen.
But how is any of this relevant to your parent comment. When I look your comment quoted above, and above it the comment you replied to, do you feel that you are on sa
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I'm coming around to rental if the price is right. Depends on the circumstance. I'm a fan of the perpetual fallback version license - subscribe, and when you're done and discontinue it, you've got a perpetual license for the last version provided in your subscription period.
Of course I do not expect ongoing support and upgrades in perpetuity - that would be unreasonable. Nor would I expect that an external dependency be maintained forever - that's why I don't "buy" movies in the cloud. The landscape is star
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Who actually does this....?
I mean...if they offered this, it's still basically selling perpetual licenses.
What's to stop you from renting a month and quitting and taking your copy with you to use....until you want to upgrade and then
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VirtualBox is at best, a competitor to VMWare Workstation.
If you want a competitor, look to ProxMox or XCP-NG, but neither are really operating at VMWare's scale.
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Fuck the *RENTAL* of software.
This is exactly why I told Adobe to take a long walk off a short pier....there's plenty of equal if not better alternatives out there for your shit.
+1. Want to see millions poured into making VirtualBox a full-featured drop-in replacement? Because this is how you get big companies dumping money into making it possible to dump you.
What?! Virtual Box is a type 2 desktop hypervisor. Comparing it to the VMware products from this announcement is like comparing a Ford Focus to a panamax cargo ship. And it's from Oracle no less!
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In any other situation I'd agree.
However paying for Vmware at 10x the current costs for 100 years up front is still going to be cheaper than the lawsuits Oracle calls down upon you for looking at virtualbox sideways.
No one willingly gives Oracle money.
s/Virtualbox/Proxmox
s/Virtualbox/XCP-ng
s/Virtualbox/bhyve
I agree that Virtualbox is the worst example to use...but there are open(ish) source hypervisors that can, at some level, compete with VMWare.
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What people need to do is get their vendors to support Proxmox or XCP-ng. Both solutions are solid, but the biggest issue is that they don't have vendor support. For example, even though Proxmox has solid backups via its own utility, it really needs support in Veeam, Nakivo, and other enterprise backup programs. Monitoring, logging, and other tools as well.
Vendor support is the important thing. This is critical. Without this, there will never be an alternative at the enterprise level for VMWare other t
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I'm not sure I'd consider VMware "great" in this sense. They already had fairly egregious licensing terms and a poor track record for security.