VMware Admits Sweeping Broadcom Changes Are Worrying Customers (arstechnica.com) 79
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadcom has made a lot of changes to VMware since closing its acquisition of the company in November. On Wednesday, VMware admitted that these changes are worrying customers. With customers mulling alternatives and partners complaining, VMware is trying to do damage control and convince people that change is good. Not surprisingly, the plea comes from a VMware marketing executive: Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product and technical marketing for the Cloud, Infrastructure, Platforms, and Solutions group at VMware. In Wednesday's announcement, Shenoy admitted that VMware "has been all about change" since being swooped up for $61 billion. This has resulted in "many questions and concerns" as customers "evaluate how to maximize value from" VMware products.
Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model. VMware had a history of relying on perpetual licensing; VMware called the model its "most renowned" a year ago. Shenoy's blog sought to provide reasoning for the change, with the executive writing that "all major enterprise software providers are on [subscription models] today." However, the idea that '"everyone's doing it" has done little to ameliorate impacted customers who prefer paying for something once and owning it indefinitely (while paying for associated support costs). Customers are also dealing with budget concerns with already paid-for licenses set to lose support and the only alternative being a monthly fee.
Shenoy's blog, though, focused on license portability. "This means you will be able to deploy on-premises and then take your subscription at any time to a supported Hyperscaler or VMware Cloud Services Provider environment as desired. You retain your license subscription as you move," Shenoy wrote, noting new Google Cloud VMware Engine license portability support for VMware Cloud Foundation. Further, Shenoy claimed the discontinuation of VMware products so that Broadcom could focus on VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation would be beneficial, because "offering a few offerings that are lower in price on the high end and are packed with more value for the same or less cost on the lower end makes business sense for customers, partners, and VMware." VMware's Wednesday post also addressed Broadcom taking VMware's biggest customers direct, removing channel partners from the equation: "It makes business sense for Broadcom to have close relationships with its most strategic VMware customers to make sure VMware Cloud Foundation is being adopted, used, and providing customer value. However, we expect there will be a role change in accounts that will have to be worked through so that both Broadcom and our partners are providing the most value and greatest impact to strategic customers. And, partners will play a critical role in adding value beyond what Broadcom may be able."
"Broadcom identified things that needed to change and, as a responsible company, made the changes quickly and decisively," added Shenoy. "The changes that have taken place over the past 60+ days were absolutely necessary."
Among these changes is VMware ending perpetual license sales in favor of a subscription-based business model. VMware had a history of relying on perpetual licensing; VMware called the model its "most renowned" a year ago. Shenoy's blog sought to provide reasoning for the change, with the executive writing that "all major enterprise software providers are on [subscription models] today." However, the idea that '"everyone's doing it" has done little to ameliorate impacted customers who prefer paying for something once and owning it indefinitely (while paying for associated support costs). Customers are also dealing with budget concerns with already paid-for licenses set to lose support and the only alternative being a monthly fee.
Shenoy's blog, though, focused on license portability. "This means you will be able to deploy on-premises and then take your subscription at any time to a supported Hyperscaler or VMware Cloud Services Provider environment as desired. You retain your license subscription as you move," Shenoy wrote, noting new Google Cloud VMware Engine license portability support for VMware Cloud Foundation. Further, Shenoy claimed the discontinuation of VMware products so that Broadcom could focus on VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation would be beneficial, because "offering a few offerings that are lower in price on the high end and are packed with more value for the same or less cost on the lower end makes business sense for customers, partners, and VMware." VMware's Wednesday post also addressed Broadcom taking VMware's biggest customers direct, removing channel partners from the equation: "It makes business sense for Broadcom to have close relationships with its most strategic VMware customers to make sure VMware Cloud Foundation is being adopted, used, and providing customer value. However, we expect there will be a role change in accounts that will have to be worked through so that both Broadcom and our partners are providing the most value and greatest impact to strategic customers. And, partners will play a critical role in adding value beyond what Broadcom may be able."
"Broadcom identified things that needed to change and, as a responsible company, made the changes quickly and decisively," added Shenoy. "The changes that have taken place over the past 60+ days were absolutely necessary."
Thanks bcm (Score:5, Insightful)
The more BCM does to abuse vmware users the more of them will move to something more OSS. Only a small percentage as always, but the more the better. KVM/QEMU could use some more love and so could libvirt-based management tools.
Re:Thanks bcm (Score:4, Interesting)
KVM/QEMU could use some more love and so could libvirt-based management tools.
That's an understatement. I try every now and then to transition from VirtualBox to KVM, but KVM is so terrible as to make VirtualBox look awesome. It's possible that it's just the documentation that's terrible, but it doesn't change the end result that KVM is largely unusable.
VMWare is under absolutely no threat from KVM, much as I would love to be wrong about that.
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What's missing? From my perspective the only real problem for basic use (i.e. things you would use VirtualBox for) is the windows video driver, which is not very good.
Re: Thanks bcm (Score:2)
Has one click setup of a bridged network interface been added to the KVM toolset? VirtualBox has had that for years and it's one of the reasons I haven't made the switch.
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libvirt handles creating bridges. It also handles moving VMs around, i.e. most of the rest of the functionality found in vmware products.
Re: Thanks bcm (Score:4, Informative)
The windows video driver issue however, is simply fixed by installing the virtio drivers and configuring the VM to use SPICE. Even better, you'll get USB redirection support as well. Doing that should be as simple as setting the virtio ISO into the virtual disc drive and running the installer. You can also slipstream those drivers or load them manually during Windows Setup. (Although do remember to reinsert the Windows ISO after loading them if you want to proceed from the partition select screen. Microsoft, in classic Microsoft fashion, displays a random error code if you don't. Instead of "Please reinsert the Windows Installation Disc / Drive to continue the installation.")
TL;DR: I'd recommend installing virt-manager (or whatever your distro of choice calls it) if you don't have it already. It has a few rough edges sure, but it's far easier than trying to set everything up via the CLI. (Unless you're trying to do something exotic like GPU passthrough. But even then you can reuse the XML virt-manager generates as a base config to pass to libvirt directly.)
Re: Thanks bcm (Score:2)
"The windows video driver issue however, is simply fixed by installing the virtio drivers and configuring the VM to use SPICE."
No, it is not. Major functionality provided by both VMware and virtualbox is not supported by the SPICE driver for Windows, like any support for accelerated 3D graphics. That is no longer a luxury, nor needed only for gaming.
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Or Proxmox.
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You're confusing a tool with the toolset.
If you need a GUI for KVM, there are plenty of those, RHEL, OpenStack, Ubuntu, Proxmox, Nutanix, UTM, ... VirtualBox is just the GUI to the VirtualBox command (which you can command line that thing too).
But yes, raw KVM would be hard for a beginner, just like raw Xen would be hard to use, or logging into the Linux distro underlying ESXi.
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Verbal Diarrhoea (Score:2)
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The more BCM does to abuse vmware users the more of them will move to something more OSS. Only a small percentage as always, but the more the better. KVM/QEMU could use some more love and so could libvirt-based management tools.
Ever heard about proxmox? Just use qemu based proxmox and call it a day. Our own infrastructure is based on a cluster of those.
Re: Thanks bcm (Score:2)
I looked at proxmox and I don't remember why I decided to just use libvirt and virt-manager, but that is the direction I chose. ISTR that the proxmox documentation led me astray approximately immediately.
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I AM currently moving my homelab to Proxmox.
And it is as OSS as it can get: It's painful becquse even a clearly documented host key authentication between proxmox and TrueNAS ain't working out of the box.
OSS is still as much a pain in the arse as closed source, just for other reasons than closed source.
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Proxmox is an appliance, it doesn't have vendor approved/documented host key authentication to non-Proxmox nodes. Sure you can login to an SSH shell and do it, but you can do that with VMware just as well. If you needed to share your storage from TrueNAS (which is also an appliance which doesn't have documented host-key authentication), use SMB, NFS or iSCSI.
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Proxmox is an appliance, it doesn't have vendor approved/documented host key authentication to non-Proxmox nodes. Sure you can login to an SSH shell and do it, but you can do that with VMware just as well. If you needed to share your storage from TrueNAS (which is also an appliance which doesn't have documented host-key authentication), use SMB, NFS or iSCSI.
This is how I do it on proxmox. I have an lxc container with apline linux serving my NFS and SMB shares.
I wish TrueNAS would support BTRFS because I'd love to use their gui tools for this. My drives are all missmatched sizes so using ZFS would lose me a lot of storage.
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But BTRFS wouldn't do any better there unless you sacrifice performance and data safety (if I expect the capacity of any 2 drives to be able to fail, having some chunks in RAID1 across 2 disks isn't good enough).
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Fuck VMWare and Broadcom. Broadcom is doing what it has previously done to enterprise customers of intellectual property that it hoovers up. It dramatically raises prices. One need only look at how CA customers were completely bent over after it was acquired by Broadcom. The instant this deal was announced, I knew the same fate would befall customers of VMWare. What you'll see is many companies who are stuck will try to execute shorter term renewals of their existing licenses and will then expedite mi
Tank the product for Broadcom (Score:5, Insightful)
"The changes that have taken place over the past 60+ days were absolutely necessary"
For Broadcom's business plan, not for the customers.
They can't say out loud to their investors what their goals are and then try to spin it some other way:
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
Of their approximately 107,000 customers:
We are totally focused on the priorities of these 600 strategic accounts," Krause said.
Which brings us to the "Enterprise" segment on Krause's pyramid. Broadcom aims to "sustain" those 6,000 customers.
The next tier down on the pyramid is "Commercial." Krause said Broadcom is content to have those 100,000 customers "trail" over time.
They declared to investors they only will actively take care of 600 accounts, will half-ass string along 6,000 customers so long as those customers fall for empty words, and scare off the other 100,000 over time.
Everyone in the industry knows what an Avago (now Broadcom) acquisition means for a companies partner engagement, volumes and innovation, and it has never ever been good. It's always about looting the whales while burning down the business to extract as much as possible out of the whales.
Broadcom identified a foot that needed shooting (Score:2)
And it has been shot as needed. Alternatives exist, and virtualization customers are flexible almost by definition.
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You would *think* so, given the whole promise of what it should be, but enterprises are terrified of change.
They've also done a job of convincing a lot of customers that their virtualization approach should also be the backbone of their backup strategy. That their integrations with enterprise storage vendors are irreplaceable. That a virtual machine from any other vendor might wreak havoc with their applications. That their virtual machine images would have to have scary driver changes to adapt to a differe
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They smell just like Oracle.
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That their virtual machine images would have to have scary driver changes to adapt to a different provider.
They're not wrong, when it comes to Windows, which makes driver changes scary.
Corporate Arrogance. (Score:2)
Everyone in the industry knows what an Avago (now Broadcom) acquisition means for a companies partner engagement, volumes and innovation, and it has never ever been good. It's always about looting the whales while burning down the business to extract as much as possible out of the whales.
Those of us sitting back staring at this train wreck, will never quite understand a company's desire to utterly destroy a brand legacy with an acquisition rather than embrace it. This appears to be yet another prime example. Also:
"the company actively pursues 600 customers...because they are often in highly regulated industries, therefore risk-averse, and unlikely to change suppliers."
Translation: It's gonna be a lot easier to license-screw this group of customers first, because change isn't just hard. It's hard by mandate.
Said it long ago, and it still rings true. As mega-corps continue to grow, so will the corporate arrogance. I would say vote with your wa
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They are (mis)applying the 80/20 rule: The top 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your revenue, while the bottom 20% require 80% of your effort/attention. In most businesses, you try to cater to the top 20% and eliminate the bottom 20% -thus keeping the most revenue while eliminating the most effort.
Broadcom seems to think they can lose all but the top end and still have a business... but it doesn't work like that. Without the middle ground customers you don't have enough activity to maintain the prod
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They declared to investors they only will actively take care of 600 accounts
Actively 'take care' of? Those 600 companies are going to be bled completely dry if they try to keep using the technology. The price for 'support' will be just a small touch below what it would take for the execs at the victim companies to decide to stay with VMWare/Broadcom. In some cases, I expect it to be MORE than what an executive would agree to, but some personal persuasion will go a LONG ways towards having the exec choose unwisely for their company. This will be VERY bloody and the end of VMWare as
Well we got orders to exit vmware. (Score:4, Informative)
Now we only have a small installation with a few thousands of virtual servers. But we have been told that VMware has no future in the company and we have told to start designing a new infrastructure without VMware, preferably a non hyper-converged infrastructure that can give the company it's freedom back to switch vendors.
There are different reasons, of course their new licensing is one of them since there will be quite the price hike that has been quoted so far.
Also Broadcom killed our mainframe because of their licensing of software that we ran on it, so we had to scramble to exit and keep costs down.
There is a deep distrust and actual hate towards Broadcom. I can't even buy a switch or network card for a server if the name Broadcom is listed. We would rather spend the extra on a Cisco switch, just so we don't have to deal with Broadcom.
Now there is no denying that staying on VMware would be the easiest choice and it has been a solid adn stable product. But from a personal technical standpoint, it is quite interesting starting talks with new and old block storage system vendors again and looking for other hypervisors.
It is clear that Broadcom does not want small customers with less than 10K virtual servers.
Re: Well we got orders to exit vmware. (Score:2)
Do they think people are stupid? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not sure in what universe any of these changes can been seen as customer friendly.
There certainly are business cases where you might prefer op-ex to cap-ex and a subscription might be appealing but having the choice to buy a perpetual license removed isnt a positive for you as a customer, its just fewer options even if you are not impacted.
Ditto for cutting out the partners. If you are already deployed, you might not need want any help in terms of consulting time, navigating license options etc, maybe you'd like to just bypass the VAR and grab some additional licenses without the markup; however that certainly is a win over "If you like your VAR you can keep your VAR".
I wish we could take the BS out of these corporate communications. Wouldn't a world were we could just play it strait and say something like "we're eliminating some licensing and services options that were not allowing us to meet profitability objections" The marking fluff does not really act as lube, they way the communications people think it does.
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Some of the dumb people will be fooled by the fluff.
Who is the target demo for subscription sales?
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Years ago I went through a company that thought my account was so big that they pushed out the VAR but because of this, I was left with nearly zero communication from the corporation and had zero support on a brand new product setup which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy.
I was very frustrated and ended back with a VAR later because of the terrible support we had. It was a mess because the corporation didn't know/care to support smaller customers.
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Years ago I went through a company that thought my account was so big that they pushed out the VAR but because of this,
Value at risk??
Video assistant referee??
Video to Audio Carrier Ratio??
Visual-Aural Range??
Visit Access Request??
I can't figure it out.
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Re:Yes (Score:1)
These assholes aren’t even pretending anymore. The head of HP flat out said he wants printing to be subscription based. You ever hear the term late stage capitalism? We’ve reached it.
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I am not sure in what universe any of these changes can been seen as customer friendly.
It is customer friendly - when you realize that their real customers are their investors/shareholders, NOT their end users ("consumers").
Re: Do they think people are stupid? (Score:2)
You will own nothing. After all, why would I sell you a product once when I could rent it to you forever? Bonus points if I make my product next to impossible to migrate away from! Numbers must go up at all costs, after all. We have to screw a bunch of fool.....I mean customers over to get that new yacht I've been eyeballing, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Run (Score:2)
Run away.
VMWare exit strategy (Score:2)
VBox KVM backend from Cyberus seems like a good step in the right direction for VMWare exit strategy. Way too much left to do, but a good step.
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Are you talking about virtualbox-kvm [github.com]? That looks interesting, although some of their claims are a bit weird: "VirtualBox can run in parallel to QEMU/KVM" ... you could already do this.
Does you know if this software allows management of KVM-based virtualboxes with libvirt? I will probably give it a spin by this weekend to find out, but I'm interested in more info first.
Enshittification (Score:2)
ESXi, Workstation, Fusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully over the last few years DDEV (docker containers) have greatly simplified my life while reducing resources requirements. As a developer, I can't say enough good things about DDEV and similar container technology. DDEV is the future, while VMware is merely a decaying husk of what it once was.
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To install DDEV on Linux: 'sudo apt install ddev', (or the equivalent).
Not long ago Homebrew on Linux [docs.brew.sh] was required, while a DDEV install couldn't be more simple now.
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Even for more mundane less important components they require multiple vendors are available in case one implodes like that.
The government doesn't seem to care about multiple vendors much at all. In fact it's been my experience all the government cares about is Microsoft and the default answer for a developer requesting to use anything else is, "No", with an uphill bureaucratic battle ahead if anything else is ever gonna happen.
Like, once we had to use Microsoft TFS [microsoft.com] which is a garbage product that competes with Atlassian JIRA, OpenProject and Notion. I'm no fan of JIRA mind you, but JIRA is like playing with puppies compared
Ditching perpetual for VMWare is pointless (Score:2)
Re: Ditching perpetual for VMWare is pointless (Score:2)
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There is no reason to believe Broadcom is smart. In fact, quite the opposite. Due to what is probably a market failure, they have money though.
And this is one of the reasons I prefer OSS (Score:2)
If anyone tries to drive that into the crapper, just fork it and give them the well deserved finger.
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Indeed. I would argue this is the main reason OSS has gotten where it is now: A lot of people are just fed up with the crap that "business" people do.
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I think it's going to be the reason why OSS will be more important, especially in businesses, in the near future. More and more companies pull an "I am altering the deal" on them and they feel the vendor lock-in weighing in their neck. For OSS to be able to pull such a stunt, it would have to have the size of Red Hat, at the very least, and even Red Hat only gets away with it because they have moved SO far away from OSS that the vendor lock-in has become a reality with their product now, too. Because it's l
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And they are in the process of killing off that selling point.
They are. Enshittification is part of the reason, greed and megalomania is another. Commercial software is getting a worse and worse deal all the time, while FOSS generally gets better.
Interesting tidbit: I have several vservers with several different vendors. They all used to use commercial virtualization. In the last few years they all moved to FOSS vor the virtualization and there is no indication they will move back. I also have had no problems at all since these moves while before there were issues fr
Does any OSS VM system support live migrations? (Score:3)
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Pretty much every VM system supports live migrations nowadays.
Once upon a time, you needed a NAS or shared filesystem for the disk, because live migration only did the memory, not storage.
Now you can do without the storage, though it sucks. Of course, same is true of vmware, you want some sort of shared/replicated storage solution for vmware too.
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Does any OSS VM system support live migrations?
libvirt supports live migration [libvirt.org] with or without shared storage. IME the problem with libvirt is that the available management software is not great so you wind up having to do a lot of things from the command line.
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Just use qemu based proxmox!
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I've lately been migrating a few small (10-100 VMs) installations from VMware to Proxmox. My experiences so far:
- Installation is a snap, without any whinging about "your CPU isn't supported" or "your NIC isn't on this rather short list."
- It's qemu/KVM with a fancier UI than virt-manager. The GUI works great for basic to moderate setups, if you need something weird you can go to the CLI and configure everything right down to qemu command line options.
- Paravirtual drivers for Windows are the standard "re
God I hate BizSpeak (Score:2)
I'm going to refer back to some of the old Western movies for a proper response to Prashanth Shenoy's spate of verbal diarrhea about how great their new "you don't own it anymore, but that's all for the best" business model is for customers: "Prashanth speak with forked tongue."
Hahahaha, no (Score:3)
VmWare is done for. You have to boil the frog slowly or it will catch on. Broadcom has has the subtlety of a chainsaw in its changes and it is very clear they are not good for VmWare customers. It is amply clear that Broadcom only wants to recover those $61B and then some on top. Enshittification, last phase.
Reaganomics in software form (Score:2)
"It makes business sense for Broadcom to have close relationships with its most strategic VMware customers to make sure VMware Cloud Foundation is being adopted, used, and providing customer value. However, we expect there will be a role change in accounts that will have to be worked through so that both Broadcom and our partners are providing the most value and greatest impact to strategic customers. And, partners will play a critical role in adding value beyond what Broadcom may be able."
The whole paragra
... and potential customers (Score:1)
As a potential customer, I take corporate attitudes and the likelihood that these attitudes will change in ways unfavorable to me in the future into consideration.
Harvester (Score:1)
It focuses more on enterprise features than either ProxMox or Vir
Corporate Raider 80/20 rule (Score:2)
It might work for a little while, but it screams that they don't really believe in the long term viability of VMWare.
Will be interesting to see if Proxmox can ramp up its offering to take advantage of this opportunity. I love it for my home lab but have no idea what happens when you integrate it with large storage arrays.
Nope (Score:2)
Dead to me, then. Way to go. Fortunately, there remain other options.
They lost (Score:2)
They screwed up. They lost, and they know it. With any luck this will also destroy Broadcom completely. Congratulations to the Chinese state-backed enterprise that snatches up the remnants.
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A company with a $590B market cap isn't going to be destroyed by blowing up a $61B acquisition (50% cash).
The worst choice Broadcom can make right now is to continue to run VMware poorly. A good but not perfect choice would be to completely shutter VMware and all its products and hire a law firm to litigate patents. The ideal option would be to run VMware as a profitable business and continue down the path they have established decades ago that lead to VMware's success and dominance in the market. That isn'
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What's Broadcom's liquidation value?
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If modern tech stocks have taught me anything is that nobody cares about a company's book value and P/B is barely considered. I've ridden a few fun rides over the years (AMZN, NVDA) and I am convinced that Wall Street is doing more cocaine than rock stars were in the 1980's.
Pirates (Score:1)
So what does this mean for us pirates? I'm running VMware on a few servers, keygen'd activation fully unlocked everything.
Does it mean running a new keygen every year to keep it working if I ever upgrade to a newer version? Or is it just that the 'license' will expire and the software will keep working. Because if it keeps working, I won't give a shit since I'm never going to pay anything anyway.
I don't really want to switch to something else, because I've got a few virtualized Mac servers, and VMware is
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There's a few OSX solutions out there, but this might be the slickest one I've seen - prebuilt docker images for building a chosen OSX VM on libvirt [github.com] - just tell it in environment variables which version you want to use and how much CPU / RAM to allocate, and you get a Mac VM that runs headless, so you could even use it for CI testing and such.
It's not going to be running the Adobe Creative Suite with any performance worth mentioning, but if you just need something running macOS code in a legally questionabl
VMWare's Value proposition (Score:2)
Change of plans (Score:2)
I was all set ot load VMWare on my new laptop so I could more conveniently dual-boot Windows and Linux. Those plans have now changed. It's a good product but it's just not worth that much to me, especially with cheaper solutions available. I used Virtual PC back in the day and it worked well. My work laptop booted XP (company politics plus driver compatibility), but to do anything real I booted Slackware under Virtual PC.
At work we use VMWare extensively. I haven't discussed the licensing changes with my
80/20 Rule? (Score:2)
In 5 years they will have no customers instead of the 600 desired customers because they
Unexpected Impacts (Score:2)
Not a worried customer (Score:2)