So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?
If you’re running a lab or a small shop any hypervisor can likely do the job. Anything above that VMware’s overall ecosystem is the most robust and well-supported.
At this point virtualization is a legacy technology. It’s not going to disappear tomorrow but its clock is ticking the same way the clock was ticking for mainframes thirty years ago. Plenty of mainframes still out there but nobody is implementing new. Same can be said for virtualization. It’s a limited market with significantly slowed growth over where it was a decade ago.
The move to a subscription model will let them squeeze every last dollar out of the technology while they still can.
Please forgive a wildly uninformed question: What is it that VMware does today that isn’t covered by Docker?
Storage, software defined networking, performance metrics, VDIs, endpoint security, virtualization on the desktop.
Not to mention, a lot of workloads aren’t suited to containers. The vast majority of business software isn’t containerized, and it would be wildly cost-prohibitive for me to shoehorn that square peg into the round hole of virtualization.
But all of these moves have been with the goals of innovating faster
Fail.
meeting our customers’ needs more effectively,
Fail.
and making it easier to do business with us.
Fail.
If the goal is milking your customers for more money then it all makes sense. At least until they start migrating away from VMware and your new client stream completely dries up.
A lot of people talk about Proxmox but I wouldn’t be surprised if redhat open shift decided to throw its hat into the ring as an HP or Dell partner.
While open shift can somewhat accommodate VM workloads, it feels like an afterthought. Really the goal is to charge how your applications are run.
However, VMware presides over staunchly “old fashioned” ships that think in terms of “machines”. So ProxMox is a bit more similar.
RedHat did have ovirt which would have been a closer platform, but they ditched that in favor of openstack, which was also VM centered but “cloudy”, which also isn’t the target model of on premise virtualization (openstack had other problems too), and now it’s openshift, which is largely a “kubernetes is a buzz word, let’s go, also as an afterthought some VM hosting to give some semblance of continuity for users we yanked through RHEV, openstack, and for now openshift”
It might play a role, but ProxMox may be better situated to be like for like. Microsoft is of course pushing their azure stack for those wiling to get tied up into azure a bit. I suspect openshift will continue to mainly focus on cloud hosted VMs rather than retool they’re go to market to better capture those abandoning VMware. After all, since the story is “reduce costs”, that’s not an appealing scenario to red hat/IBM, since it inherently puts an obvious upper bound on revenue and the customers will be those that demonstrated they are the most ready to migrate when unhappy.
I think this is very interesting. I’ve been investigating the solutions and found that a lot of other platforms like scale hci, virtuozzo, and oracle VM are all based on the oVirt/Openstack platforms but have been customized.
Openshift and Suse Harvester both have a very similar Kubernetes first approach which I think is interesting. Harvester seems to rely on KubeVirt to deploy “legacy workloads” (probably windows).
The reason I mention openshift though is because I’ve been paying attention to Wendell, level1techs, and the level1 forums and Wendell keeps hinting that Redhat/IBM openshift + intel is being used as a VDI platform featuring Intel flexGPUs for a secret customer (I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a government facility like the national laboratory near Knoxville). I’m just trying to envision how that deployment looks.
I find it peculiar that everybody in this discussion is ignoring Hashicorp’s stuff??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp
I glanced at Proxmox vs Hashicorp’s stuff, after seeing some discussions on here about 'em, & Hashicorp’s stuff is oriented to clarity & simplicity.
Sorta Japanese take on it.
To me clarity is worth a significant amount of value.
Anyways, I’m just noting this, for anyone who’s actually considering such things: I’m only a nobody who has avoided geeking for some years.
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