>I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
There will be no next. Broadcom will get blood from the stone, rest assured. They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box. If you think IBM and mainframe is bad, you've never lived with a technology that Broadcom has acquired.
100%. I still have contacts from when I worked there, and It's worse than feared. Everything is on fire and all the best engineering/support talent has either left or is leaving. Broadcom is not only raising prices, but is set to deliver considerably worse products. It makes me sad, because it was once an incredible place to work. Now I recommend that people avoid them like the plague.
Incredible place to work or not, I recall at least as far back as 2004 they were terrible from a B2B support standpoint. Impossible to get help with buggy drivers, everything opaque and poorly documented.
And don't get me started on trying to get their chipsets working on Linux. Up until recently, it was nearly as bad as nvidia's garbage. Even now, I'm not sure if everything is well supported; I've avoided BRCM wifi like the plague for years now.
Maybe, Broadcom's strategy is 'to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box'. Broadcom spent $69B to acquire VMWare. They just need to squeeze blood for another 10 years.
VMware's revenue for 2022 is $13B, and net income about $1.8B. Trim sales department, remove duplication(HR, IT, etc), cut down development, remove many make-work projects that the middle management engages in, increase licensing/support cost. They will focus more on net income, financing costs for $69B will be taken care of by layoffs and other stuff.
IBM? Try EMC or Cisco. I ended up at the former by acquisition; many friends ended up at the second likewise. AFAICT they both have much worse records of turning acquisitions into abandonware than IBM does (not that IBM's is great). Oracle and Microsoft have already been mentioned, but Intel deserves a place on that horrible list too. Tech has been full of such fat and lazy predators for a long time.
Pretty much this. I wish proxmox would get off their butts and release a better management setup to deal with multisite, as I would love to complete the move to their product for our last remaining vmware systems.
Tbh I was really surprised how Workstation still got major updates after that news from 2ish years ago where they fired the whole team working on that and moved its development to India . It already seemed like they wanted to focus on the core business of ESX and switch workstation to maintenance mode, but no, we for example got major improvements in 3D pass-through, like Vulkan and d3d10/11 support.
Simple: there's devs in India who can code well and not every Western developer is an irreplaceable John Carmack so not every offshoring story ends badly.
Sure, without a doubt, there are exellent devs to be found worldwide.
But let's face the reality ...
Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent.
They go outsourcing in India because they want to wield the axe on what they perceive as the expense of Western developers.
So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they !
Especially as a typical remuneration structure for senior management is that you are rewarded with a bonus based on the amount of cost-cutting you've achieved.
I agree completely with you that 'Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent'; they go to India primarily for cheaper resources. But there are secondary consequences to this outsourcing: cheaper resources in India working on the same product for a year get enough training to understand the code base. In the Western corporate world, every company wants to hire a rockstar with all those leetcode hard questions, etc. In Indian outsourcing environment, if someone is willing to learn, willing to work for less, knows how to solve fizz buzz and other problems, he/she gets hired. With the lower pay, the management doesn't expect them to be rockstars, these devs with lower-pay even according to Indian standards are getting free training by doing maintenance. After a while, they can contribute to the code base. That's why you see so many developers who worked at WITCH companies on behalf of clients like Cisco, have become good network development engineers, moved to USA, and working for tech giants.
In India, because of different levels of pay, one can get trained for first few years by working for cheap companies. Once they hone skills, they go for companies that pay them top: companies even below WITCH -> WITCH -> American companies in India -> American companies in America; that's how the pipeline works there. In the states, this pipeline is completely gutted: every company wants rockstars or hires fresh grads from select schools.
You're living in a bubble if you think the all US companies are only looking to hire rockstars and that the US doesn't have it's own fair share of body-shops or non-tech companies looking to hire entry-level devs on the cheap.
>So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they!
I beg to differ.
You're either ignorant or have no idea how many SW and HW you interact with regularly from big name companies, has been through the hands of skilled Indian or other offshore devs which while being cheaper than American devs, are in now way worse programmers, sometimes the opposite.
You seem to equate pay only with talent and skill, but that's rarely the case. Lower paid international devs aren't necessarily worse than their American counterparts and well paid American devs aren't always better than international talent.
Your pay is more a function of opportunities and supply/demand in your area rather then purely on your own skills. Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
For the record, I don't buy the whole "America is best thing" and I most certainly don't have a dog in the whole patriotic-flag-waving-bs fight either. And yes, I've been on the receiving end of what would be politely described as "poor" US talent, so I'm acutely aware that not everything in the garden is rosy.
I am also not disputing that there is a proportion of companies out there who go to India for all the best reasons, a genuine quest for talent.
But sadly, I think we have to accept the reality that such companies are very much in the minority. The reality, sadly, is that the majority of companies who outsource to India only do so for one reason. Aggressive cost-cutting.
>The reality, sadly, is that the majority of companies who outsource to India only do so for one reason. Aggressive cost-cutting.
Of course companies will optimize for the best bang for the buck labor the same way you optimize for the best bang for the buck products when you shop for something, that's how capitalism works, it's a two way street.
Now if the move to India, or anywhere else, lowers the development cost without lowering the product quality, why is that a problem?
I would understand this being an issue when offshoring causes the quality of the product to go to shit, but it often isn't the case anymore, so what's then problem here?
Unless of course you mean the problem is "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" which would be understandable but like I said, capitalism is a two way street.
I've been in this "industry" for near 25 years. I'm in the US (though not American), but in that time I've rarely worked with Americans on my direct or adjacent teams (they're definitely a minority in tech, and I've worked from 12-person startups, to 300K-person giants). I've even worked for some of the body-shop-outsourcers you've referenced and have been the one providing the outsourcing. I understand this is anecdotal, but I have never seen any outsourcing or offshoring contract that didn't cause the quality of a product or service to go to shit. Quality isn't even usually quantified and defined in most offshoring contracts (at least ones where I've worked). The amount of downright fraud involved in the providers, where for example, we were supposed to provide service X for 5 years, but really we've just told the customer we did, and now we're going to retroactively go back 5 years and adjust some engineer's timesheets, is both common and staggering.
> Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
Supply and demand. American companies needed "developers, developers, developers", and when the supply is very finite and at the same time the investment markets were flush with "dumb money" that begs for at least a pittance of ROI, so in the end they ended up in bidding wars.
So now when a developer from <insert poor country here> enters the US labor market, their market value increases simply because they are now adding to the supply side of the US labor market - them being in the US is the factor.
That was a rhetorical question. The explanation you gave was the correct one but it wasn't nectary since it was obvious and self-suggested from my rant.
First of all, what traceroute66 replied. Just like China is able to manufacture high quality products.
Also, you're making it sound like the devs can do whatever they want and happened to deliver cool new features. As said, back then everything hinted at them just switching Workstation to maintenance mode and letting it slowly fade into irrelevance, so it wouldn't have mattered how brilliant that new team was.
Funnily enough, I know of two instances where companies got rid of their mainframe driven by the license cost for Gen[1] which was bought by Broadcom in 2020. I heard they were only issuing 5 year licenses now.
Lol. I didn't realize that. The product i used to use from CA years ago was sold to another tech necromancer - Attachmate. I thought CA was part of whatever shitshow acquired them! :)
AWS, Azure and GCP are going to see some growth from this. If you were an ESX customer and needed a good reason to finally embrace the cloud - here it is.
Meta/Facebook. Look how instagram, WhatsApp, and oculus are doing. Even the stuff they ended up abandoning they cleaned up and open sourced (like Parse)
Meta really doesn't get enough credit for their open source contributions and stewardship of important tech. Of course there are very real criticisms of Facebook and their engagement strategies and such, but LLaMa has been incredible, on top of things like React of course.
Maybe not in the US, or in your bubble, but a lot of people still use FB to connect with friends and family, or their groups of interest. Many more use it for the marketplace, to sell and buy things. For them FB is an indispensable venue.
As for helping divide society/ politics, have you paid attention to HN front page the last few days? Wave and wave of OpenAI posts, with huge amount of ignorant, uninformed, speculative, conspiracy driven, repetitive, divisive comments that got endlessly upvoted and promoted. That reflects who the HN audience is and what we are interested in. You may say that HN also helps divide society/politics. Yet you, and I, are still here.
They're doing well, but at least Instagram and WhatsApp are much worse for the end user than they were pre-acquisition. To the point where I've stopped using Instagram, and have moved as many of my chats off WhatsApp as I could.
I guess it depends where you live? In the Western would that should be pretty normal. Not that everybody had it, a lot of people just didn't care, but if you wanted to be online with a low-tier gaming rig it's not like that cost an arm and a leg. And people played CS on full-on potatoes back in the day. 512*384 low details software renderer with 15fps.
I think it is matter of who it used to what. I was working with web version of Outlook for a long time and loved it. Now I am forced to use old one and hate it.
It's been slowly getting better though. Nowadays they have a working search function, pasting works most of the time, and it's much harder to break the input area. Took them several years, but for pretty much all of 2023 it has been an acceptable chat software
Sadly, I have wasted many hours reading HP-UX documentation, and also hunting the Modula-2+ and Modula-3 papers, as per Compaq and DEC Olivetti acquisitions.
> They even fuck over their own customers by locking away documentation and firmware updates behind a support contract paywall.
I used to work for HPE on their OpenStack team, and getting support, even as an employee, basically required me to have a rolodex full of engineers all over the world. A tremendous amount of troubleshooting was just looking up who had committed code, then tracking them down when something blew up.
Broadcom is the reason there are a few hundred drivers for minor variations of the networking chipset in your laptop, each of them incompatible with all of the others.
Broadcom was essentially bought by a private equity firm who took the name as the name of the umbrella corporation.
Before that Broadcom was (and still is) one of the larger communication hardware companies, making chips for cell, wifi, bluetooth, ethernet and ARM SoCs, along with telecom and data center boxes that used these chips. You almost certainly have their hardware in some device you own. But they have always had difficulty competing with Qualcomm, arguably in part due to anticompetitive behavior from the later.
After the acquisition, they have been acquiring enterprise software companies to diversify, including CA Technologies (think Atlassian/Oracle of the mainframe world), Symantec, and now VMWare.
Given that CA already had the reputation of "where software goes to die", this is ... bad news for VMWare. (I'd heard that description from many in the tech field, including from a CEO who's previous venture had been acquired by CA.)
I also hadn't realised that Broadcom itself had originated at HP.
Broadcom didn't originate at HP, it was an early 90's startup. What happened is that a private equity firm bought some parts of HP that had been spun off and then that company later bought Broadcom.
Yeah, that wiki article is confusing. Broadcom Inc is the new company formed when Avago purchased Broadcom Corp, and Avago got it's start as a spin off of HP (by way of Agilent). However, the original Broadcom Corp is older than that and was unrelated to HP:
It took me a couple of readings to get that right. Yes, it is confusing.
Part of me thinks that corporate acquisitions and mergers should not be permitted to use prior names, and especially not to adopt the name of an earlier, non-ancestor parent.
Its history goes back to the 1960's. It is a major semiconductor company that I would say, was part of the ecosystem that made computers and networks possible.
You haven't heard of them because they make too much of everything that makes the fabric of everyday computing.
It's like how you would never really know of the company who made the pipes for your toilet/plumbing.
>They will continue to raise maintenance and licensing fees until they very last customer turns off their last ESXi box
hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Honest question. Maybe there are some licensing issues I'm not aware of. Isn't vbox open source? If not, wouldn't even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ in the browser would do most virtualization trick now days?
most people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox.
The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes.
The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface.
it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem.
That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for.
It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks).
As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
Fair bit of that can be done with Proxmox now. What esxi has going for it from what I hear is the ability to deal with 100/1000s of hosts over many many nodes and Proxmox struggles with that
can you speak to how that is vs the gui web interface goodness of proxmox? I'm interested in playign with ganeti but all the youtube walkthroughs that would motivate me more are super outdated and the website doesn't really sell the product very well.
> vsan... a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is all about what the sales guy is willing to do to make the rest of the sale. It has zero marginal cost if they can get you on the platform and using their ecosystem of tools and software.
In edge deployments where rack space is tight it's actually a great solution if you only have a few U to work with and have a HA requirement for a legacy app as well.
good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
> Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks
Actually, no, they apparently won't, because I tried and was told they are discontinuing that product. They are going full steam on their OpenShift (k8s) product though, and will be happy to inform you that you can run a VM on that, but if you press them you'll find that you're actually running a VM in a container, and that you have to specify it as a k8s deployment, so apparently you can't just throw a VM up like you can in vCenter.
It's ESXi, the server class stuff, not so much the desktop VMware. So many companies have been using it for years. Now Broadcom are wanting to install spyware to "track" usage and license compliance and they're raising prices. For a lot of orgs, it'll probably take several years to move the production systems to something else.
For the desktop, VirtualBox isn't much better. At one point after Oracle purchased it, they were tracking your IP and if they found you were using their extension pack that provides essential capabilities like USB 3 support (only the core of VirtualBox is GPL) and it was for commercial use, they were hitting you up for a license [0].
Nearly every company/public service/non-profit/whatever uses vSphere/ESX somewhere. You'd be (very) surprised to see where people shoehorn ESXi hosts. VMware is EVERYWHERE, and vSphere/ESX/NSX is still the best game in town if you want to virtualize your datacenter. It's insanely rock-solid tech.
Yep. Arguably if you have Windows licensing, Hyper-V will do mostly all the same stuff "for free", but only if you want your hypervisors to be exactly as reliable as Windows machines. If you're rolling VMware, your datacenter's backbone tends to be ridiculously solid.
Think servers with four digits of days of uptime, in terms of things you probably shouldn't do, but absolutely can.
That’s not actually different on the Windows side, you should update your priors. There are datacenters full of Server 2019 boxes that have never been upgraded because the guest VMs are mission critical.
Source: I’ve responded incidents on those guests. It’s terrifying, but hypervisor uptime is limited by power not OS choice.
I'm the other "pro Microsoft guy" here on HN, but I have to agree with the GP comment: VMware stability puts Microsoft to shame.
These days Windows is stable if you don't touch it.
VMware is stable even if one of the disks is out of space, the fibre is flapping, some idiot misconfigured the switches, and the whole cluster has time out of sync... by seven hours.
That's not hyperbole, that's an actual cluster that I got given to look after. It was running like that for months, perfectly fine, with VMware HA just "taking care of things".
If you sneeze in the direction of a Windows Failover Cluster it'll... fail.
Agreed. I have 20+ Hyper-V Windows Server VMs running since 2017, seeing 400-600 Mbps live video traffic - no major crashes, only due to facility power loss or annual patching reboots.
As explained by others the parent comment is talking about ESXi, but to answer your question: virtualbox desktop hypervisor is the spam of desktop hypervisors.
Everyone has heard of it, it's theoretically comparable to the likes of VMware/Parallels desktop hypervisors, and it's cheaper. But just like spam (compared to ham), it's also obvious to anyone that's used both that it's by far the worse option, and there's very few reasons to use it besides cost, while there are numerous reasons to use one of the better alternatives.
In general, performance is significantly better with other hypervisors, but in particular shared filesystem performance (ie sharing a directory from the host OS into the guest) and features are lacking on virtualbox.
It's the default provider used by vagrant, and even the vagrant team recommend using a different provider for "any serious work".
One caution: SPAM isn't actually cheaper than ham, it's just shelf stable without refrigeration. You can get a decent spiral ham for well under $3.29/lb (Costco earlier today), but 12oz cans of SPAM work out to around $5/lb.
I don't know if it's just a demand thing or perhaps because I don't really know what "spiral ham" is, but in Australia the only ham you're likely to find cheaper per-kilo than spam is going to be a 2+ kg leg of ham, complete with bone, fat, skin, etc. A boneless ham will be at least as expensive, and sliced/shaved ham from the deli section at a supermarket will be easily more expensive per-kilo than spam.
Of course one could argue there's an even higher percentage of inedible parts in the canned monstrosity because it's all inedible, and I wouldn't argue that view point is wrong.
A spiral ham is actually a spiral sliced ham. This is the butt end or shank end of a whole ham and yes, typically probably 3kg at a minimum. The 'spiral' part is that during processing it's been sliced in a spiral that leaves slices roughly 5-7mm thick. These are typically a little more expensive than unsliced bone in hams, but the convenience factor is huge.
Hams like that often go on sale around US Thanksgiving and Christmas, with prices for them around US$4.50-6.50/kg last week and probably as 'loss leaders' around US$2-3/kg the week before Christmas. Ham is a regular part of 'traditional Thanksgiving' but not as much as turkey, whereas the 'Christmas ham' is definitely a thing.
Edit: the following statement is incorrect and retracted: ‘Virtualbox is not free for commercial use iirc’
Esxi is an enterprise product which engineers are familiar with, the cost of the product vs the cost of migration and upskilling in alternative tech should not be underestimated, particularly when it’s the thing that runs all your other things.
Edit: in case you’re not aware, many organisations still leverage on-prem virtualisation technologies - that might not be obvious to people that haven’t seen it.
Virtualbox is GPL licensed. Only the extension packs are non GPL.
In any case virtualbox competes with VMWare player/Workstation/fusion which we all should know is not their core business.
Proxmox and XCP-NG are well placed to take their customers and gradually add any missing functionality. Although neither have feature parity with VMWare they are adding new things all the time and are very responsive to their respective communities.
XCP-NG even has a VMWare to XCP migration tool built in.
However, in my experience using both I would avoid Proxmox specifically if your workloads include heavy SQL Server / Exchange usage. The bug in question affects all KVM based solutions.
Yeah, I was only ever a ‘casual’ ESXi user (we only ever had a couple of hosts and two dozen or so VMs, and nothing super mission critical), and I’m amazed at how good Proxmox is now we’ve started using it instead of ESXi given the Broadcom acquisition.
Obviously if you’re running dozens of hosts and thousands of VMs, needing live migration and things like that, then it’d probably be missing a lot of features you’d want, but for smaller stuff it’s pretty crazy how well it works.
I don’t see MS having any interest in VMware. They have their own virtualization tech already and it would only cannibalize Azure, which seems to be pretty much were their money is now.
While I agree Microsoft probably doesn’t want to buy VMware, they absolutely have a pretty strong “hybrid cloud” solution, which basically means running an Azure hypervisor on your on-prem servers.
Really it’s just Hyper-V with extra “cloud management” bits (“Azure Arc” and friends), but it’s _relatively_ friendly to manage alongside your Azure cloud resources once you set it up.
Bottom line is, I really don’t think they’re worried about on-prem hypervisors competing with Azure!
Yeah that's kind of what I was about (though probably not worded very well).
For the on-prem virtualization use cases they are interested in, they already have the necessary technology with Hyper-V.
I actually thought that vSphere offers some stuff in the hyperconverged area that Hyper-V doesn't, this is where I could see it competing with Azure. However it seems Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct seems to be pretty much on par, at least on paper.
So there's even less reasons why MS would be interested in VMware. Only maybe to get rid of a competitor.
They're picking up the pieces for 69 billion. Your analysis makes it sound like VMWare is falling apart. Going by price it suggests it is going from strength to strength no?
That price is a reflection of future financial potential, not of commercial success. Very few people would pick VMWare for new stuff today unless it is a large on-prem installation (and there are still plenty of those). But they are past their peak and the bulk of recovering that will come from existing customers, not from new ones. You lock yourself in to anything related to Broadcom at your peril.
I am really disappointed that Dell did not accomplish enough with VMWare to hit my radar outside of a couple of fans at tech meetups.
I really thought there was a strong play there to do a major private cloud play as part of Dell's 'come back story' and then nothing.
But maybe that's exactly the problem. For a container based solution you still need a hypervisor but if you invite hypervisor people to the table, to they really want to champion linux containers or do they want to try to reach a local maximum by squeezing all of the fat out of VMs.
Even the Java to an extent 'got it' more than Dell+VMWare. I abandoned Java as a platform right around the time Docker went from whispers in dark corners to a quiet ping on people's radars. Within a couple years of that, the JVM team had increased their level of effort to shrink the system footprint from what I would label bet-hedging to aggressively. You need a small JVM if you're going to pack five services and/or ten JVMs onto the same host. Initially J2EE imagined itself to be multitenant, and it did a poor job of re-implementing half of Erlang, poorly. Containers were clearly on their radar.
There’s a market out there for a very well designed turn key cloud with things like managed Kubernetes and Postgres you can deploy on bare metal or cheap VPSes. Too bad they aren’t looking at that. They have plenty of expertise and some of the software pieces already developed.
I bet the problem is that they are too “enterprise” and couldn’t price it low enough. If it were too expensive it wouldn’t be competitive with big cloud managed offerings.
VMware under EMC $625M acquisition lasted ‘04-‘15
Dell acquires EMC for $58B in ‘15 which includes previously acquired VMware.
Now Dell is trying to balance their books and sells entire stake of VMWare in ‘21.
Broadcom now picks up the pieces of VMware with acquisition completed this year (‘23).
I wonder which corporate overlord will take it over in the next 4-5 years.
Maybe Oracle or MS will be the next to bag hold.