Comment by antithesis-nl

> However, the magic word for both customer segments is "vMotion", i.e. live-migration of VMs across disparate storage. No OSS and/or commercial (including Hyper-V) solution is able to truly match what VMware could (and can, at the right price) do in that space...

Someone's gonna start working on that soon. Necessity is the mother of invention.

To me, this will be the UNIX wars moment for virtualization.

Originally, UNIX was something AT&T/Bell Labs mainly used for their own purposes. Then people wanted to use it for themselves. AT&T cooked up some insane price (like $20k in 1980s money) for the license for System V. That competed with the BSDs for a while. Then, some nerd in a college office in Finland contributed his kernel to the GNU project. The rest is history.

UNIX itself is somewhat of a niche today, with the vast majority of former use cases absorbed by GNU/Linux.

This feels like an effort by Broadcom to suck up all of the money in the VMWare customer base, thinking it's too much of a pain in the ass to migrate off of their wares. In some circumstances, they're not wrong, but there's going to be teams at companies talking about how to show VMWare the door permanently as a result of this.

Whether Broadcom is right that they can turn a profit on the acquisition with the remaining install base remains to be seen.

What can VMware do in this vmotion space?

The docs says open source can do a live migration, see https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Migration and https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

Third is academia. Even with a marginal academic discount, it doesn't come close to offsetting the price hikes. When the choice is between slashing personnel budget and minimizing the usage of/completely migrating away from VMware before the next renewal, there's really no choice in the matter, especially with the difficulty of firing employees.

Another magic word that Vmware has which no other vendor does the same is NSX. (network virtualization).

proxmox is lightyears behind this usecase, and so are most other vendors. Especially if you are building private/public clouds with multi tenancy in mind.

NSX is really well designed and scales nicely, (it even has MPLS/EVPN support for Telecom Service Provider integration).

Most open source and other commercial offerings have solved both the compute and storage aspect quite well. But on the networking front, they a really not comparable.

Proxmox for instance, only supports a vxlan encapsulation or vlans, without support for a proper control plane like EVPN. Heck, route injection by BGP is only doable by DIY'ing it ontop of proxmox.

"just using vlans" is not going to cut if you want to really scale across datacenters and with multiple tenants. NSX does this all really nicely without having to touch the network itself at all thanks to encapsulation and EVPN route discovery.

Hashicorp has some Nomad drivers for Qemu and a beta version that uses libvirt. However it's fairly immature and lacks a lot of features they would need to be competitive there.

Since IBM already has OpenShift I'm not sure how much time and effort they want to put into Nomad virtualization, but I'd love it as an alternative to Kubernetes.

libvirt+qemu can do live migration across disparate storage; I know quite a lot of people want to use it. I'm curious in which ways you find the vMotion stuff does well with that.

I would think another issue for a lot of existing large VMware customers is NSX (incl. dynamic firewalling), orchestration (vRA/vRO), vROPS, and the gazillion integrations that have been built with tight coupling at both ends. Swapping that out is not an easy task, and the "digital transformations" some of the available products are banking on take a lot of time in real life.

Xen (and XenServer and XCP and the Citrix banded stuff) have been able to live migrate VMs for a really long time. Definitely not something special to VMWare.

Realistically, all the legacy workloads (those that are singletons and can't be load-balanced, need an active GUI session etc) are going to to be problems forever, even if you keep VMWare around.

" Broadcom refused to even honor pre-acquisition license keys from these sources, leaving many private data centers in the lurch"

How is this not contract violation?

>However, the magic word for both customer segments is "vMotion", ... . No OSS and/or commercial (including Hyper-V) solution is able to truly match what VMware could (and can, at the right price) do in that space...

Storage vMotion requires a hefty license (as does DVS and the other useful things, such as containers). Proxmox does it all out of the box at a very reasonable price point.

Hell, VMware wont even let you use LLDP until your pissing money out of all orifices. You get CDP only for "free".

After 20+ years of being a VMware fanboi I am migrating all my customers to Proxmox. I've had enough.

I think Oxide's stuff does live migration, but I don't know how well it runs on non-Oxide hardware.

vMotion is about host failure. If a blade server dies, the vms can be spun up on another blade. Storage is same.