Remember, remember, the 1st of November: The day Dell VMware spun out

Dell and VMware have named the day they'll break up: November 1. The conscious uncoupling starts on October 29, when VMware will pay a special dividend of $11.5 billion to all current shareholders. On the same day, Dell shareholders will also receive a dividend, in the form of VMware stock, to compensate them for Dell letting …

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe?

It seems to be a case of champagne dreams and a beer budget.

I put their chance of success only marginally above the Gunpowder Treason and Plot.

(+1 for the headline)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they can find some of the energy they had back in 2004

and finish the GUI migration from 20 years ago.

Feels like their pace of development has been glacial, and the plight of those that have to live it it day to day has been ignored. The migration to a usable and feature complete GUI hurt the most, but the core offering still lacks any backup functionality, it still is finicky about hardware compatibility, base networking and network storage setup are still a pill, and I can live without the hundred sales calls laboring under the delusion I want to spend 300K rearchitecting our deployment every year.

We have been seriously considering moving to HyperV because they haven't gotten their act together and we are paying for it already(it's not technically free). We would lose a little functionality, and I hate the HV GUI too, but it's harder to justify paying for esxi when we could run the whole thing of 3 year old white box windows servers.

VMware has till the end of Covid to get it's house in order, we may not renew as we will be due a server refresh, and I'd rather spend the overhead of vsphere licencing + more expensive hardware to meed the HCL on SDDs for the storage array instead.

[Franco]

Re: Hopefully they can find some of the energy they had back in 2004

I usually get mocked for this by VMware diehards, but if Hyper-V has the functionality you need and you run a mostly Microsoft shop then it makes sense with the licensing. The main downside, as you said, is the GUI. Management just isn't as easy unless you pay for SCVMM.

I'm glad VMware is being seperated out though, support and customer service throughout the Dell years has been getting worse and worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hopefully they can find some of the energy they had back in 2004

totally agree. For lots of customers the extra functionality of VMWare is just a waste of time and therefore money as its not really used. HYPER-V is simpler to support, it looks and acts like any other windows server, I do take the point about management without SCVMM but if you've not got a very large deployment that's not really an issue. vCenter drives me up the wall, so many menu's and configurations scatter allover the the GUl trying to find stuff is a pain. Patching the environment is a classic example. Hyper-v patch like you do any other windows server, ESXi, bugger around with lifecyle manager and download patches form vmware, then add them to a baseline then stage the baseline, etc, etc, etc And my particular favorite, patching vCenter in a vCenter HA configuration. First destroy your current vCenter HA config, patch vCenter then recreate vCenter HA!!!!!! Which takes ages as its got to clone your current vCenter and deploy two copies, one for the passive node and one for the witness, and as vCenter can be quite lumpy it takes a while. We've had a couple of issues with vCenter HA and both times the VMWare support engineer(s) have said vCenter HA is shonky and they wouldn't use it!!!!!

[BART BARFSALOT]

The Dell Tolls for ESXi

What a short memory you have, dear author! For me, VMstare lost its dev-cred shine years ago, when it suddenly stopped support for some of its then-popular free developer client tools by laying off a shipload of engineers, letting the current versions rot, and shoving on us crappy, immature Webby tools. That is when clunky-but-included-for-free OverHypedV got attention, and many SMBs have never looked back. Once the leader in a simpler time, stagnant, enterprise-bound VMstare no longer inspires. Dell is no fool: Sold high and said goodbye. Writing on the wall.