Here’s how VMware hopes to spend $1B Broadcom R&D budget boost VMware intends to use the billion dollars a year Broadcom has promised to add to its R&D budget to simplify and extend its platform, to ease upgrades, and encourage users to adopt more of its stack. The Register learned of those plans today at VMware’s Explore conference in Las Vegas, where the virtualization outfit's …
As a freelance consultant in Luxembourg I get to talk to quite a few people in the upper echelons. Just yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a business owner who told that he had dropped VMware entirely. Among the things he gave as reasons were :
1) as a business partner, he has to recertify every year (money for VMware), he has to give a certain amount of referrals every year (money for VMware), and yet he still has to pay for his application license - no freebies for business partners
2) the latest version of VMware must be installed on (very) recent hardware - if your server is five years old, VMware won't install
As a result, he is now using an open source (free) product that works just as well, is less complicated to configure and use and doesn't pout in the corner if the CPU isn't the latest and greatest.
I'm thinking that VMware may have some issues in its future if it can be so easily replaced by a free product.
>> as a business partner, he has to recertify every year (money for VMware), he has to give a certain amount of referrals every year (money for VMware), and yet he still has to pay for his application license - no freebies for business partners
That's the case for every software vendor. And partners do get some niceties (like NFR licenses).
>> the latest version of VMware must be installed on (very) recent hardware - if your server is five years old, VMware won't install
That's nonsense. ESXI 8.0.1 (the latest version) runs fine on Hawell generation systems - they came out in 2014, that's 9 years ago.
There's also a simple override for the CPU check, with which ESXi 8.0.1 installs on even older systems (like Sandy Bridge, which is approx 13 years old).
>> As a result, he is now using an open source (free) product that works just as well, is less complicated to configure and use and doesn't pout in the corner if the CPU isn't the latest and greatest.
So what is this mythical open source product that does everything vSphere does and that is easier to use than vCenter?
You're joking, right? We ran an evaluation not too long ago (when the VMware/Broadcom deal became serious), and there were so many issues that at some point is wasn't worth progressing. Shit like CPU spiking (without a single VM on the server), or the whole system freezing, network issues (dropped connections, low performance), NFS crashing, and so on. SR-IOV and hwardware pass-through is a mess, and the UX is illogical. And this is on enterprise-grade server hardware.
I can't believe I'm saying this but even Hyper-V has been more mature than Proxmox.
And then there is the fact that all the 3rd party vendor tools that exist around vSphere and vCenter and make life easier for large deployments don't even exist for Proxmox, or that Proxmox isn't even on the list of supported hypervisor/OS.
I get that Proxmox has a large fanbase in the homelab scene, and I guess it's good enough for small deployments, but it's a long way off from being equivalent to vSphere, or even an enterprise grade hypervisor. For a small business, especially when it's on Windows anyways, I'd rather use Hyper-V (and it's essentially free).
vSphere 8 minimum CPU requirements is Skylake or newer - That's a processor family that launched over 8 years ago.
The dropping of CPU support isn't a VMware stipulation, it's because the CPU vendors (Intel/AMD) have EOL'd the CPU and no longer produce microcode updates. Skylake is currently the oldest Intel chipset still eligible for microcode updates, but only for Xeon processors (so don't be surprised if it drops off the list at the next vSphere major release).
If you were running it on an EOL chipset and a new Meltdown/Spectre/Rowhammer vulnerability or bug is discovered, you don't get microcode patches from the vendor and you're stuck running a buggy/insecure CPU.
Unofficially, you can get vSphere 8 working on hardware as old as Westmere (13+ years old), but it's unsupported (if it breaks, VMware are unlikely to help you).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
