Broadcom re-orgs VMware into four divisions – none of which mention end-user compute products

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has concluded, and quickly resulted in the creation of four divisions dedicated to the virty giant's business – none of which appear to include end-user compute products. The changes weren't announced as such, but appeared on Broadcom's list of executives. The Register checked with Broadcom – …

[Grunchy]

Proxmox vs Qemu

I’ve got Proxmox on the servers and Virt-Manager (Qemu) on the workstation.

I tried out VMWare many moons ago, upgraded to VirtualBox, then settled on Proxmox & Qemu.

Of course Proxmox is a given, for the ZFS pool.

On the workstation it’s really unimportant, it’s just a sandbox for Microsoft Windows to be trapped in. It’s strictly for legacy stuff, I don’t even really have a use case for it.

(If I was running a cloud server I’d probably just use Proxmox, depending on the specific technologies needed, of course.)

[bigwiggle]

Re: Proxmox vs Qemu

VMware Workstation and Fusion aren’t even EUC products. They were moved to a different business unit years ago.

Horizon and Workspace One are the two product families under EUC.

[Crypto Monad]

Virt-manager is an X11 front-end to libvirt, which runs (amongst other things) qemu/kvm virtual machines.

Proxmox is software with a web front-end which also runs qemu/kvm virtual machines.

So in both cases, you have qemu/kvm as the hypervisor underneath. You're just running a different management software to create and start the VMs, attach a console etc.

In fact, you can run a qemu VM without any front-end if you like; it's just a userland process.

kvm -cdrom /path/to/image.iso

[Gene Cash]

I'm sure he knows that. I do, and I do the same thing. Proxmox is great for server management, and virt-manager is sufficient for the desktop. Best of both worlds.

I'd probably still be using VirtualBox though, if they didn't break audio/microphone support every other damned release.

[teknopaul]

I didn't. I know vmware was a lot of Linux under the hood. But that's handy info. Each time I look at virt tools the landscape seems to have changed.

I recently purchased headless hardware for windows to save myself the virtyslisation headache: USB involved.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they got rid of the crappy Linux scripting and moved to Powershell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you mean VBA?

> At least they got rid of the crappy Linux scripting and moved to Powershell.

<sarcasm>Oh yeah, powershell is sooo much better than bash or python</sarcasm>

[Pascal Monett]

"starting your next chapter elsewhere"

Oh, what a poetic way to say that you're being fired.

I hope it softens the blow for those who will be looking at XMas without a job this year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "starting your next chapter elsewhere"

They're being "allowed to spend more time with their families" this Xmas. Who could say no to that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "starting your next chapter elsewhere"

This is one of the longest telegraphed punches in history. While the timing before the holidays sucks, I don't know when there is ever a good time.

I doubt it came as a sudden & unexpected surprise to anyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "starting your next chapter elsewhere"

"starting your next chapter elsewhere"

Funny enough that's what a lot of VMWare customers will be be doing! hahahahaha We're going to be migrating from VMWare ESX to Nutanix AHV on our Nutanix cluster refresh

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "starting your next chapter elsewhere"

I got made redundant just before Christmas last year, and was really worried i wouldn't get any offers until well in to the new year. Turns out it was the easiest search for a job I've had in years, I was struggling to choose between 4 great offers before everyone disappeared for the holidays.

I hope everyone looking now has similar success.

[Bitsminer]

Player

They're still offering "VMware Workstation Player" --the free, the paid "Player" and the paid "Pro".

This week.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Player

So check this.

Workstation and Fusion are not EUC products. They were moved to a different business unit several years ago.

[J. Cook]

Hmm... I guess I know what I'm going to do with the giant lump of old hardware sitting in our lab, I guess, and that's building something else to replace vCenter and ESX, just in case Broadcom decides to go full evil with renewing support.

[Groo The Wanderer]

VMWare Workstation was still available when I checked last night - I had to download and install the 17.5 client on my Linux host (switched over from Microsquishy's IO-crippled Windows 11 Pro, which now only has an accounting software package and video games on it. "Wintendo" indeed. But I digress.)

I can't see them abandoning the Workstation line - it is what allows the development community to prototype environments that need to be hosted on their full-range products. You can't very well expect someone to pay for an ESXi server license to do software development.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Oh, they can, and are incentivesed too. Enshitification

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a free version of ESXi that can't be managed by vcenter and has limitation on the number of vcpus per VM (8), no vmotion, no backup API etc.

So it wouldn't cost a developer anything for the license of ESXi. The cost is a dedicated system to run it, having to virtualise it with another virtualisation product (nested virtualisation needed), or running ESXi on their development system and running their development environment as a VM on ESXi, passing through the graphics, keyboard etc to the VM, then allowing them to run multiple VMs on their development machine in ESXi with their own environment.

[43300]

Having to have a dedicated system to run it is the issue - for initial testing all many want is a Type 2 Hypervisor like VMWare Workstation. It's actually pretty good - for test VMs on the local machine it behaves far better than Hyper-V ever does. I hope they don't get rid of it.

[Sudosu]

"no backup API"

This is what started my journey to find a replacement.

Ended up with Proxmox and am very happy.

[Zoopy]

Terminology

The article mentions "posting" a Xeet.

I'd think "popping a Xeet" makes more sense.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Terminology

Or an Xcretion

[Roland6]

“end-user compute products”

Surely they are “private on-premises end-user & desktop cloud” which would naturally fit into VMware Cloud Foundation.

[Phalanx1759]

Same as before, the end of one more.

Let the exorbitant price hikes, the layoffs, the cuts to R&D, the mass exodus of clients, the brain drain start.

In two years will be a shell of it's former self pretending to be healthy. Products will start lagging behind, features missing, items cut. It's a shame to see VMware go down like this.

[Sudosu]

Re: Same as before, the end of one more.

As long as they don't try to go full SCO.

[Randall Shimizu]

VMware's number one customer complaint is their outlandish licensing costs. VMware is oblivious to customer concerns. Most companies in the SMB market are not using VMware or migrated to MS's Hyper-V. This has allowed MS to migrate them to the cloud. While the restructuring seems like a good first step they need to redo their corporate culture. Integrating VMware into Broadcom is a step in the wog direction.