As Broadcom nukes VMware's channel, the big winner is set to be Nutanix As the fallout from Broadcom’s takeover of VMware continues to rain down on the industry, rivals of the one-time virtualization giant have the opportunity to swoop on customers thanks to the massive changes happening to its channel. US semiconductor and software multinational Broadcom finally completed its acquisition of …
I wasn't quite up to speed on this as I assumed I was but got myself up to speed now(via https://nandresearch.com/research-brief-impact-of-new-vmware-bundles-pricing/). After learning what I learned regarding the bundles and no longer selling the standalone products(which I was surprised to see after checking both Dell and HPE's site for vmware related things and not finding anything), I have to think back to VMware's "vRAM tax" stuff they tried a decade or so ago, which they backtracked on eventually(took a while for them to realize this, and fortunately never affected me as I was on an older version and didn't upgrade until a while after things reversed).
Wondering after a year or so if a bunch of customers jump ship would Broadcom reverse course(maybe not entirely, but to some degree), maybe or maybe not I don't know all depends on the market reaction.
We have been planning for our VMware renewal for a while, I casually mentioned to my fairly newish boss that in the short term it would be unwise to expect stability from VMware till Broadcom's plans played out a bit more and it would be better to try and string them along until at least one C level was forced to take the fall for the hastiness of any planned VMware restructure. A fairly bland and predicatable statement from anyone who has been through enough vendor acquisitions I thought. My boss now thinks I am Mystic Meg and we have started to show a bit of ankle to Nutanix
And I'm sure more than a few idiots management-types are patting themselves on the back for their proposed VMWare 'revolution'. Planning out their "performance" bonuses whilst they drive the market for VMWare's products into the dustbin.
Well done! As this article discusses, letting your trained monkeys , errr beancounters, run things has never led to anything good in the long run.
I'm pretty sure that anybody who has been in the industry more than 5 minutes knew this was going to happen based on Broadcoms previous track record. Even before the aquisition, the change to core based licensing pushed costs up but as soon as there was whispers of Broadcom being in the running we knew the writing was on the wall for VMWare. As we have been banging on to our developers and vendors for the last 5 years, the future is CaaS and the hosting solution was never going to be Tanzu.
Its a shame, they have some solid products and there is nothing else that has management tools and 3rd party support that scale for enterprise hosting. Nutanix is OK for SMB but falls shorts when scaled up.
Yep... I jumped ship as soon as the acquisition was announced. Knew it wasn't worth investing any more time on something that would be irrelevant winin 6 months of the deal going through.
Haven't tried Nutanix myself, but I've got some industry contacts working for them now, and have heard a lot of good things.
For the moment, I'm generally suggesting the open source options for hypervisors unless you're an all-in Microsoft shop, in which case Azure HCI is the obvious move. The big open source players have support options now that are reasonably priced, and are all basically either Xen (XCP-NG) or Linux KVM (everything else). Xen scales well enough that it works for Amazon, so it's probably good enough for whatever size you're at too. KVM seems to be more open-ended, but there's open management options to choose from at basically every sub-hyperscaler size you might want, and if you're a hyperscaler, you probably already have a custom KVM management interface ;)
"unless you're an all-in Microsoft shop, in which case Azure HCI is the obvious move"
Good luck. Azure Stack HCI is still a bug-ridden mess, even worse so than Hyper-V. It's also really just a tool to slowly push Microsoft on-prem customers to the cloud.
"Xen scales well enough that it works for Amazon"
Amazon has abandoned Xen for KVM more than 7 years ago, and so have all the other big supporters. The only big player hanging onto it is Citrix for Citrix Hypervisor Formerly Known As XenServer, which also is more of a legacy product that Citrix is milking as long as possible (there isn't really much new development going on).
Xen is dead, the last new version came out in 2010 or so and since then there has been little development. KVM is where the (FOSS) virtualization action is, and has been for a long time.
Anyone who in 2024 considers Xen as a basis for a new large deployment really needs to get their head examined.
True, but there already are a number of solid management tools available, although most are for large installations, and they all come with the downside of higher complexity for installation and configuration.
As for security hardening, it doesn't depend on the hypervisor, security hardening something that should be done for any installation. Besides, it's not that out-of-the-box ESXi or vCenter (or any other VMware product) is particularly secure, either.
I can undestand that you didn't quite (enormous understatement I'd say) like your experience with Xen-Orchestra, but that doesn't justify the lies.
* Xen, the hypervisor, is well alive and kicking, thank you.
Lately specializing on "the other architecture" (i.e. arm64) and focusing on embedded workloads (e.g. automotive)
* AWS did use Xen as their hypervisor. They later migrated over to Nitro, their own concoction.... which isn't quite KVM, by the way
(Whereas everything else, including Nutanix's AHV, is based on KVM AFAIK)
...which means that, yes, Xen can manage hyperscale workloads too (AWS wasn't significantly less "ginormous" back then as compared to present size -- same league of "infinity")
* Citrix XenServer is probably mostly a dead-end, yes.... but the Hypervisor project (for the backend) and VATES' virtualization stack/XenOrchestra (and maybe even XOSAN --- haven't tried so can't comment) (for the frontend) are truly alive and releasing new versions regularly (including all kind of security patches), with a good and expanding ecosystem of partners.
But, what would I know.....
- Experienced Xen hypervisor user+sysadmin since Dec 2006 (yes, we had to patch our own kernels back then)
- At some time, even Citrix Partner (2010-2014)
- Have moderate experience with XOA... though we mostly manage our in-house fleet (smallish MSP) with our custom-built tools, and have done so essentially "forever"
and, well, my experience with KVM and KVM-derived products is quite less than stellar. Maybe I'm very much used to Xen's "just works" ---at least for my use cases--- rather than having to wrestle with a myriad of half-cooked third-party tools which don't quite fit anything but the most basic use cases.
Moreover, anything Xen I have used (except for XSR5.5) is way more stable, predictable, diagnoseable and repairable (IME) than even the most expensive VMware toolstack. YM *will* Vary.
I do agree with some other comentards, though, in that most "sub-hyper" CSPs (on KVM) must be running their own toolstacks (just like we do, on Xen)
...but you were referring to Enterprise/Mid-Enterprise kind of workloads, weren't you ?
I guess in your world, anyone who doesn't blindly agree with you / don't have the same experience must be "insane"... ah, the youngsters xD
Big user of Nutanix has all our stuff is hosted on it, we've got VMWare on Nutanix as well.
We've migrated a lot of stuff from VMWare to AHV and been pretty straightforward so there's an easy(ish) migration path.
Was going to run the community version of AHV at home but unfortunately, the NUC I'm using to play virtualisation does not support the min 3 SSDs I would need unfortunately. I could do it under Proxmox but rather defeats the point! Though possibly will try again on a small lower power form factor machine at some point.
There are a couple of different options I have found. AOOSTAR has some NUC-sized AMD units that have dual 2.5Gb networks plus wifi, three PCIe SSDs and up to probably 64GB of ram in the new one, and MinisForums put out the ms-01 recently with I think three SSD locations, dual 10Gb and dual 1Gb networks and a PCIe slot. That one supports 64GB but unofficially I've seen reports of 96 GB working.
I have a recent AOOStar unit and so far, so good.
What I haven't managed to find is a NUC / NUC+ sized box that will take 128GB or more.
Exactly. Institutional investors recognize that this is short-term thinking, cutting costs and coasting on income from the remaining customer base while Broadcom flogs off bits and gradually runs what's left into the ground. They love that. When Broadcom becomes the next IBM, the investors will have moved on to some other IT chop shop, as will the current crop of Broadcom execs.
> "AT&T is VMware’s largest customer for SD-WAN, said to account for about half of the total revenue, and the product is expected to be dead if the telecoms giant drops it."
AT&T rely a lot on velocloud indeed, but their SD-WAN offering is very rich and diverse supported by a state of the art multi-vendor orchestration platform. AT&T propose a lot more SD-WAN boxes than vmWare's offering. AT&T can probably leverage their position as reference customer to negotiate very good prices... or switch altogether to other vendors running on white boxes.
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There ARE trial XO licenses. In fact, the freemium model that it is based upon quite encourages you to enable the free time-limited (30 days) trial from within the web interface....
You might not like the interface, the model, the features or the company making it... but that was inaccurate.
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