VMware and Siemens spar over where to stage software licence showdown German giant Siemens AG has tried to convince a US court to throw out the case in which VMware alleged it used unlicensed software. VMware filed the case in March, when it alleged that Siemens and some of its related companies in the US had used many instances of unlicensed software, a fact that came to light during …
Once upon a time, Siemens was a giant - we used to jokingly call it a "bank with an attached electric appliance department" - that would have bought someone like Broadcom, never mind VMware with the spare change behind the cushions. Just to then unceremoniously fire every single exec.How the mighty have fallen.
"bank with an attached electric appliance department"
They used to say the same of GEC-Marconi. They took the piss out of Lord Weinstock - the CEO - for having a huge cash mountain and not using it to buy companies. Then, after Weinstock went and the dot-com bubble hit its peak they spent their cash mountain on expensive but worthless start-ups and the company almost disappeared. When the bubble burst the shares went from £12 to 12p overnight; I've got many friends who worked there and their pension funds were gutted. So maybe Siemens isn't the behemoth that it once was, but at still has a market cap higher than Lockheed or Boeing and, more importantly, still exists. Of the 12,000 people Marconi once employed in Chelmsford there are about 100 left working for BAE who bought the business before it, effectively, went bust.
That is true. But Siemens Halbleiter and Siemens Datentechnik (which then merged with Nixdorf to save them and became Siemens-Nixdorf) are shadows of their former selves. Siemens used to be like the Japanese kaigyou: a job for life. So many of my former coworkers took early retirement, left outright or, in the end, were even made redundant.
I was first thinking of it as a variation of Stockholm syndrome, but that's not quite the right description. After a bit more looking, I think traumatic bonding is more like it.
But in a business sense, I think there's an element of "this hurts, but to change will hurt more" (a finance version of traumatic bonding ?) - and the longer things go on, the more entrenched the tech becomes, and the more it will hurt to change. If you look at how MS has got to where it is (I'm not familiar enough with VMware to comment on that), it's slowly moved the goalposts over time, each time the change has been detrimental to users, but it's been small enough not to trigger the "f*** this, they've gone too far this time" response - and also over time they've carefully crafted an intricate web of interdependency designed top make it ever harder for any third party to replace any of the tools in the MS ecosystem (thus making it almost an "all or nothing" choice whether to move to something else.)
In the case of Adobe, they got to where they were by providing damn good tools - to the point that they were the de-facto standard in the creative industry. But then they did a big-bang switch to subscriptions and the users found they didn't have any other viable options than to go with it or quit the industry.
More or less correct.
I've been tasked with finding alternatives to vmware in our environment, and of the three viable choices we have (Hyper-V, ProxMox, and Nutanix AHV), the first one might end up being the one we go to, even though it's the least desireable choice- The UI and UX for Proxmox is not exactly friendly to someone unfamiliar with Linux, especially on the configuration side, and migrating machines over will be... interesting. (And not in a good way.)
I'm stalled out with testing AHV, because the community edition of the install ISO up and chose the wrong damn network interfaces instead of what VMware and ProxMox does and ask the user at the keyboard what network interface to configure during the process, so I have to dig up a script post-install to fix that in order for me to finish configuring the damn thing to begin with.
Nutanix would also us rather buy their hardware instead of the validated hardware we already own, so it'd be more of a forklift upgrade costing more than the support contract that VMware quoted us back in March. (And we'd also have to buy additional hardware for what we have anyway, because AHV doesn't like using things like external storage appliances, even if they are on a dedicated SAN.
While there's a probable migration path from VMware to Hyper-V, it's going to involve down time (much like ProxMox's migration process) and adding in the instability of Windows Servers as a Hypervisor, which frankly scares me.
"adding in the instability of Windows Servers as a Hypervisor, which frankly scares me."
Windows stability is not a problem, and Hyper-V is tried and tested stuff, but you need to patch the hosts just as you patch ESXi, although with Windows it's a monthly ordeal...
Ideally you install a Core version of Windows Server on the metal, and just the necessary Hyper-V features. Nothing else. Core server is Powershell only - which is more complex than esxcli - which has its own isoteric commands you'll never use - but Powershell allows quite complex things in Windows world in general. If you have used PowerCLI with VMware then it's going to be a small jump.
The bare metal Hyper-V is remotely commanded via either the normal RSAT tools in a Windows 10/11 PC (free), or via Windows Admin Center (free), using Powershell (free), or System Center ($$$), or SCVMM ($$$). If you already have the latter two products licensed, I recommend checking them out for easier management. I think you can get a trial from MS.
The user experience is not as smooth and nice as with VMware, but it is a manageable solution.
***
Whatever you do, do not choose Azure Local. We've been testing it for the last half year and even with Microsoft's engineers' help it's been a nightmare just to set up properly and still doesn't work properly!
I am thinking that the MBAs at Broadcom must have missed their Economics lecture the day that they discussed the concept of "Substitution".
The other hypervisors on the market may not have as many bells and whistles as VMWare today, but Broadcom has given them the reason to step up their game and close to parity.
Without bringing politics into this AB Inbev found out not to F-around with an existing customer base when adequate substitutes are available.
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