Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

I agree with your point about "winning was the default state." I joined during the Diane Greene era and left in the Pat Gelsinger era, spoke to all three CEOs at different points in one-on-ones, and learned a lot about how different people approach the challenges of running a company and listening to employees.

Pre-Broadcom, sort of toward the end of my time there, there was a lot of unintended self-sabotage that didn't need to happen. We lost people that we shouldn't and shot ourselves in the foot for some really dumb reasons, which just a bit more coordination could have prevented. There were some innovative ideas that got lost in all this, and I believe could have fueled VMware's product line and put it in the right positions for where the sector ultimately went. Alas.

Avago's business model is to acquire cash cow businesses and then milk them dry. These VMware changes are consistent with that model.

There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").

VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).

Microsoft hides their best stuff in SCVMM, which is another product and another license they want you to purchase. Anytime I've asked someone from MS why I can't X like I can in vCenter the response was usually, "oh, it's in System Center. FCM, HVM are just stripped down. If you need it you should buy System Center."

If I were starting a company today I would make sure that the majority of my apps were web based. (CRM[netsuite or sf.com], O365/GoogleDocs, workday|gusto, etc.)

Why is your place of work not moving wholesale to Proxmox? It's mad that HyperV is chosen as a solution in this day and age.

Love proxmox now.

Yes? Do that for the hundreds of VMs, with a minimal downtime, bonus points for a dumb C-level on your neck.

You would quickly learn what "just converting disk images" is not enough for moving between hypervisors.

Just as an example: last year I moved a company with two Proxmox servers to ESXi. It took a 3 months and another server as a staging point. A minuscule in modern times 1TB+ VM took a whole weekend to be moved. Of course it didn't work in that time.

Or, they may have been naive. Small companies especially tend to have people with a more, I don't know, 'social' set of business expectations? 'I wouldn't do it to others so surely they wouldn't do it to me / they'll reverse course when they see how bad it looks' sort of expectations. I don't think we should feel "very little pity" for people like that (sympathy is human): but I'd instead say, I think they may be taken advantage of, but I feel admiration because an expectation of good conduct is something everyone should have and retain, even if it is breached.

Don't do it

Now if it actually works out like this, only time will tell I suppose?

As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.

Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).

Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.

From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825

Might as well rewrite it in Rust at the same time, two birds with one stone.

I now use UTM to host Windows 11 Pro on my mac for exactly one Windows application.

With the exception of suspend, it does the job.

VMwware sure as hell did not invent the hypervisor, and we were damn careful not to ever claim that. The early unique IP was how to enable a hypervisor to use dynamic translation where required to work around non-virtualizable x86 instructions, we also did well with how to package a hypervisor to run on a host/share host devices etc. Over time that early differentiation went away as we helped encourage CPU vendors to include better hardware virtualization support. And the other big thing we had was just a market focus/desire to deliver value/delight nerdy users like ourselves.

Who is the granddaddy of hypervisors? It sure ain't KVM, and it sure ain't VMware. That would be IBM. They had decades of doing hypervisors on the mainframe when we were getting started as a tiny startup. They sure know a lot about hypervisors and had a x86 hypervisor research project in Watson labs. We were humbled when IBM fellow Rich Oehler came to us wanting to partner because he saw how far ahead we were. That was years before KVM even got started. The IBM collaboration, lead to years of great work with IBM, who helped VMwware get going with ESX Server. Although the focus of VMware since founding was always to end up focusing on the data center/server market we could not have done that so well and so fast without IBM and sales and GTM cooperation.

Now good on KVM and others for pushing open hypervisor technology, and any company in this space who actually cares about their users and customers. I hope KVM helps pound VMware/Broadcom into the dirt.

Edit: typos