Even by the standards of blind corp greed, that's a bad move - you want people to know your platform when they're done studying, so they can advocate for it in their jobs. Why would you destroy this revenue stream? Unless they have no longterm vision for VMware and just want to bleed it dry as quickly as possible.

Broadcom looks at Orcale and says "Can I have some of that business model please"...

They exist on legacy vendor lockin, and will milk customers until there is nothing left, which will take decades or more

But to me, Oracle is the canonical example of getting nerds while they're young.

In university, I had access to Oracle databases, Oracle manuals, Oracle Linux, etc. Not through some special university approved lab set up - I could just go and download them. Even their acquired software like PeopleSoft etc.

I had NONE of that for DB2 or AIX, for example.

And their respective market share, I believe based on no evidence but strong belief, belies that strategy.

(disclaimer, I guess - I work for IBM, but ironically as an Oracle consultant... the early access really did work :-)

Many people have talked about this...

People do know that oracle has ALOT more software then their DB right?

I mean their DB is the least vendor lockin thing they sell.....

Yes, as I said, I spent much of my life around oracle products. Most are freely downloadable for non production purposes.

Any student can download and use Oracle DBs and most other products for free legally right from Oracle's sites. This suggests that even Oracle understands how important this pipeline is.

Yeah that's the idea. They hold corporations hostage that are slow to move and increase prices.

And it’s entirely plausible they make enough money from that to buy the next VMware in another decade or so to repeat the cycle. Sustainable bottom feeding as a strategy.

> you want people to know your platform when they're done studying, so they can advocate for it in their jobs. Why would you destroy this revenue stream?

That was how Adobe ran for a looooong time, up until and including CS6. They didn't give a f..k about piracy beyond something that could trivially be circumvented by a keygen and a few well-placed /etc/hosts entries, and that was what made them the utterly dominant power in anything creative - people were used to years of working with Photoshop (a friend of mine started with photography at age 13!), and so they demanded from employers that they use Photoshop. Incidentally, that also was what kept Apple afloat before the iPod/iPhone days - Adobe stuff just worked fine on Apple hardware but was a nightmare on Windows, so people also demanded Macs for their work.

The advent of CC came once Adobe had achieved that lock-in and started milking its customers for all they were worth, and additionally they opened up a load of legitimate customers as well who didn't feel like dropping a few grand on Adobe stuff but who cares about 50$ a month?

I always thought of Sun as the canonical example of this… why did all the dotcom era startups burn so much cash on Sun hardware? Because that’s what was in the Universities!

But on the other hand, look at how that turned out :(

This is different. Most student won't be exposed to datacenter management. It's really just system administrators who see this.

VMware is literally taught in schools. My college has a two course program in it.

That’s still entirely independent of what the school’s mainframes run on.

XCP-NG

i thought i heard kvm was winning, is there still a good reason to go with xen?

All are good choices.

XCP-NG + Xen Orchestra is a winning combo. If I had a large VM infra, that's the stack I would select. All open source too!

The tooling is really mature. Amazon used xen for ages. kvm wins for hardware passthrough and performance, but if your willing to sacrifice a little performance the advanced admin features are competitive.

or proxmox

They're pulling entirely out of some countries, too, so here in New Zealand they're apparently going to send comms on the 27th, have a seven day 'consultation' and then probably give everyone the date they don't have a job.

VMware is notorious for continuously changing SKUs and licensing models to make things more expensive. I would suspect that Broadcom will continue putting the squeeze on customers. If hyper-V (or whatever it's named now) was a viable alternative, I suspect you'd see tons of folks fleeing VMware.

Azure runs on basically hyper-v I hear (which would make sense, right?), so it can't be that bad?

HyperV has been overlooked by Microsoft for awhile in favor of Azure. You can get a basic HyperV host up and running pretty easily (even for free with the Core edition), but I would not call it great. My experience with HyperV is not a pleasant one as it struggles a lot and the error messages are often extremely cryptic. Similarly, there are some pretty outstanding bugs that existed for years that Microsoft didn't bother to fix -- for example, since HyperV 2019, there has been an impactful RCT bug† that can be triggered if you upgraded your HyperV hosts in a specific path (2016-2019) and any backup solution used HyperV's RCT. The result of the bug is extremely poor performance on any VM using RCT. Supposedly there was a patch last or this month that addressed it, but I've not heard any positive news from clients about this patch. Nevermind that Windows updates have frequently broken core HyperV functionality (as recent as December 2022 there were bugs where you couldn't start Virtual Machines or even create new ones due to bad Windows updates)

From my perspective, Microsoft doesn't want to deal with HyperV anymore, they want your machines up on Azure. I'd actively advise against HyperV simply because I don't see that Microsoft cares about on-premises.

† RCT == Changed Block Tracking for HyperV, basically faster backups by allowing the backup application to know exactly which blocks of the virtual disks have changed since the last backup and the backup application can do fast incrementals via this means.

Azure runs on a modified HyperV, right? Or are you saying they are using some other hypervisor there?

it does but i cannot tell why the azure performance is so different than on premises hyperv. i simply don’t know but the issues i’m describing here afaik did not affect azure instances. i do not know why but i thjnk it means there is a difference between on premises hyperv and azure hyperv or they do something to ensure the same issues don’t affect azure instances

but i simply don’t know why there is a difference

edit: if you search “hyperv rct bug” you will find forum posts fasts showing the timeline of this issue lasting years and many clients complaining that microsoft would not even acknowledge the issue publicly (or even in ms support cases) until very very recently

There's bad tech, there's bad user/admin experience, and there's bad licensing/costs. They might just mean that ex. the costs are awful, which I expect Azure wouldn't care about. (Disclaimer: I haven't used hyper-v, I don't know if any of these apply)

HyperV is fine for the basic stuff, but it's missing a lot of the other stuff that makes ESX so appealing (no direct vSAN or NSX equivalents, and you _need_ Windows to run Hyper-V vs ESX supporting liveboot on USB or CD). Also, I think ESX VMs are way faster than HyperV ones, but it's been a few years.

Isn't Storage Spaces Direct an equivalent to vSan?

Storage Spaces Direct is a sure plan to have data loss. Such a piece of %#(

Well there’s a difference between a hypervisor and the infrastructure around it - even if they use the same hypervisor, it’s very likely that the rest of the system is completely different.

So ... for the corp/academic crowd, what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?

I don't understand orgs that deal with companies with a loooooonnnnnngggggg history of predatory pricing and sales shenanigans and not have active mitigation plans.

Who has Oracle that isn't actively planning going to Postgres or MariaDB? Of course I'd say the same thing for IBM in the 1970s, Microsoft in the 1990s, and AWS today.

VMWare obviously has a lot of the same.

VirutalBox is a barebones type 2 hypervisor with only basic orchestration, backup, networking, management features, if any.

ESXi and the VMWare products built on top of it (vCenter/vSphere) are not even comparable to VB, other than that they both can run virtual machines. vSphere can move running VMs between storage or compute hosts without interruption, can failover between storage or compute, can failover between networking outages (thanks to virtual switches and the ecosystem of hardware support around it), and provides a platform for additional third party add ons for automated backups and recovery. Not to mention easy role based SSO access. My entire university's infrastructure was virtualized on VMWare aside from a few domain controllers and the Netapp storage clusters it all ran on, and the equally large Linux/KVM infrastructure and the HPC datacenter that ran a bunch of other stuff for...reasons (higher ed is fun). And as an added bonus, desktop type 2 hypervisors like Workstation or Fusion integrate perfectly into it. I used to manage a dozen Windows and Linux VMs straight from VMWare Fusion on my Mac and still do at home in my little VMUG cluster.

It's like comparing a Chevy Spark to an aircraft carrier, except you built an entire medium to large sized organization's infrastructure on top of it. You can't just switch overnight unless you want to stop making money for a while. For most orgs who can justify the already steep price, moving away from VMWare onto something else will mean multiple years long projects requiring thousands of person-hours to complete, redundant efforts (as the old stuff can't just go away until the new stuff is battle tested), on top of probable hardware purchases since VMWare and its demands have shaped on-site datacenter spend, layout, and networking for years.

The actual VMs are the easiest part to move since they are just some virtual disks and a config file. It's all the other supporting stuff and high availability that need to configured and battle tested that will take forever. It's not something you can plan to do ahead of needing to do it because doing so would mean doing the same job twice for years for a bet that you can't just weather some higher costs for a year or two before you can move stuff onto cheaper platforms (and train/hire for expertise).

> what is it VMWare does that VirtualBox doesn't do?

For my specific use case, it's display responsiveness.

My main work machine is a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 3. Our development environment is Ubuntu, so when I got the machine our IT guy had helpfully installed Ubuntu on it.

There were two major problems though. I could only get my AirPods to pair as headphones, not as a full headset with microphone. And worse, I couldn't get my triple-monitor setup to work at all. (The ThinkPad has a 15" 4K display, and I use two 24" 4K displays with it: one in landscape mode immediately above the ThinkPad display, another in portrait mode to the left.) I could only get two displays out of the three to come up.

I did like the hardware quite a lot - I've been a huge ThinkPad fan for 25 years. So I immediately bought a similar machine for personal use. It came with Windows, and both of the above items worked "out of the box".

So I looked at the bottom of the work machine and saw that it came with a Windows license. I downloaded the Windows 10 ISO from Lenovo and installed Windows on it, figuring I would run Ubuntu in a VM.

I tried VirtualBox first, and it worked, but the display wasn't smooth. For example, I often use the Windows key + left/right arrow to move a window to one side of the display or the other. Ubuntu does a "sliding" animation when you do this, but it looked like it was only refreshing the display every tenth of a second or so.

So I tried VMware and it was perfect. The display is just about as responsive as running Ubuntu on the bare metal - every transition and animation is perfectly smooth.

I've had a similar experience.

VMWare Workstation (desktop edition) is faster and more polished than VirtualBox.

I'd like to try it all on top of ProxMox one day.

First, VirtualBox is an Oracle product, so I'm not sure which side you're advocating :)

More to the point, I think VirtualBox is the equivalent, broadly, of VMWare Workstation/VMWare Player; which is a specific individual product that runs on desktop as type 2 hypervisor and a teeny tiny bit of the broader VMWare ecosystem (probably neglible part of their revenue).

I don't know if VirtualBox has any product or share in server/datacentre space? Whereas, VMware is absolutely positively huge. The core ESXi product, sure; but again the ecosystem around it, from vSPhere/vCenter to vRealize and Orchestrator and nsx and vSan and everything else, the management and automation flows are pretty well integrated (externally; I'm sure it's a acquired/developed mess internally as every other IT product ever:).

It's a bit like... I don't know, "what does Window Explorer have that File Commander doesn't"? It's a valid question that has a rational answer which is useful for limited use cases, but it misses the very very big forest (Windows and Office and Azure etc) for very minor trees inside of it

Hope that helps a bit?

Does virtualbox have an equivalent to VCSA? Can I failover a datacenter with it?

virtualbox is pretty capable but I only view it as equivalent to vmware workstation.

No, you can't failover a datacenter with VirtualBox.

VirtualBox is also Oracle, which is why I switched to KVM/QEMU. But I'm also not an Enterprise user.

VirtualBox just straight up isn't reliable enough for any production situation. You never know how it'll break, and the support front release to release is unpredictable and overall sucks Cindy Stankey balls.

Servers and enterprise.

VMware Workstation has much better USB support (especially USB NIC support) than VirtualBox.

It's also licensable individually. If you want to use the VirtualBox Extension Pack in a business environment, you need to buy a per-user license. It's only $40, but Oracle has a minimum order quantity of 100, so you're spending at least $4000.[1] i.e. in a business, for about 20-30 users, VMware Workstation is cheaper.

[1] https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=dstore:product:257141221156...

Can you create a High availability cluster that does automatic failover with virtual box?

Migrate to proxmox.. it’s great

Without knowing almost anything about it, I run Proximo on a box at home.

Is it at all comparable to ESX?

I kind of assumed the Proxmox was just the free and cheap and bare bones option.

In terms of features, they match on the simple / broad features. When it comes to scale, reliability, defined compatibility, and supporting tools that is a big no.

I have worked on VMWare stack in previous jobs. but I run proxmox at home now.

Free ESXi without VMware tools is somewhat harder actually. Still far better reliability.

or to MNX Triton or vanilla SmartOS, they're the greatest.

How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?

I'm sure that SmartOS is great, but being based on Illumos, I'd be hesitant to switch. Illumos doesn't have the most expansive community or hardware support as far as I know.

> How is MNX Triton, a public cloud offering, an alternative to an on-prem, private cloud solution?

By doing on-prem private installation of it [0]. Support contract is not necessary. We run illumos on HPe hardware from Gen6 to Gen10 and there are no issues. Even have GPU compute going via passthrough to ubuntu bhyve HVM.

[0] https://docs.tritondatacenter.com/private-cloud/install

Now this is very interesting and I'm excited to read up on it. Thanks for the link!

How does it compare to Proxmox, if you don't mind? Both seem to have distributed VM and storage and VM/CT support, software network support... if Triton has better SDN I may be interested in it.

I remember taking a quick hobbyist look at JoyentOS or something like that about five years ago, but I thought the project died... I'm shocked to hear it's still alive.

I think it's a pretty smart move. Educational institutions don't have the engineering capacity to change their datacenters overnight. They'll be paying the higher fees for years to come.

We certainly dont. Though half our infra was already on Hyper-V anyway. Lets hope MSFT is watching and wants to put effort into HVS.

I'm in the process of trying to convert to openstack at my university. but so far its been slow going. I've got a few smaller clusters online currently running it