There was a solid few years that a lot of business types at vmware behaved as though winning was the default, assured state. It took several years for them to see that that was very much not the case. A real lesson in there, for every successful business today.

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.

For a visual representation of this see the "Edgar suit" from the movie Men in Black. :)

I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.

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).

I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.

Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.

And I was like... what virtual host?

What I found was Server 2003 running on VMWare Workstation, running on a Windows 7 Dell PC sitting at the bottom of a rack.

A lot of people think VMWare Workstation is the pinnacle product of the company and I have NFI how this came to be.

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.)

I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)

Problem with incentives, I would say.

I don't think anyone finds this flavor of activity beneficial. What's beneficial is the underlying system that is sufficiently free and flexible that great things (like VMware to begin with) are possible. As much as we don't like "this" we don't want to put any bureaucrats in power to squash creativity and enterprise.

Much like freedom of speech means someone can speak abhorrently, freedom of enterprise means someone can do bad or dumb business things. But we enjoy the thing in totality.

That was literally Broadcom’s reason for existing before Avago even acquired them. It’s the other half of the Qualcomm/Broadcom telecom duopoly.

> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...

Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.

IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.

All automatable, I'm sure.

Love proxmox now.

Deployed for Haiti, Chengdu etc. All ran perfectly.

Obviously the types of supported virtual hardware will be different between hypervisor types, but that's usually something that can be dealt with separately.

A friend of mine said that VMWare was still the best VM platform due to the ecosystem that built around it, so it'd be nice if it could be preserved for later resurrection.

I know time moves on quickly, but it'd be a shame to lose it entirely.

I know this is promoting criminality, but there's something wrong with society if this is deemed criminal.

Disclaimer: don't (be a hero)

Yep. They're building the cage around you. Why would you stick around?

It's sad to watch these things slowly perish

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.

It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)

I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.

It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.

I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.

I like Proxmox a lot, but it is technically and commercially several years behind. There is no moat, and when stuff slides sideways, you need to understand what's going on (e.g a competent sysadmin). That is changing with the recent Proxmox NA announcement, but still not there.

OpenStack is not the same product at all, and is about an order of magnitude more complicated. Much more powerful, but instead of a good sysadmin, you probably want a team (and maybe some core devs).

Define "pretty big". Proxmox officially supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster and the Proxmox folks themselves have "seen clusters of around ~24 nodes in production" (as of 2025) and for "bigger clusters than that, fine-tuning might be necessary":

* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...

There are folks talking about running things in the high-40s and low-50s, but that's not officially support. If you have beefy hardware you can fit a lot of VMs on a single hypervisor (I've always found running out of RAM is often the limit).

A single vSphere cluster can have up to 96 nodes (without vSAN), and vCentre can handle multiple clusters (2500 total hosts; 40k VMs). Proxmox recently released Cluster Manager, which helps with feature parity.

I'm a happy user of Proxmox for a number of years (and helped ran OpenStack before that), but I think for large(r) scale deployments (and even smaller ones) there's a good reason which VMware was so popular. (How many folks are actually at that (large(r)) scale is a different question.)

(Also: XCP-ng doesn't seem to get much press. Haven't used it myself though.)

Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.

The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.

Quite often the bigger you are the more the higher ups want risk to be mitigated, and so are often glad to cut a cheque to be able to yell at someone over the phone.

Waste of money

Buy declining companies with good customer bases, cut spending and raise prices.

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.

And of course anyone can file a lawsuit…