[colechristensen]

I would be mildly interested in a 5 minute pitch of what VMware is offering these days, it's been 15 years since I've touched any of their products and the way they were doing things then really seems like it is becoming increasingly irrelevant so what have they been doing instead? It looks like my vague guess of "the same but also on top of cloud providers" seems to be about right given a quick glance at their website, but I'm curious to know a bit more.

[parasubvert]

VMware has several billion-dollar or more businesses...

- the core vSphere hypervisor and management software

- Vmware Cloud on AWS which is pretty big on its own, plus other cloudy things like datrium / disaster recovery as a service.

- cybersecurity (carbon black and secure state), which is similar to what Symantec does, will be an interesting overlap

- endpoint management (security for desktops, mobile) which was AirWatch

- management (monitoring & automation) aka. vRealize and Cloud Health

- workspace / single sign on, similar to okta (Workspace ONE)

- virtual desktops (Horizon) which compete with Citrix

- software defined networking (NSX) which competes with F5, Cisco, Juniper etc.

- modern apps (Tanzu) which is largely open source... containers & developer tools & data services & agile consulting, e.g. Spring, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Greenplum, Wavefront, Bitnami / Kubeapps, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Labs (now Tanzu Labs)

[rsync]

Fascinating … your very comprehensive list does not contain the only VMware products I have ever cared about: workstation and fusion.

[TMWNN]

You run a well-known online backup company and I don't, but my reaction was exactly the same: The only VMware products I've ever cared about are Workstation and Fusion, neither of which is on the list.

On the one hand, it's pretty cool that VMware has pivoted so successfully over the past 15 years from being solely focused on a hypervisor (or, I suppose in modern terminology, "self-hosted cloud") business that the cloud largely supplanted. On the other hand, it's sad for someone like me, who used Workstation to run VMs at home (I moved to VirtualBox), and have thought at times about spinning up ESXi.

[edgyquant]

> a well-known online backup company and I don't

What’s up with this? Did their company steal the name of the tool rsync?

[rsync]

In early 2006 I asked the original author and the current maintainer for their blessing to use the domain "rsync.net" for (re)incorporating the offsite backup component of the ISP I started in 2001[1].

I gave them right of first refusal, etc., and they said my use of "rsync.net" as the name of the company, domain name, etc., was acceptable.

[1] "JohnCompanies"

[fuy]

their main business for two decades has been datacenter virtualization. Individual developers don't care about it, sure, but it's a huge software business.

[maire]

Workstation and fusion were never big money makers. They were more of a labor of love.

I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.

The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.

[maire]

correction: VSphere 2.0 not Businessware 2.0 (wrong company).

For some reason I could not edit my post so I had to reply to my post.

[walterbell]

A few years ago, most of the US dev team for workstation was laid off in favor of a non-US team.

[parasubvert]

good point… I don’t think they’re billion dollar businesses though. Probably hundreds of millions? Hard to say as I don’t think VMware publishes this info

[IshKebab]

And has a lot of "similar to {thing I have actually heard of}"

[TMWNN]

It reminds me of the first episode of Saturday Night Live after the original 1975 cast all left. In the first episode, the new cast did a sketch in which they each described themselves as a version/variant of/similar to a member of the old cast.

(Everyone was fired after that season, except for Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo.)

[manwe150]

I think both of those are free now for consumer usage, for at least a couple years now?

[reiichiroh]

No not the Pro versions still

[0x0000000]

You covered SDN but they are also the leading SD-WAN vendor through their VeloCloud acquisition 7ish years ago. Workspace 1 is also the core for their SASE products (zero trust network access, secure web gateways, browser isolation etc) when tied with VeloCloud.

[parasubvert]

Yep I forgot about VeloCloud and SASE. It really is a beast of a company :-)

[influx]

I run esxi on my (admittedly beefy), home server. It is a fantastic piece of software that can be completely controlled through a web browser. I can easily spin up a couple of VMs, interact with the install without having to use a remote virtual keyboard/video switch, and the whole thing is rock solid.

I could probably do a lot of the same thing with Linux itself, but the web interface is so nice, I'm keeping it as long as it continues to be free for home use.

[bityard]

You can do the same thing with Proxmox VE. IMO, Proxmox is a much better choice for stand-alone VM hosts. The UI alone is certainly miles better.

Where VMware shines is when you want to virtualize multiple datacenters and manage them all from a single browser window. Getting hundreds of hosts and datastores managed all under one vCenter umbrella all while eliminating single points of failure, while not trivial, is the bread and butter of VMware and it works very well once it's all up and running.

[halo37253]

As Someone that runs Proxmox and ESXI.

That is hardly true.

The ESXI UI is vastly cleaner and more VM Focused. The network stack is easier to work with, and setting up passthrough is dead easy. A big plus to ESXI is how easy it is to export a VM and move it to another machine. The Export/Import method on Proxmox sucks, and all CLI. Plus there are a lot of premade VMware images out there that spool up in minuets on ESXI, getting them up and running on proxmox is a chore.

Proxmox is not bad if doing everything from scratch in Proxmox, and you don't need to move VMs arount.

Plus don't get me started on lack of a filebrowser on proxmox.

Performance is better with ESXI anyways. Only downside to ESXI is hardware limitations.

[phpisthebest]

Proxmox fall down on Enterprise tooling and integration with other software enterprises use to run the business

Things like Monitoring Platforms, Backup Solutions (veeam), Automation tool kits (powershell), etc.

I like Proxmox, I use it personally, but in its current form I do not see how any medium or large enterprise that has is management tooling around VMWare could just drop in proxmox.

[andyman1080]

not super critical but is there a terraform provider for proxmox? I looked at proxmox a while back when building my home server but went with esxi free because of the community provider - https://github.com/josenk/terraform-provider-esxi

[stormbrew]

I’d be really interested in an “i used both” comparison between esxi’s free offering and proxmox for this sort of purpose. I imagine esxi might be more polished, but also more limited.

[nyx]

I've used both, though not for anything especially complicated. Your guess about the polish level is correct; ESXi blows Proxmox out of the water interface-wise, especially for some specific tasks like configuring networks or managing PCI passthrough devices. As far as "more limited" goes, I can't say I noticed much of a feature discrepancy, although being open and just sitting atop KVM, Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of vCPUs in the free version, eugh).

One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware, whereas VMware has all the usual enterprise-level support commitments and so you're very much on your own if you try to force it to run on hardware that isn't on their official compatibility list.

[koyote]

> One pretty big one, if you're looking at homelab use, is that Proxmox is just Debian, so it's waaaay more likely to run on crap-tier commodity hardware

That was my first (and last) hurdle when wanting to try out ESXi...

I booted up the installer only to be greeted by a "not enough RAM" message. I believe it's 4GB minimum, which my tiny machine had, but ESXi read it as 3.9GB instead of 4.0GB and refused to budge.

Very happy with Proxmox on the other hand! Having access to the underlying Debian is also quite nice if you need to do something that's not supported by the interface.

[unixhero]

Proxmox also has native container workload virtualization with LXC container support built right in and ZFS filesystem. Two killer features.

[halo37253]

You are better off running a VM for dockers. That way that entire VM is portable.

The ZFS Filesystem is a nice feature

[stormbrew]

> Proxmox doesn't have any of the artificial limitations imposed by VMware (like a cap on number of vCPUs in the free version, eugh).

These were what i was thinking of yeah.

[influx]

Excellent point on hardware support. I'm running several years old Xeon chips in my server, and ESXI is already complaining they might not be supported in a future release.

[pkulak]

I use Proxmox and can do everything OP just described. I would assume the esxi is more polished, but I don't spend a heck of a lot of time on my hypervisor; mostly on what it's hypervising.

[geodel]

They have this VMware Tanzu platform which is like Red Hat Openshift. A heavily customized application packaging , deployment management solution on top of Kubernetes. It can be deployed on any cloud and on-prem DCs. So kinda multi cloud bet. They are selling it in a big way.

[awill]

What does "They are selling it in a big way" mean? I've never heard of it, and neither have any of the software engineers who are next to me at the office. RedHat OpenShift also bombed. They had a great start 11 years ago, but then didn't innovate, and worse, released a 2.0 that wasn't backward compatible. They used the 2.0 release as an excuse to kick off all free plans. What a joke. There's a reason Red Hat isn't a leader in Cloud.

[parasubvert]

They also released a 3.0 and 4.0 of OpenShift that weren't backwards compatible :-)

Yet OpenShift is making bank. You'd be surprised how much money they make on AWS, Azure, and Google.

[emptysongglass]

OpenShift is fantastic and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any medium sized startup and up. I run it in my closet. Most medium sized startups end up building out an OpenShift-like K8s but they use 6 months to a year plus to do it.

Upgrades within major versions are totally painless, one-click affairs.

[RajT88]

I have customers running Tanzu.

It is slick, but niche. Incredibly rock solid - in ways K8S is not - and you pay for it.

It is on its way out as a product.

[nunez]

Tanzu is a loaded term :) Are you talking about TAS (ex PCF) or TKG?

[RajT88]

PCF

[nunez]

i wouldn't say it's on its way out. it's still in active development and very much supported

[bogomipz]

Why is it on its way out as a product? Is it simply not making money?

[RajT88]

The scuttlebutt I hear is Kubernetes is stealing its lunch money.

Again, referring to what used to be PCF. Hence why the more modern Tanzu is K8s based.

[parasubvert]

PCF is still making bank but the industry has rallied around K8s. So growth has stalled but it has a happy customer base.

Unfortunately there’s no real equivalent (OpenShift is not really “it”) on K8s unless you’re assembling several products together with a lot of glue. Which is what everyone does, with varying quality.

[awild]

They also offer tanzu as on prem cluster where you can somehow use kubernetes to provision kubernetes virtualised kubernetes clusters.

[larntz]

It uses cluster-api to provision clusters. It's very cool and isn't a VMware thing. It's open source, and you can easily run it on regular k8s clusters.

https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/

[bogomipz]

Well, Cluster API depends on underlying providers and the VMWare provider is definitely a VMWare thing as it's maintained by them:

https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-vsph...

[vkat]

Yes it is a community project but VMware engineers play a big part in maintaining as it is foundational to the kubernetes product that VMware sells. Open source does not mean it runs by itself.

[luma]

They own a substantial chunk of the on-premises datacenter virtualization space. Loads of orgs still run their own kit, and VMWare makes some damn nice tools to squeeze the most from that investment. There are competitors in the space, but none with the breadth and depth of VMWare.

[vinceguidry]

They still make the best virtualization software for OSX. I use it daily to run desktop Linux on OSX. Video drivers seem to be having a tough time with Electron apps these days, sigh.

[silksowed]

vmware enterprise footprint and business still seems to chug along. most of the world markets lag behind hyperscale technology progress.