[twoodfin]

I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.

[rwmj]

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

[sofixa]

> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of those, because everyone who will at some point try to get rid of them. Not all, not immediately, but the ultimate trajectory is down.

[rwmj]

People are still setting up machines by hand, then leaving companies without documenting what they did. The whole "infrastructure as code" is a fantasy at most real companies.

[2b3a51]

Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4?

(As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).

[rwmj]

As I said in another thread, Win95 and RHEL 3 are the oldest we've come across recently. Guests of this sort are not converted, they're copied and run using emulated devices (IDE/SATA, e1000 network etc). We help customers as best we can but don't support these cases.

Usually the story is they're running something like CNC control which originally ran on baremetal, then got virtualized onto VMware when the hardware died (possibly using VDI to make it appear on a terminal close to the machien), and it's still doing the same thing effectively today.

[twoodfin]

IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.

It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.

[bigstrat2003]

Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.

[nix0n]

> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal

I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.

If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?

[donavanm]

The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.

[sofixa]

> It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

None of those matter in the slightest with containers. Why would you need to reallocate hardware resources when the containers can run on another piece of hardware? You would snapshot the relevant storage, not the whole OS and kitchen sink.

VMs as an intermediary between hardware and containers is just a waste of resources - both directly (RAM, CPU, storage to run a useless OS with no benefit) and indirectly (all of those VM's OS needs maintaining and patching).

It's basically a hold over from the olden days of "everything is a VM".

[stackskipton]

We run everything on VM just for flexibility. Want to stand up a new machine for testing? Boom, run the script, new Ubuntu server. We need to decommission a machine. Shutdown all the guests, move them over to new machine and start them.

Sure, most of what we do is very cattle and we could run on bare hardware but why not take advantage of easy to add flexibility.

[sofixa]

I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state).

Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.

[wmf]

It's cargo culting. Even 37 Signals fell for it.

[twoodfin]

Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.