Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.
This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.
VMs in general
There are a variety of options available with near feature parity. Killing the free version effectively cut out lab users which may as well say: we sure would like people to start training on a new platform. People use what they are comfortable with… and tend to carry a hatchet for companies that burn them.
This was a short sighted play which ultimately will result in the platform dying slowly as the workforce changes. They cut off new blood: less people will be proficient with their platform and more will be pushing for a switch to the competition. In addition to the loss of the free version they massively ramped prices. They won’t last. Right now the companies that are too big to pivot are already starting to weigh the costs of transitioning vs the squeeze. The C-suite are idiots.
With infrastructure as code, vm management has become even more easy. A lot of companies are standardizing their vm park based on new deployment and management techniques e Sometimes in IaaS platforms (a fancy name for externally managed, rented hardware) but the VM has a long life ahead.
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Sounds like terraform with extra steps.
Terraform is VMs you dumbass
Terraform is infrastructure as code executed via a compiled go binary and can manage vms you dumbass
What.
Not even remotely related.
N… no…
VMs have many applications outside the cloud
One of those is running the cloud or being the cloud
Yeah, but most of that runs on Hyper-V, KVM or Xen/XCP.
True, but it was more of a reply to this.
One of the applications outside the cloud is running the cloud?
Lotta people here working in legacy not realizing you can run bare metal k8s with containers and never touch a proper vm again. That said, if you are in the cloud basically everything is a vm even when you are using k8s. Two of the big three cloud providers run on top of Xen and one uses hyper-v for all of their machine types