As an old ex-vmware eng it's kinda sad reading all these articles about broadcom's controlled descent into terrain. A lot of really cool and useful engineering was done in vmware's heyday, and it was often delivered in rather shaky commercial shapes, but for a while the whole thing kinda worked. And broadcom seems to see it as a company that is long past its ability to innovate, extracting as many dollars as possible before its rapidly decreasing value goes to zero.

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 got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

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

I have very little pity for any of these customers, excluding maybe small businesses that simply don't know any better and lack the expertise but at every company and client I've been at there were at least 1-2 people trying to convince higher ups to not needlessly build core infrastructure on proprietary components and yet most were and are still being ignored.

Sure, if you have legacy Windows-only software that is proven to not work in other environments, you're out of luck and your hands may be tied but all the VMWare shops I've liberated from this slow, ugly and terrible to automate mess had to pay dearly for that.

How many more rug pulls do these people need? Oh right, they're probably in the middle of some Azure migration anyways.

Some people just need to learn through pain.

Leaving VMware just got harder? What? NO! It just became more obvious that you've failed if you are still stuck there. (VMware employee #10/11 -- I lost count. First Director of PM).

So the Linux qemu-img tool can still convert VM disk images from .vmdk into formats compatible with all the other hypervisors. Is there something more to the process of VM migration from VMWare than just using this tool (and manually creating the proper virtual hardware profile in the new hypervisor)?

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

From TFA

> 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.

Can someone exfiltrate the VMWare source so that it can be distributed at a later date once Avago (Broadcom) cease?

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)

> I am of the school of thought that even if Broadcom gives VMware Standard away free for a year, it would be hard to convince customers that they need to stick with the platform

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

When one becomes too comfortable with one vendor way of doing things, you end up paying 10's of millions of dollars in the end. Move the work loads to KVM, and invest in your own employees, and you can migrate off of VMware easily.

We run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.

I have fond memories of the first VMWare "BIOS" running inside my windows, this was so magical.

It's sad to watch these things slowly perish

Rather than converting the cold vm disk, couldn't you boot up the vm, dump the disks to stream, and send the streams into another format?

having worked heavily on backup software, ho are vm backups supposed to work now?

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

More VMware - winning friends and influencing people, like usual.

Is a magnet torrent available?

Should be possible to reverse engineer it with AI.

i thought everyone got rid of vmware in 2007 when virtualbox came out... wow cant believe people still pay for that

Time to sue!

Most of VMware virtualization code was stolen from kvm and they never were punished. Our laws are a joke, our courts are largely illegitimate and so to is our government.