What now for VMWare? What now for virtualisation?
- Thread starter Quartz
- Start date
Reading the comments on various videos and tech sites it seems like its too late.
Free ESXi was a great way for people to get familiar with VMWare and therefore recommend it for enterprise, stupid move, those people now burnt have moved on and no longer recommend VMWare.
Free ESXi was a great way for people to get familiar with VMWare and therefore recommend it for enterprise, stupid move, those people now burnt have moved on and no longer recommend VMWare.
For the most part this is largely not going to bother a company like Broadcom. They're at the stage nowadays akin to 'Nobody got fired for buying IBM' - expensive? Yes. A name change on products every 30 seconds? Also yes. But I've worked and consulted at some of the big players since BC took over, and none of them are going anywhere away from VMware. I'm talking 10k+ assets sorts of places. Lots of diversifying yes, but the reality is they don't need homelabbers and/or bloggers to keep the people they're targetting in the game. It's not popular, but it's the truth. What will more likely chase people away is the horrendous support if you don't have VCF licensing and you have to deal with the third parties.
They also have barely any rivals in the SDN space that hold a candle to NSX, agentless is such a big win for them. I will say though, VKS needs to die a death haha. That's another one that name changes every 30 seconds. I suspect they're pushing more heavily in the VCF/NSX/VKS/AVI space than just bog standard ESXi nowadays.
I won't be going back to ESXi in the homelab, not because I'm burnt by BC or anything, I work with NSX and the wider VCF BOM on a daily basis, but because I find it more interesting to work on open source tooling nowadays.
Not to say Broadcom are good or anything, they've dealt with a lot of things badly, they absolutely have and I don't think they're a good company at all. But people, especially bloggers/tech bro youtube folk seem to think their word is gospel, when the reality is the target audience for BC is super large customers.
Purely off site or hybrid?
Not just that - what's the likelihood that they'll pull it again in the future?
Exactly, who is going to ever trust them again.
Depends on your workloads, docker and VM are quite different things and you are going to be reliant on your apps supporting container hosting.
Indeed, as Lunar_Fox mentioned, containerisation (Docker) and virtualisation (ESXi) are quite different. Containerisation is a lot easier for just setting up a few apps though, especially if you don't need a fully fledged OS behind it.
I was thinking that I might not need to run a full OS in a VM, just for the following that I have..
Plex Media server, one VM for this alone.
FTP Client and DC++ on another VM.
'Torrents' VM with Nord on it.
DC++ Hub on a VM
I also run a Pi5 with PiHole on it, which could go elsewhere not on physical hardware.
Plex Media server, one VM for this alone.
FTP Client and DC++ on another VM.
'Torrents' VM with Nord on it.
DC++ Hub on a VM
I also run a Pi5 with PiHole on it, which could go elsewhere not on physical hardware.
I run all my docker apps in a VM hosted on ESXi. It allows me to have a full image backup of the VM which has many benefits vs file backups (or none at all!), plus other niceties you get of a VM vs bare metal. I do however also have a full vSphere/VCF lab, so it makes sense for my use case.
Hyper-V standalone (i.e. the free Hyper-V Server 2019) is still supported until 2029, so you could use that and just live migrate any VMs across
Anything that needs Windows or Linux OS will need a VM. Docker/Container apps don't have an OS as such though you need a runtime environment. You can run Container workloads on Windows or better Linux. Docker is quite lightweight but you could install a K8 environment which gives very ESX like features for container apps. Container apps ideally shouldn't be persistent so if a container dies then you just redeploy it. If you need persistent data then use a DB server though for small apps that is often combined into one container, most runtimes provide an API for doing backups, usually to a S3 bucket somewhere, could even be in the cloud.
As mentioned hyper-V is still free and so is ESX for personal use though you will need licenses for the guest OS (I think windows server license gives you a couple of free hyper-v virtual Windows server licenses instances).
Well the reason I use the 'Feature' version in Windows 11, is worse case I can use the machine as a normal PC if needed as its just running Windows 11.
I also use Drivepool and Scanner to deal with the drive situation, so all data is on NTFS drives, so I can just pull any drive and the files are all there..
Sounds like I'll be sticking with Windows 11 then for now, with as much crapware removed as possible and then my existing VM's sat on top..