• Alex@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?

    • Muddybulldog@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If you’re running a lab or a small shop any hypervisor can likely do the job. Anything above that VMware’s overall ecosystem is the most robust and well-supported.

      At this point virtualization is a legacy technology. It’s not going to disappear tomorrow but its clock is ticking the same way the clock was ticking for mainframes thirty years ago. Plenty of mainframes still out there but nobody is implementing new. Same can be said for virtualization. It’s a limited market with significantly slowed growth over where it was a decade ago.

      The move to a subscription model will let them squeeze every last dollar out of the technology while they still can.

      • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        Wait what

        virtualization is a legacy technology

        AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.

        Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.

        • Muddybulldog@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Virtualization, as a commercial product pointed at businesses, is a legacy product.

          Of course large providers are utilizing virtualization, containerization and an abundance of similar technologies. However, they’re not generally using VMware to do it.

          I spoke in the context of OPs question.

        • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          (probably shouldn’t) HyperV

          What makes you say “probably shouldn’t”? WSL use is widespread at this point

          • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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            8 months ago

            WSL is also shit for any kind of containerization and HyperV fucks up everything else. If you’re not doing any DevOps/SRE stuff WSL 2.0 is fine provided you don’t mix the filesystems. I have been so frustrated with their claims on release for 1.0 and 2.0 that I haven’t evaluated the recent systemd release for WSL. I provision WSL for people that don’t know why they should care and Linux VMs for people that need to work with CI tooling.

            In general if you use a Microsoft tool you have to use the Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that’s not a huge deal, eg VS Code just adds a ton of telemetry and GitHub reads all your public code. Sometimes it’s a huge deal, eg you want to do literally anything beyond Docker Desktop defaults in the container world.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Maybe a better term is “commodity” technology. Rather than a thing by itself where one company is much better, now it’s everywhere, mostly good enough. It’s not going anywhere but I wouldn’t run a business on it alone

          • billwashere@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yes commodity is a much better term here. It is a mature and fairly ubiquitous technology at this point.

      • pezhore@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        At this point virtualization is legacy technology.

        Man, I’d love to believe that - and please Lemmy, prove me wrong, but virtualization, especially commercial products like VMware have one huge advantage over things like kubernetes - it’s effectively plug and play and has full support available.

        1. Boot off this esxi iso
        2. Deploy this VCSA OVA
        3. Have vCenter auto config VSAN
        4. Deploy fully ha/Drs managed VMs

        I would kill for a similar experience with kubes - something that I cannot for the life of me get to work in my homelab given the myriad of walkthrough in various states of accuracy.

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Yeah the above is someone who can either greenfield because they work for a new shop or is deep in the kube-aid.

          Most buisnesses just need your stated features. Some stand alone VMs with HA that makes them server independent and let you snapshot/back them up with ease. Slot commodity servers in a room somewhere, wander off to do more important things.

          The good news is that proxmox is already there, if a bit more crunchy to deploy. It’s got integrated ceph to work as a backend for HA/VSAN, built in snapshots and a separate backup appliance that sports Veeam style features. It has a simple config language that could compete with powercli if that is a current vmware use case. Looks like it even supports VDI with Intel’s enterprise gpus, although that is early days.

      • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Please forgive a wildly uninformed question: What is it that VMware does today that isn’t covered by Docker?