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Comment by tacker2000 | Hacker News Reader

tacker2000

I know of a large company that are moving their whole VMWare setup (thousands of VMs) to an OpenShift solution, now that VMWare has raised prices significantly, and I’m sure they’re not the only ones.

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Many of my peers in the ISP community shuttered their hosting operations entirely in the wake of Broadcoms move, putting a mountain of effort and cost on themselves and their customers in the process. This is sad for many reasons, least of all because it drives further consolidation of the Internet towards the hyper scalers.

I dread to think of the real economic cost of Broadcoms moves with VMWare.

I'm honestly a bit shocked to hear that anyone has been using VMWare to provide hosting. I thought it was for internally running stuff that is expensive anyway.

It's standard practice to run all your physical servers as ESX cluster. Doesn't matter if for hosting, internal needs or whatever. Nobody sane would just install Ubuntu on a physical server and edit the nginx config. Running virtualized makes it much easier to have standard backups, restores, upgrades, failovers and so on.

What else would they be running? VMWare abstracts the machine from the hardware in a very literal sense, with live migrations between hosts, etc. so you can work with your boxen without interrupting any customer services.

If that capability suddenly costs 10x-100x more due to licensing, the margins stop being there - you'd need to rise prices above whatever aws/azure/gcp is doing and that's obviously not going to fly with customers. Shutting down is the only reasonable choice; unreasonable choices like develop your own vmware alternative or use an existing open source solution don't make sense for anything above micro and below hyperscale. The mid-market has been rugged, gutted and driven over by a Buick.

> What else would they be running?

Anything that doesn't cost licensing money is what I was thinking. Isn't there some FOSS and also gratis alternative?

No, not really. Proxmox is slowly improving, but not a replacement yet.

It has been incredibly common for the last maybe 15 years in the managed hosting industry. It wasn’t even especially expensive compared to the revenue density. Most would be on service provider licensing paying per GB of RAM.

OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP. It enables you to create a fully API-driven data center that includes elastic compute, elastic network, and elastic storage resources. The key difference is that, unlike a public cloud where you consume APIs (OPEX), with OpenStack, you own and manage them (CAPEX).

OpenStack is not ideal for provisioning static workloads like you would with vCenter. It works best as an orchestrator for elastic, API-driven workloads. It also simplifies hybrid cloud integration: link your SDN networks, then use Heat to manage deployments based on predefined rules and affinities.

Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.

I don't follow the difference between static and elastic workloads. OpenStack can create a VM just like VMware, and has more features that would otherwise be implemented as a K8s cluster running on VMs.

In a cloud environment like OpenStack, virtual machines are a means to provide compute resources, not an end goal like in VMware.

Elastic workloads typically scale horizontally, unlike the vertical scaling or static provisioning seen in environments such as VMware. Elastic workloads are usually stateless, declaratively provisioned, have short uptimes, and are designed to fail gracefully rather than relying on high availability.

Kubernetes (K8S) can achieve similar capabilities, but is still distinct from what OpenStack offers: an open-source, private AWS providing multi-tenant, API-driven infrastructure for storage, networking, and compute.

If you don't care about working with elastic APIs, OpenStack/AWS is probably not for you, use VMware/ProxMox + Kubernetes.

Thank you!

> OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP.

It's a competitor for all three. Having a "fully API-driven data center" is just as useful on your own hardware as it is using someone else's hardware.

VMware recognizes this as they have OpenStack APIs:

* https://www.vmware.com/topics/openstack-api

> Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.

Or XCP-ng.

Yes, they are moving to OpenShift, which is comparable to ProxMox. (Not OpenStack)

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