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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

do people make new deployments with vmware these days? I haven't really dealt with that side of things in a good while but i stopped using vmware at home (migrated everything to virtualbox) about a decade ago and it's not something that's crossed my mind since then. my impression is that vmware is just used by big companies that have legacy entrenchments and there's no reason to pick it as something to build atop in 2025

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>(migrated everything to virtualbox)

Virtualbox is not a replacement...

When businesses say "vmware" they mean esxi/vsphere to manage large numbers of VMs, not desktop VMs, not vmware workstation... The replacement would be hyper-v, proxmox, xen or moving workloads to Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS or GCP.

Besides, vmware workstation is also vastly better and also given out for free now.

Be careful with VirtualBox outside tiny home labs. If you thought Broadcom was a pain in the neck, wait until you talk to Oracle.

I thought oracle licensing shenanigans only applies if you used their extension pack? If you only used the community/GPL version you should be fine.

> I thought oracle licensing shenanigans only applies if you used their extension pack?

I believe that's correct.

The thing one must be cautious regarding is installing the Extension Pack without careful consideration.

That’s probably true, but the idea of using only the GPL version throughout an organization, then being asked to demonstrate to Oracle’s satisfaction that you don’t have one single extension pack anywhere, is enough to make me leery of it.

This has nothing to do with virtualbox. VMware workstation is the desktop product and is given away for free since it's practically insignificant to the portfolio.

This is all about managing and deploying applications across multiple servers (vSphere) which is a fleet of computers running ESXi as their operating system.

My impression -- and this is entirely based on superficial observations and a massive amount of extrapolation, so I may be entirely off-base -- was always that VirtualBox's priority was always speed (security was nominally there, but felt retroactive), and VMware's was always security (speed was nominally there, but felt retroactive). Would be nice if someone could clarify whether this was/is accurate.

I would say VMware is very comfortable infrastructure and despite the fact Hyper-V is adequate and effectively free for a Windows shop, I would prefer VMware.

That being said, when the alternative is free, VMware really doesn't have the power it thinks it has to dictate terms.

Free doesn't allow for selling support contracts which is what BRCM is after. Good luck with Hyper-V if that's the direction you go in. Free doesn't generally include any support.

To be clear, Hyper-V is not "free" as in "no cost". It's "free" as in "no additional cost": Most who have Windows VMs in a virtual datacenter have Windows Server Datacenter licensing which allows infinite VMs per processor core. So if you have Windows Server VMs, you can already use Hyper-V as your hypervisor, but many still prefer VMware because it's seen as more stable and secure than using Windows hypervisors underneath your Windows VMs. VMware certainly adds value, but not infinite value, when most of its customers already are licensed for Hyper-V anyways.

Enterprise is the focus for VMWare ESXi nowadays. Expensive support but fewer support accounts. Broadcom isn't interested in volume.

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