This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn’t exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.
Unfortunately for Mac hosts, Apple has no KVM/Hyper-V equivalent so your best option for virtualization there is Parallels.
(and it’s honestly kinda stupid that Apple can’t build their own KVM equivalent into the Darwin kernel which macOS is based on)
I realize there’s all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I’ve got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I’m using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
Another vote for Hyper-V.
Yeah, if you’re used to Microsoft servers and have a Microsoft network it integrates really nicely and is great to manage. Plus, it’s free.
Its not free. You need to license the base windows server. They killed the free hyper-v server offering.
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don’t be afraid of it, it’s worth the look. Especially for a single node like you’re talking, no reason not to in my opinion.
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There’s also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
This is another good reminder to not use VMware nor VirtualBox for any reason.
I primarily use mac and when I need to quickly spin up a linux machine, parallels needs you to buy a new version every year or they wont support much, and fusion supports everything but its…vmware
I’m out of the loop. Why not virtualbox?
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Dunno, Larry well understands what he does unlike most tech CEOs and owners today. Oracle was allied to Sun at some point. Larry has that demonic appearance, but he’s less of a threat than literally anybody else of them. Especially since Larry already has enormous power which he abuses less than expected.
You’re talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted? The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
You’re talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted?
Oh. That part I didn’t know.
The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
Yeah, that was just the habit probably.
Bruh they’re a copywrite law firm (read as patent troll) with a database and a tech company attached. Pretty much all they do is fuck other people over
with a database and a tech company attached
There are three real DBMS options for enterprise - Oracle, PGSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle is the most powerful and least problematic of them.
I’m not sure why you would buy an open-source company/product, particularly a GPLv3 one, if you didn’t understand or agree with the premise. It’s probably the stupidest decision he made. I’m not saying I agree with his other decisions, but most of them made some kind of business sense. With this one, he would have saved a lot of time and effort and received the same value if he’d just spun OO.o off ASAP. The linked timeline kind of says it all.
I don’t get your confusion.
Sun buys StarOffice, Sun opensources it into OpenOffice and supports its development, Sun goes under and gets bought by Oracle with all its stuff.
Then yeah, Oracle killed most of what Sun was doing altruistically (or as part of their desktop\workstation strategy that didn’t transpire, who knows). Including OOO.
Citation needed on literally all points. Fuck Oracle, fuck Sun, and fuck Larry Ellison
Fuck Oracle,
Suppose so
fuck Sun,
Either you are so ignorant you don’t know what Sun was, or you are out of your fucking mind.
and fuck Larry Ellison
That’s up to everyone, I personally don’t find him that attractive
I do know what Sun was, and now they’re owned by Oracle. Fuck Sun
And “fuck” literally means “don’t fuck”
there’s no sun anymore. It’s oracle
Because Oracle sucks donkey balls.
It’s free and works for me, why should I stop using Virtualbox?
and what to use instead? run qemu commands and all the preparation by hand?
there’s proxmox, but that’s not a desktop solution.
Virt-manager works ok
Virt-manager is a GUI for libvirt, which can use several hypervisors, including KVM/QEMU, and it works great.
There’s several other clients for libvirt, including GNOME Boxes, Cockpit (web based), and virsh (CLI).
Because it’s owned by Oracle and they’re the kings of malicious licensing. Using their software, even as an individual, with no intention of ever using it for work, gives them more power. Of course, if you ever even think about using it for work, then be prepared for the company you work for to be paying a huge bill or be sued.
It’s for personal use only. Should I be switching to native Linux virtualization with KVM or something?
I would recommend it. I also started with VirtualBox and made my way over to GNOME Boxes. Anything else will have a learning curve, but in the end, I found the alternatives work better once you wrap your head around them and you don’t ever need to worry about Oracle pulling the rug from under you.
Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
It’s also the business model of Oracle I think and they are wildly successful.
Who are Oracle’s customers?
MBAs
Anyone who uses Oracle DB or virtualbox in a corporate environment
I’m forced to work with Oracle databases, FML I hate it so much
The CIA
I think it had something to do with Broadcom wanting to go for a few big customers and don’t want to deal with the small fry anymore.
It’s a valid business strategy to kick your low-paying customers to the curb and focus on the big spenders. Did the same with my little PC business back in the day. The small fry cost shitloads to support and are generally more bitchy.
But HOLY shit did Broadcom kick 'em down. I’ve never seen such an in-your-face business move to squeeze the cash cow as hard as possible, tank the company, grab the money and run.
People can say, and have been from day-1, “I’ll never use their shit again!” That’s fine with Broadcom, it’s literally their plan.
Surely no competitors will grow in the small and medium business market to eventually be a competitor…
Broadcom knows they bought a dying platform. Their strategy is to isolate the customers incapable of ever migrating and charge them as close to near bankruptcy as possible. They’ll get their initial return on investment in under 5 years and then eventually just let VMware die because new businesses that are still nimble all moved to other platforms anyway. They’ll hit Lotto tickets with a few whales and keep 5-10 devs on to patch stuff for those whales and print 100-1000x return on costs in perpetuity.
That is … bleak.
I suspect you are correct.
RemindMe in 5 years
#I know that doesn’t work here(And that god that bot doesn’t work here)
Capitalism is the woooooorst…
The RIAA special
Right? That’s what encouraged me to sail the high seas.
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
Proxmox is amazing.
Proxmox ftw
I really want to use Nutanix but they are the same price as VMware VCF and they don’t support my existing hardware so I’d have to buy all new servers, just to pay the same price.
Where would we be without predatory rent-seeking?
Someone’s going to make a fortune migrating firms off VMWare onto open-source VMs.
Man could you imagine what proxmox would be if that project got just a tenth of the money VMware got?
Classic prisoners dilemma. Nobody wants to invest in proxmox because not enough people invest in proxmox.
Honestly I think if Proxmox got VMWare money then they’d become stuffed to the gills with business sharks and probably go the same route eventually.
That is not a Proxmox problem, that is a capitalism problem.
*Humanity problem.
There are some solutions invented, but they require work and revolutionary wars. And the functioning system, I think, will be as close to ancap as to Trotskyism. Won’t be clearly “socialist”.
No, this is not a humanity problem. This is a capitalism problem. Companies are not beholding to their customers, they are beholden to stock owners. It is no longer in their best interest to make customers happy, it’s in their best interest to provide ROI for their investors. Every software product hits a point of diminishing returns. There are no new amazing features to woo new customers, it is a mature product that only has incremental features. When this happens, you either flip to a subscription model and parasitize your user base, or sell to another vendor, management group, or some other entity who does it after you’ve been paid out. If we had better controls on mergers and buyouts there would be active competition to foster diversity and keep prices down, but when companies buy all their competition and all of the small companies who make products and enhancements for their base, it’s a lose lose situation for the end users. This is my jaded two cents after a quarter century of being in the IT/AEC field in the direct line of this enshittification process from multiple companies across the spectrum.
Companies are not beholding to their customers, they are beholden to stock owners.
I don’t think you realize how much of an improvement this is over other really existent options.
One can be a serf, or a slave, or a city dweller in a privilege-based society, or a peasant in some despotic kingdom. The list of options is long, none are good.
Proxmox is already perfect (for my use case)
Gonna be obnoxious: Chicken/egg issue. Not really prisoner’s dilemma. PD is essentially deciding to hedge your bets at the cost of the other party or risk worse circumstances through mutual cooperation that could bring about the best result, so long as the other party chooses to cooperate as well.
You should take a look at Canonical’s LXD. They’ve been investing in it pretty heavily and can definitely rival proxmox.
The web based UI is superb and I’ve never had issues with the CLI which is quite a contrast to my experience with proxmox
Except then you’d be stuck with Canonical.
Not really. Incus is a fork of LXD that’s carrying the torch for community focused containers.
Interesting. Reminds me of Emby and Jellyfin…
I still don’t like the decisions Canonical is making.
Yeah…I rank Canonical roughly where Google was like 20 years ago. They’re still mostly good…but that’s highly likely to change.
Everybody is moving to Openshift or public cloud
Openshift is a kubernetes platform isn’t it?
There’s still a need for real VMs, and I didn’t think openshift filled that.
Yeah, it’s a distro of kubernetes.
Most apps run best as a container, but for appliances and legacy apps they have Openshift virtualization which runs VMs in the cluster by running KVM inside of docker.
The open source tech there is called Kubevirt. All VMs are 1st class citizens in the kubernetes API, so it is actually easier to run than VMware/Proxmox if you already have a Kubernetes cluster and you’re not doing complex stuff with qcow images or VM migrations.
I use both containers and VMs a lot with Kubernetes at work.
We told them to go fuck themselves. We retain lawyer specifically in case we have legal concerns, and the way we use their products, price jack up would be so extreme that it’s entirely worth risking it while we migrate away.
I stupidly bought a VMWare Workstation license when I first got on the Windows 11 train. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and all that rubbish. My experience was such shit that I abandoned it all for Linux and Virtualbox.
Fuck Microsoft, fuck VMWare.
I was a happy camper with Hyper-V on server operating systems, was always a PITA on desktop versions though. Wonder if that’s changed. (Doubt.)
qemu ftw.
That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.
The strategy, from day-1, was to dump low-tier customers and squeeze the big dogs. They knew this wasn’t a viable long-term plan. Broadcom knew they had captive customers in the large enterprise space who would take years to migrate. They want to rape all they can, cash out and kill the product someday. But hey! As long as they can squeeze, they will do so.
I mean, fuck me, Oracle is still in business and that’s the model Broadcom is going for.
Broadcom is doing an excellent job convincing their customers to stop using VMware. Such a good job that at Red Hat we’ve shifted strategies with OpenShift Virtualization to pick up those customers. For the longest time our Virt play was just a stop gap to containers, now it’s a full blown product.
Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.
What would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
You can do live migration like that with qemu, I do it all the time with Proxmox, which uses qemu under the hood.
You’re not wrong in 2025. But VMware was able do it in 2003.
Sounds like a them problem if their software won’t refuse to update without an active contract. If it keeps working and being able to be updated then it’s on them.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t do updates. This is just to scare people into paying.
The article says the letter demanded they uninstall updates to the point before their contract ended.
It also says this same letter has been going out to users days after their contracts expired, regardless of whether any updates had been installed and even if the user had migrated to another service.
Exactly, if their software keeps working and allowing updates and they don’t know what the end user is doing then it’s a them problem. If they didn’t bake in telemetrics to know what version each license key is using then it’s on them.
They probably have a good cease and desist on Broadcomm for automatically installing updates on their system against the contract.
A move this dumb will totally work out in thier favor. /S
They’re trying to kill it. Anything they can squeeze out of existing customers in the meantime is just gravy.
Isn’t VMWare out of support anyway?
Not that I fault the users of it - a perpetual license is a perpetual licence and good luck with the C&D, but there are other options. Though I only know of OpenShift on RHEL.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
