Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

Can someone explain what VMWare does so well that allows them to do this for someone totally uninformed? No where I've worked at has used VMWare, but everywhere I've worked used containers or VM's of some sort.

Even in the early 2015's kubernetes was mature enough to run production workloads. Any issues that did come up were with our own application code, never the orchestrator.

I never found myself thinking that it would be nice to have a close sourced expensive option to reach for.

What area does VMWare excel so much to justify this pricing power?

If you actually literally meant "or VMs" in your statement, I'm curious what sort they were that were not VMWare?

VMWare absolutely owns this market in the enterprise. It's been reliable, it's well-supported, there's a huge ecosystem of vendors and integration partners around it, and it's been the no-brainer choice for virtualization for CIOs since about 2010 (or earlier!).

Kubernetes demands a cloud-native approach - VMs are deployed from container images, nothing has persistent storage by default, network interfaces must be declared, etc. VMWare tolerates more conservative approaches like hoisting existing physical machines into VMs while leaving everything running on them unchanged. It's less sophisticated on a technical level, but it's also an easier "sell" for companies with an established technology stack that they may not want to change right away. It's also potentially a better fit for organizations which need to run Windows infrastructure (e.g. AD servers, mail servers, etc) which can't be hosted in k8s.

VMWare is far easier solution for normal enterprises than K8s. K8s more suited for having many small VMs that can be quickly deleted and recreated i.e modern microservice architecture. vSphere & friends is more targeted for running very large database, oriented application that need high uptime and are very long lived. VMWare can live migrate a running OS between physical hosts so that you can have continuous uptime. VMWare works with any OS so it's especially used by any Microsoft based orgs which the majority of hospitals, schools, government offices are.

If you are deploying enterprise apps from the 1990-2000s you use vSphere, if you are building your own SaaS product then you use K8s.

Yeah so we used Vagrant way way back in the day to have an easy way to distribute dev environments. Definitely not an expert here as to all the alternatives, but for what we had, the devex felt fine.

> What area does VMWare excel so much to justify this pricing power?

My experience is only with VMWare's desktop-virtualization tools, but hands-down they have the best integration features and services, especially for... uh... "retro" small-business computing needs (in my case, it was the only way I could get a VM running Windows Server 2003 to work - which I needed in-order to be able to run a Progress-based CRM).

I find it odd that Microsoft's own virtualization/Hyper-V stuff is useless if you're wanting to run older versions of Windows, especially XP/2000/2003 (as Hyper-V was a post-Vista/WS2008 thing); it's not just the lack of drivers, but the lack of absolutely-essential integration features like USB port forwarding and "real" GPU emulation (because Hyper-V's "Enhanced Session mode" doesn't actually show you the local-console desktop: it's all just using a special mode of RDP).

I've been a user and admin (not architect or SME) of VMware for over a decade and what strikes me is the reliability.

With that said though, I think a lot of customers using VMware don't really need all the features of VMware. They could get away with something simpler and cheaper.