VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Microsoft is doing well and you were a small customer for them.

VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.

Doing things that way (virtualization rather than containerization) fell out of vogue specifically because of how bad vmware was to work with. CPU quotas were probably what pushed serious people away from the product instead of machine licenses. I was early in my career but working with vmware products was the bane of our existence because if we wanted to make any sort of configuration change or spin up a test machine or really do anything at all it had to run through accounting which was just an instant non starter. we all started fiddling with alternatives and docker swiftly became reliable at least for spinning up a new web server or testing the latest and greatest whatever. vmware did this to themselves.

Exactly. You end up having to burn licenses for stuff like that, although I will concede that VMware always gave us more licenses than we paid for and they always included extra products. It was weird though. There was no rhyme or reason to it. One time they gave us 1000 licenses for VMware Fusion even though we didn't have any Macs. Microsoft, on the other hand, let us use whatever we wanted. If it was still around when it came time to true-up, we paid for it.

The vast majority of containers run on VM not baremetal.

But not on vmware, just zen and/or kvm with various management front ends.

VMware has always been a PITA, even in the late 2000's, we pivoted and bought several thousand physical machines for a new datacenter after they started to play tricks just weeks before we were going to turn up the DC.

They have always aspired to be Oracle like, where customers are hostages. Most people I knew who weren't stuck in the "Enterprise" trap moved to kvm/zen ASAP especially after the Westmere dramatically reduced the vm_exit() latency allowing for databases etc...

That was over 15 years ago, and outside of a very small number of niche use cases, tehre was no real argument to run container hosts on Vmware outside of a (IMHO) mistaken risk appetite.

It is really the fruit that ate itself, as had IT departments had a more data based risk assessment process, we would probably be heavily hybrid-cloud now. But the same Enterprise gravy train that VMware grew under killed them.

Shifting blame at great expense in licensing and agility to an _Enterprise_ solution was their jam...now Broadcom owns them an it is even worse.

Not in the F100. They're all VMs, all of the time, all on vSphere. Nutanix was the next best solution, with Hyper-V as a distant third. Hence why Broadcom ate them.

This really seems only obviously true if you're counting docker/podman-desktop and similar dev tools which work via stashing containers in a VM. There are a ton of large scale kubernetes deployments made directly on baremetal.

zen? like, uh, the browser?

From what I hear and have seen, pre-Broadcom head-on VMware takeouts didn't go much of anywhere. But kubernetes-based (Kubevirt) products do seem to be having a degree of success.

I assume they mean Xen.

Yeah, vsphere has a mile-long list of enterprise checkbox features that the sales managers can overwhelm the CIO's with on the golf course.

Kubernetes might have success, but AFAICS Kubernetes also sort of involves a new way of architecting applications (cloud native applications, 12-factor apps, microservices, etc.; whatever the buzzword du jour is). The idea with vmware was always to virtualize all those zillions of more or less idling physical servers, and get some snazzy management GUI to handle them all etc. etc.

Yeah, but I think his point is that VMs haven’t fallen as far out of vogue as the parent is perhaps suggesting.

We still run a lot of VMs, just not VMware VMs.

Rearchitecting for containers is indeed a lot more effort and, indeed, one of the reasons for VMware's success was that it provided more efficiency without (at least initially) much in the way of operational changes.

But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.