this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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So I may be biased but what is vmwares USP? From my limited experience it was a slightly more polished GUI for creating VMs and the ability to run on older pre-virt hardware. Is the experience still objectively better than the alternatives?
If you’re running a lab or a small shop any hypervisor can likely do the job. Anything above that VMware’s overall ecosystem is the most robust and well-supported.
At this point virtualization is a legacy technology. It’s not going to disappear tomorrow but its clock is ticking the same way the clock was ticking for mainframes thirty years ago. Plenty of mainframes still out there but nobody is implementing new. Same can be said for virtualization. It’s a limited market with significantly slowed growth over where it was a decade ago.
The move to a subscription model will let them squeeze every last dollar out of the technology while they still can.
Wait what
AWS, GCP, and Azure run on virtualization. Do you think all these cloud providers are providing everyone bare metal? This doesn’t include containerization which is a subset of virtualization. Your average shop might not run virtualization directly unless of course your team touches VirtualBox or Vagrant or qemu or (probably shouldn’t) HyperV.
Either your understanding of virtualization is very lacking or you didn’t explain your point very well. I am really curious what you meant.
Yeah, virtualization is definitely not "legacy technology" 😂
Virtualization, as a commercial product pointed at businesses, is a legacy product.
Of course large providers are utilizing virtualization, containerization and an abundance of similar technologies. However, they’re not generally using VMware to do it.
I spoke in the context of OPs question.
What makes you say “probably shouldn’t”? WSL use is widespread at this point
WSL is also shit for any kind of containerization and HyperV fucks up everything else. If you’re not doing any DevOps/SRE stuff WSL 2.0 is fine provided you don’t mix the filesystems. I have been so frustrated with their claims on release for 1.0 and 2.0 that I haven’t evaluated the recent systemd release for WSL. I provision WSL for people that don’t know why they should care and Linux VMs for people that need to work with CI tooling.
In general if you use a Microsoft tool you have to use the Microsoft ecosystem. Sometimes that’s not a huge deal, eg VS Code just adds a ton of telemetry and GitHub reads all your public code. Sometimes it’s a huge deal, eg you want to do literally anything beyond Docker Desktop defaults in the container world.
Maybe a better term is “commodity” technology. Rather than a thing by itself where one company is much better, now it’s everywhere, mostly good enough. It’s not going anywhere but I wouldn’t run a business on it alone
Yes commodity is a much better term here. It is a mature and fairly ubiquitous technology at this point.
I think that’s a fair point. Trying to build a new virtualization company today would have huge initial investment and a steep path to the companies that run their data centers.