E.g. it's not that NSX as a whole is discontinued it's that NSX perpetual licensing is discontinued and you must buy the NSX subscription licensing. Some of these other SKUs may not have an equivalent but for anything "big" like NSX or vSphere there will be.
I don't pretend to know the true actual reality of what's going on here, but an article about the end of non-subscription licensing from December of last year is linked in the original article.
The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.
Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.
Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.
It sounds like they are saying the products are entirely discontinued, including subscriptions, but then they say: "In the future, at the time of renewal, customers will be offered the best subscription products to fit their needs."
It says "not available for purchase" and that users will be recommended what subscription product to use instead.
It's written horribly complicated, and it leaves a lot of open questions, but what it does not say is that you can't give money to broadcom to get the features of those products. And it's hard to imagine that this is the end of vsphere. It's just the end of buying vsphere.
That VMware KB article says the subscription version of those applications is no longer available either.
The following products are at End of Availability (EOA). All licensing options
including ... subscription, as well as all editions, suites ... are included
in this announcement.
It sounds like those ones are going away rather than just forcibly transitioning people to a subscription model.
Inaccurate. VMware is consolidating its ABSOLUTELY INSANE list of SKUs down to a handful. Yes, some products are getting put down (I.e. no longer maintained, with support ending way later), but not 56 of them, and definitely not NSX (makes HUGE money for VMware).
What I take from several kbs and articles is they're removing all of that as individual products, and they're selling the new all-in-one "vSphere foundation", only in a subscription model, that will have some of those functionalities and then offer some others (like NSX) as add-ons:
i think i will still be in tech when the pendulum swings back to on-prem, when everybody notices how awfully expensive the cloud is, after the bigger players raise the prices at will, because they killed off the competition.
I work at a Fortune 50 company and the pendulum for us has already swung back around. 5 years ago it was all "move everything to public". Now, we're building a bunch of on-prem infra and there are huge projects to move workloads back.
For us, on-prem is about half the cost for compute and storage vs public cloud.
Problem is that management is usually not skilled enough (or just greedy for bonus money short term) to understand what is happening.
Cloud is good if you are tiny or need to scale really fast if you are growing and then move out of it.
For the bigger companies it can be a good strategy to scale out, but for that you only need IAAS and no fancy cloud vendor lock-in products.
you will always be cheaper if you build it on your own, if your usecase is heavy load.
you might be cheaper with colocation instead of building your own datacenter but most enterprises still have a need for their own anyway.
I wonder how this will cut into the hobbiest/learn-at-home crowd with our half width, 1U free-tier-license ESXi servers we learn our skills for our day jobs on.
I don't think this is a concern of theirs - the new owners don't appear to have any plans for it to be around long enough to need another generation of people to run it.
It's likely that for whatever products remain after this purge, there will be no more major releases, only security patches and ever-more-expensive extended support contracts.
I think people underestimate the long term impact of this kind of thing. Giving the people who use and maybe more importantly influence the purchasing of expensive commercial products the ability to easily play with them on their own is essentially free advertising. And taking that away after you've offered it is even worse since now those same people not only can't experience your product firsthand as easily, but they now actively dislike your company for screwing up their home lab.
Maybe the bet here is that VMWare is so entrenched or the time horizon of the people making the decisions is so short that it won't matter to them personally. But I bet long term it has significant impact and makes room for competitors with more foresight.
Are you using live migration of running VMs, or wanting it to work in Proxmox?
Asking because in my testing of that in Proxmox 3 and 5 node clusters last month, the live migration would fail (aka just hang with no further progress) just over 20% of the time.
Haven't looked into it further (likely will though), but searching around online shows lots of other people having experienced the same issue. General sentiment seems to be "Proxmox is good for homelab and non-prod environments. But probably don't use it in production."
We're definitely seeing an uptick in interest for Triton Datacenter[1] from vSphere users looking for alternatives.
Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community.
While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions.
There is also Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager and Azure Stack that might be an alternative for companies that ran Windows on their vSphere environment. I've seen Windows shops already switch to that because the licensing a lot cheaper.
There's also Nutanix, RedHat and other options that people have mentioned here.
It supports multiple hypervisors including VMWare, KVM, XCP-ng, etc. I haven't tried but it has some features to allow users to migrate from VMWare to Apache CloudStack with KVM and/or XCP-ng.
I remember when Nicira/NSX and the concept of SDN was groundbreaking stuff. Hyperconverged had just become a thing, and VMware was the brightest star in the galaxy. Seeing it shuddered is pretty powerful.
Personally I would like AWS et al. to die so that cloud consultants and their associates will go away and I will be able to stop being lectured about "digital transformation" and "the cloud". It's really all very boring now after seeing the same schtick several times.
I’m at a loss with VMware. We’ve been full vdi since 2011 and can’t afford cloud solutions. Citrix is overkill. Love Nutanix, but can’t use AHV due to VMware horizon. We’ve had zero or thin clients for all workstations. It’s been so easy, until now.
Was never warned, when we went full vdi people were very into it. It was a huge bonus to us as a small IT dept being able to maintain and manage a large infrastructure. I think vdi is essentially dead until the swing back to on prem solutions.
Readit News
The 1st party link has a much clearer title "VMware End of Availability of perpetual licensing and associated products" https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/96168?lang=en_US&ref=thestac...
E.g. it's not that NSX as a whole is discontinued it's that NSX perpetual licensing is discontinued and you must buy the NSX subscription licensing. Some of these other SKUs may not have an equivalent but for anything "big" like NSX or vSphere there will be.
The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.
Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.
Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.
It sounds like they are saying the products are entirely discontinued, including subscriptions, but then they say: "In the future, at the time of renewal, customers will be offered the best subscription products to fit their needs."
What does that even mean?
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2024/01/embracing-change-wi...
It's written horribly complicated, and it leaves a lot of open questions, but what it does not say is that you can't give money to broadcom to get the features of those products. And it's hard to imagine that this is the end of vsphere. It's just the end of buying vsphere.
Source: I work at VMware in presales
Your potential customers will not enter your sales funnel with this kind of strange and misshapen noise happening about your products.
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2024/01/embracing-change-wi...
Dead Comment
For us, on-prem is about half the cost for compute and storage vs public cloud.
you might be cheaper with colocation instead of building your own datacenter but most enterprises still have a need for their own anyway.
It's likely that for whatever products remain after this purge, there will be no more major releases, only security patches and ever-more-expensive extended support contracts.
Maybe the bet here is that VMWare is so entrenched or the time horizon of the people making the decisions is so short that it won't matter to them personally. But I bet long term it has significant impact and makes room for competitors with more foresight.
Asking because in my testing of that in Proxmox 3 and 5 node clusters last month, the live migration would fail (aka just hang with no further progress) just over 20% of the time.
Haven't looked into it further (likely will though), but searching around online shows lots of other people having experienced the same issue. General sentiment seems to be "Proxmox is good for homelab and non-prod environments. But probably don't use it in production."
Dead Comment
Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community.
While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions.
[1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com
There's also Nutanix, RedHat and other options that people have mentioned here.
It supports multiple hypervisors including VMWare, KVM, XCP-ng, etc. I haven't tried but it has some features to allow users to migrate from VMWare to Apache CloudStack with KVM and/or XCP-ng.
But the issue with this and Proxmox is vsphere is not just the web interface.
Usually a company has Veeam integration for backups, and server creation/decom automations all built on the vmware platforms...
Dead Comment
Probably wishful thinking.
https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...