back to article Is VMware the power it once was?

It is commonly held that if an article asks a question in the title or lede, you can safely answer no and avoid reading the body of the article itself. While not always true, the aphorism is accurate enough to be considered reliable. With that in mind, I have been asking myself, "is VMware the focal point of power in IT that …

  1. Nate Amsden

    hate conferences

    Lived in the bay area for 5 years(Just moved away yesterday) never once had the slightest interest in attending vmworld. I did attend one vmworld "party" last year(sponsored by 2 companies that I am a customer of), didn't know anybody so just stayed for about 30 minutes then went home. Waste of time.

    Conferences have never had any value for me personally at least. HP Discover the past couple of years had it's moments, though outside of meeting with the storage folks whom I know the rest of the event had nothing of interest (not attending Discover this year).

    Company more than happy to pay for conferences though none of them interest me.

    I have been a loyal vmware customer for nearly 17 years now though. Just vcenter+enterprise plus (5.5U2) though(and vmware workstation). Maybe upgrade to vsphere 6 by end of 2018, no rush.

    None of the other products are particularly exciting to me. None of the competition (e.g. openstack, public IaaS cloud etc) is interesting either.

    1. CheesyTheClown

      I think loyalty was key

      If you have a system which appears to work for you... why not stick with it. I personally recommend against wasting the time, resources, money, etc... upgrading to VMware 6 (or the soon in beta 7) since it's really a whole lot of nothing particularly good. It's also really just not as stable as the old versions.

      Customer loyalty or "lock-in" for others is VMware's biggest advantage. They were there first and people have grown comfortable with it. It works for most people and there's no benefit to building something new if what you have works.

      For new deployments of systems, it's become very cost effective to use alternatives. Azure Stack which most companies already are licensed for and therefore is basically free simply requires a few more machines.

      Ubuntu has accomplished more than any other company with regards to making OpenStack and out of the box experience. Unlike Redhat's normal "everyone wants python and the command line" way of doing things, Ubuntu has given an application oriented experience which feels similar to how we felt about VMware for servers. It might be that Ubuntu is a good solution for you to try for new systems and VMware 5.5 is good enough for legacy systems.

      It's up to you... it takes a lot of resources to identify new technology and learn it well enough to comfortably use it. If the number of hours needed to learn the new product exceeds the number of hours you would save by using it, it obviously makes sense to stick with what you have.

      I would recommend you consider taking a look at Azure Stack when it comes out though. If you can install and manage Windows, you can easily install and manage that.

      P.S. Personally, I have never seen anyone do anything but lose money by using public cloud unless they were a service provider who would benefit from a global CDN.

  2. TaabuTheCat

    Switching

    In all the years I've been running VMware - not as many as Nate, but close - I've never had a real reason to look elsewhere. The releases mostly had new features relevant to my environment, and most importantly, they were stable right out of the gate.

    The last 18 months have been a shitshow for VMware customers. Bug after critical bug, and it's a total crapshoot as to when show-stopping (data loss, PSODs) problems will get fixed, and fixed for good. The quality of phone support has gone way down as well - the only metric appears to be number of cases closed.

    Toss in View (we're VDI for about 95% of our desktops) and the release cycle has become a little shop of horrors. Never used to be this way.

    So if VMware is even slightly worried about remaining relevant and keeping long-time customers, they need to get their focus back on quality. There's simply no reason to pay premiums for crap software and support.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Switching

      Totally agree. The quality of their software has dropped dramatically.

      I have recently had two cases lasting nearly 6 months each. Despite on both occasions trying many, many solutions I have had to wait for a new update release of the vCenter to fix the issues. Which in turn involves significant additional work (SRM upgrades etc)

      The removal of SSL v3 was a nice Christmas present for everyone last year and I believe at one point there was not a new edition of their Hypervisor that did not have a serious bug in it.

      They really need to concentrate and invest heavily in quality control and support.

      Alot of my customers are preparing the move over to Hyper V.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Switching

      The choices have definitely grown. How about switching to RHEL/RHEV, SLES, Hyper-V or I dare say Nutanix. What are your top must-have VMware features?

  3. Martin Summers Silver badge

    I might just be pissed off tonight for various reasons. But another Amazon is the future article? I didn't stop reading at the heading, I stopped reading when I read the first sentence about Amazon. It's great you think they are that special but I just can't see them taking over as you say. You're handing too much power and control to a company like that and they're at the other end of an Internet connection which in the UK at least is not always a good thing.

    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Trevor didn't say that he thought Amazon was that special but that technologists of his acquaintance were looking in that direction and used them as a bellwether to indicate that Amazon (and public cloud generally) are poised to steal some of VMware's lunch. You personally may believe that handing "too much control to a company like that" is a bad thing, but there are plenty of C-level executives who seem to disagree with you. I actually agree with your points about handing over control and depending on the Internet to access your critical data, but I can't deny that "teh cloud" is on a lot of people's minds, many of whom are key decision makers.

    2. Mark 65

      I think the popularity of Amazon is due to the current fad of get someone else to manage your compute (a.k.a. cloud) versus the old-school do-it-yourself. One favours Amazon, the other VMWare.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The answer to

    your headline question is, "no". It is in a slow decline while primarily squeezing money out of its installed base. The long term onslaught from competitors and serious missteps have taken their toll. Be that various clouds or open source or their own bungling of opportunities. That said, they still enjoy serious margins on their goods, so they can always drop prices to compete, but there's that pesky stock market thing and Dell and all that. The overall picture isn't promising and the exec departures of late have to make one wonder what they knew before jumping ship..

  5. Mr.Nobody

    Certainly a downward trend, but not out

    VMware is on a downward trajectory, no doubt. Companies that are starting out will likely go to AWS or Azure since that is the model everyone is chasing these days, but there are still many companies that are far in bed and under the covers with VMware, and they aren't going to go anywhere.

    We have fairly large VMware environments - almost 3000 vms altogether. The bean counters and sales people all think we have to move to AWS, but they have yet to look at the costs. It would be a minimum of 3 times the price without even factoring in everything we would need to change to deal with AWS and their differences.

    I agree with tabbu, VMware used to always be excellent software and support was equally excellent. It has all turned to shit. We are deploying esxi 6, and surprise, some VMs just don't want to migrate from the esxi 5 hosts to 6. The only fix is to turn them off and back on. This was esxi 6 update 1 mind you, we waited until that came out.

    Opened a ticket for said problem, since we have about 100 of these VMs now in production that can't migrate, so we can't finish the upgrade. Update 2 has a fix for these VMs that won't migrate. Fantastic.

    Apply the fix - and now all the sudden the VMs that wouldn't move before move, but they run like complete shit on the esxi 6 boxes until you shut them down or move them back to the esxi 5 box. Support had no answers for me. I told them we'll just leave it on the old version without the patch, and get downtime to shut down these boxes. What a joke.

    The next undocumented feature is that you can no longer delete datastores with the delete command. You have to unmount them first. I got two fellows on support calls who barely spoke my language, and they told me its always been this way - when I mentioned that its never been this way in the 10 years I have used the product, they had no answer. I told them to escalate - no answer.

    Told my sales rep and closed the ticket, but I gave them an earful. I don't know how we can give them this much money every year in support and get what is now clearly EMC level support. grrrrr.....

    Needless to say, I don't think we have a lot of options. Vitualization has allowed us to save a lot of money and get by with fewer people. I am trying to imagine even getting the time to look at another option, let alone migrate almost 3000 machines to it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Certainly a downward trend, but not out

      3000 VMs is pretty midsize, but yes both quality and support have taken a nosedive the past 18 months. I believe the quality issue is being addressed, but the support one needs more customers to complain - plenty of VMW employees have to install and use the software and experience the bugs, but none of them call support...

  6. Franco

    I know that Azure and AWS and such like are the current trend, but I am slightly surprised to see not a single mention of Hyper-V in the article.

    As much as Microsoft were late to the party with their Hypervisor, Hyper-V has come on leaps and bounds over the years, and whilst it still suffers greatly (as of 2012 R2, not tried 2016 yet) in terms of managment compared to VMware (Having to look at Hyper-V manger, Failover Cluster Manager or Virtual Machine Manager depending on setting/environment), the favourable licensing and less steep learning curve make it a viable product in a lot of places. I know of a lot of very large companies and public sector bodies making the shift from VMware.

    I'm also hearing a lot of grumblings from VMware guys about the support, most are saying the sooner it's split back off from Dell/EMC the better.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "... and whilst it still suffers greatly ... in terms of management ..." - You put your finger on the major snag - right there.

      "the favourable licensing" - for whom? Not everyone runs Windows for everything.

      "and less steep learning curve" - really? For example, I defy you to get iSCSI working quickly on a HyperV cluster compared to VMware. The MS initiator is horrendous in use. Sorry: the MS GUI for the iSCSI initiator is horrific. I could go on and on.

      VMware is by no means perfect (recent CBT snags buggering up backups spring to mind) but it does get out of the way more often and let you crack on with the job in hand.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Boffin

        Not everyone runs Windows for everything.

        No reason you can't run Linux on HyperV. No need for a licence either, just ge whatever the free hyperv version of windows is currently called.

        Wouldn't recommend it in a 100% non-Windows environment (what would be the point?), but great in a mixed environment.

      2. Franco

        Favourable licensing in that Hyper-V server is free, and Hyper-V as a role has no additional cost on top of a Windows Server license. Add to that the free VMs available (IIRC 2 on Standard, Unlimited on Datacenter) and if you are a Microsoft shop it makes a lot of sense.

        The learning curve, I was speaking from my own experience of how quickly you can get a VM up and running. I've had all manner of fun myself with iSCSI, MPIO and 3rd party software not playing nicely together.

        Both products have their foibles, my point was that Hyper-V has closed a lot of the gaps between itself and VMware in the last few years.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      He did mentioned HpyerV

      He did mentioned Hyper-V albeit indirectly by referring to Azure stack - its the Microsoft branding for the hybrid cloud technology's in Server 2016 which hyper-v plays apart in. I was surprised to see him lauding Microsofts effort quite as vociferously as he was given he was proclaiming Microsofts demise on Friday. Still to be a commentard I guess you just need an opinion, it doesn't have to be consistent.

  7. Stephen McLaughlin

    VMware Slowly Fading - Key Word Slowly

    In many of the environments I visit, the major threats to VMware are OpenStack and Hyper-converged solutions (like Nutanix). It boils down to one thing, cost. When the competition is extremely low cost, it's difficult to compete regardless how good your product performs. Thinking back around 10 years ago, seemed VMware was the only game in town. It is definitely still the king, but the future doesn't look as bright as it once did.

  8. herman

    Well, I used VMware 10 years ago and it was good. Then came KVM and Virtualbox and I haven't gone back.

    1. AMBxx Silver badge

      !

      I don't think you're the target for the article - this is a about 'proper' server virtualisation, not desktop stuff.

      Try out HyperV or ESX and you'll see the difference.

  9. thondwe

    DataCenter or not

    I think the underlying issue, is how much money/effort do you put in to run your own datacentres and does running your own add much to your business? Do you want staff fighting hardware/software suppliers (and their B resellers), virtualisation stuff, backup stuff, exchange/sharepint etc, 24x7 availability, etc etc, or do you want them delivering some saleable functionality to your business (assuming you're NOT a hosting company)?

    Having someone else run your "Cloud" (Public or Private - don't care), is very appealing - which means VMware is after a share of that market - and that puts them up against Microsoft, Amazon, OpenStack etc. They are losing their original market, and struggling in the new one?

  10. Doogie Howser MD

    Truth

    Another fine article Trev, good work. I'm inclined to agree with your viewpoint, and I've felt this way for a while. Other than NSX and VSAN, VMware has pretty much been in a holding pattern for quite a while. For someone who cut their industry teeth on Novell products, I'm starting to get a touch of deja vu.

    No company in tech is too big to fail (not even Apple, given enough time) and I wonder if maybe there was a touch of arrogance at the top of the company a few years back that's contributed to the current state. Obviously revenues are still good, but once people think of their tech as "old hat", then it's only downhill from there.

    I've pivoted from VMware and Hyper-V to public cloud - whether you like it or not, those are the skills you'll need for the foreseeable future if you want to get the mortgage paid off a bit quicker.

    1. UncleBingo

      Re: Truth

      Its funny to see someone else reference Novell. I was just telling my boss that VMware appears to be heading in the same direction as Novell found its self when Active Directory started gaining traction. It may not have been the better product but IT history is littered with the bones of products that were superior to others but for some reason or another (usually price) were replaced by less capable offerings. VMware is between a rock (Microsoft) and a hard place (Open Source) when it comes to on-premises or private cloud offerings. Sure they have the market share now but Microsoft will eventually get it right (or come close enough) and the open source community has nearly unlimited potential, if they could just focus. I give VMware 3-5 years to either innovate or go the way of Novell.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Truth

        The missing bit in the article and comments is that while vSphere may be on the (slow) decline, VMware is a massive company these days with a huge portfolio of products, some good, some needing further work.

        It's also really easy to get stuck in the bubble of marketing / news where everyone's going cloud native and public cloud, in the big companies I work with they may dabble in those, but it's going to be a fraction of their IT spend for a decade yet - they're still working on migrating some stuff to x86 and virtualization let alone cloud native.

        Yes if I was a startup I think AWS or Google are almost a no-brainer for a lot of use cases, at least until you're huge enough to build you own (see DropBox), the big issue (for VMware & MS too) is integration - if you're good a software like Google, Apple etc. then OpenStack can make total sense, but if software isn't your business then paying the premium for VMware may be sensible.

        Someone mentioned connectivity too - in the US they take for granted redundant fat Internet connections in a way many other regions simply can't, and that alone changes the scales towards private cloud.

  11. Anonymous Coward
  12. Jedimastermero

    believe VMWare strategy will be focused on hybrid/private cloud management specially if new players are coming to your data center (hyperv/KVM) or you are moving to AWS/Azure, enterprise customers are usually comparing between VMware and Hyper-V due to their vast ecosystem in terms of management, monitoring and backup which means they might not think about adopting RHEV for instance which has small ecosystem compared to both VMware and MS, so far Hyper-V is still trying to catch up with vsphere in terms of manageability plus the customers mindset who think that MS stuff are unstable and easily broken, Windows 2016 might be promising for hyper-v however the per core license means that customers will have to pay more cash to MS or either go to Azure

  13. Iain Smith

    The real VMware problem?

    Seems to me that Andy Grove put his finger on what might be the real problem here:

    "Success breeds complacency and complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive."

    Those running VMware should read this this set of comments. Paranoia could save 'em.

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