VLOG Thursday 370: My Forum Updates, XCP-NG & Xen Orchestra

Heh. That Dell termination is really going to hurt VMware's market share, Broadcom just doesn't know it yet.

You see, Dell sells a lot of server hardware with VMware already installed and tested on it.
And by a lot I mean pretty much every Fortune 500 company.
Literally every single one of them. Why? because it's a U.S.-owned company and if you want to do business with FedGov/Uncle Sam you will make sure your IT infrastructure comes from an approved U.S. vendor and right now Dell is the 800lbs gorilla in that space.

"But they're in the cloud! The Wall Street Journal tells us so!"

Sure, they are. But not 100%. Development environments for new and existing hardware and software products tend to be hosted entirely in-house either on-prem or at a secure datacenter off-site for various security and contract reasons and they all use Windows PCs in the office for mundane day-to-day operations like web browsing and Office apps (especially Microsoft Teams).

Those Windows PCs require a Windows server to help manage, maintain, and secure those PCs.

And that is all virtualized on VMware.

Sure, they could use something like Azure in the cloud but what happens when the ISP connection goes down? Corps don't fully trust the cloud to be there 24/7/365 so they deploy hybrid infrastructure and there's a ton of hybrid Azure installations out there, even though it's a royal pain to maintain at times. Almost all of it is running on VMware. Well, they were all running on VMware…

I know. I've installed a lot of them for Dell. Dell basically provided turn-key VMware infrastructure and they were pretty damn good at it.

Problem is, Proxmox is a German company. Not U.S.-based. That's a FedGov no no. Xen hypervisor itself is part of the Linux Foundation which in turn is also heavily invested-in/supported-by currently-on-the-outs-with-Uncle-Sam Huawei and might-as-well-be-CCP-run Alibaba Cloud. Any company doing business with FedGov in any way isn't going to use Xen or XCP-NG either because they'd get slaughtered during the mandatory IT audits FedGov requires be performed on a regular basis.

I think Broadcom/VMware knows that and knows that FedGov is always, always, always going to use them when it needs a hypervisor.
And FedGov is where the money is at in the long run. Companies come and go but Uncle Sam is forever, especially when forced by legislation. Just ask Cisco. There's a reason their products are on the NSA's approved list. A list they spent a ton of money in development and testing in the 90s to get on and still do to maintain that listing to this very day. I know. I used to work directly for FedGov back in the day, both in the USA and overseas.
If something wasn't on that list we weren't allowed to implement it.

Now Dell is still going to sell customers servers that can easily run a VMware hypervisor but it's no longer going to come pre-installed by default without the customer paying extra for it in post-hardware-install services.

The customer is either to going to pay Dell extra to perform that service (that's me…hi, kids!), pay extra for a third-party to do it, or do it on their own.

Existing VMware-on-Dell customers will probably just continue to pay VMware licensing but they're going to have to come to terms with spending more money in time and services to get new Dell servers spun up in their existing VMware infrastructure.

Good night and good luck!

As for installing xcpng, how about an automated way to do it?