Enterprise Linux Security Episode 81 – The VMware Graveyard

As a VMware support engineer, I have a differing perspective on some aspects and I felt this episode is bit misleading. The ESXi hypervisor and virtual machines (VMs) are not disappearing; they will remain accessible in the future. The foundation of VMware, vSphere (comprising ESXi hypervisor and vCenter), is indispensable and isn't going anywhere. It's crucial to recognize that vSphere will persist for on-premises usage and for customers utilizing VMware cloud services. It's important to note that virtual machines will continue to be supported without any discontinuation.

A couple VM related options that are worth thinking about for small deployments: Cockpit on RHEL has a kvm module, it's pretty nice, looks professional, it does the basics. Truenas Scale has a kvm module that also does the basics, and you can take advantage of ZFS on comparatively cheap supported hardware. The truenas option is great for very small clients that may not be able to justify spending 8k+ for a server with decent hardware raid that would be safe to run windows on. For a few thousand you can get a fully supported system from truenas, then run a windows server VM to serve as a ADDC, join the truenas to AD, create your various shares on the truenas directly, and use windows where needed if for example you have to run a quickbooks database or whatever else.

I'm still running
VMware 4
Guess there's no point in upgrading.
Broadcom chips have caused me nothing but headaches over the decades anyway, I'll have to get in the habit of avoiding them

Not just a headache for business, but those who working for them on VMware products, as well as those recently qualified or half way through a course they've paid for. Could be a career ending move for older employees.

I used to work as L2 tech support for vsphere products. From my experience, probably 90% of customers use very small fraction of features available in modern (vsphere 8.x) versions of their hypervisor and vcenter. You could put most of those customers back on vsphere 4.x and they wouldn't notice any difference in functionality. As I observed VMware's development of their product portfolio, you can't help yourself thinking that majority of features added from vsphere 5.x onward are non-essential, used by tiny fraction of customers. It's a bit like watching company who lost their original vision or maybe can't come up with some new innovative idea, so they continue adding useless features for the sake of releasing new versions of their product.

Dude… You lost me when a user question asked why use VMware over qemu and you started blaming the CTO. I mean sure, you have a point about the pointy haired boss syndrome, but VMware is in no way comparable to qemu.

Your product becoming a commodity is both a blessing and a curse? Seems like they want to keep some of the cash cows, and turn some of them into hamburgers.