Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

jjosephcsible about 3 hours ago 22 commentsRead Article on virtualizationhowto.com

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Discussion (22 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

firesteelrain•4 minutes ago

We run a lot of ESXi with vSphere (part of overall VCF solution). It works very well. But I am part of Big Corp. so they don’t mind paying. We are good via warranties etc using what we already purchased. I don’t know that I share the same sentiment that we could have just used ProxMox. We are a Dell heavy shop and there is a new Dell Private Cloud product that is very promising. More like choose your own adventure.

ramgine•about 1 hour ago

I got my current job because I could lead the hyper-v to VMware migration project. Just this year I led the VMware to hyper-v migration project. VMware was such a great product (although a bit cumbersome in the VCF environment I managed). It’s really unfortunate it went the way of Broadcom. In comparison Hyper-v feels like a typical Microsoft product. A bunch of different tools created by different teams to do tasks that feel bolted on and afterthoughts. I have to run FCM to manage the nodes? But I run HVM to manage the roles? But there’s no overall resource management like VMware vsphere or proxmox does natively?

I’ve quietly built a proxmox cluster in our environment for semi-prod workloads for when the inevitable windows host has issues.

sigmoid10•27 minutes ago

I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows over the years that once I tried out hyper-v for the first time last year, I somehow have never touched vmware again. Sure vmware has better configs, cleaner interface and some very subtle design advantages. But damn, hyper-v just fucking works and it keeps working across updates. I have a VM that has been running for a year and it is still perfectly doing exactly what it should. I never experienced that with vmware.

simoncion•16 minutes ago

> I actually had so many troubles with vmware on windows...

I assume this means that you were using Vmware Workstation? The VDDK is for Vmware vSphere, which -IIRC- runs on Linux and coordinates computers running ESXi, which are where vSphere VMs actually run.

Not that many people are going to be using Vmware Workstation to run a large number of VMs.

Jedd•about 1 hour ago

From TFA

> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...

Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.

IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.

All automatable, I'm sure.

nubinetwork•about 1 hour ago

Rather than converting the cold vm disk, couldn't you boot up the vm, dump the disks to stream, and send the streams into another format?

watusername•16 minutes ago

Yes, this is Microsoft's "agent-based migration" option mentioned in the article.

Neywiny•24 minutes ago

Probably better to get the vm into a ramfs or any other way to not be currently on it. Otherwise it'll likely be pretty corrupted

uriahlight•about 2 hours ago

The sad part is that most companies using VMWare could have been using Proxmox all along without any of the licensing and fee nightmares.

throw0101a•about 1 hour ago

As a user of Proxmox, and observer of VMware infrastructure in other silos in some IT orgs I've been in, there is no way that Proxmox was a viable solution 3-5 (or more) years ago.

Hyper-V could have been used in many instances. I know a few places that chose to start moving to Nutanix even before the Broadcam fiasco. OpenStack is useful for many large scale environments (especially with tenant isolation and usage tracking/billing/chargebacks).

Proxmox is good a good solution for SMBs, but (especially pre-9.x) there were a bunch of things that made it much less usable for large(r) scale deployments IMHO.

gerdesj•37 minutes ago

I started migrating my customers from VMware a good three years ago.

It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)

I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.

It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.

quietsegfault•14 minutes ago

I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.

I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.

kiney•about 1 hour ago

I was working on a pretty big proxmox setup back in 2016...

Avicebron•35 minutes ago

Well good news, it's improved quite a bit. File level restore is a thing now..

Brian_K_White•11 minutes ago

Anyone larger like that automatically also can afford the staff to simply address any shortcomings in-house and then own it forever, and perfectly tailored, and perfectly customizable at any time forever. There is no missing feature that a few hours or days of developer time doesn't erase.

Oh it's crude on day one? So what? You're still operating and on your own terms, and every week a few more minutes of work gets added as little pain points get addressed by whoever cares, and before you know it it's better than anything you can buy, and the total cost was less than your previous licensing, and you never had to deal with a serial number or license manager or account rep, never had to care one bit about counting cpu cores or client seats or vms or physical hosts or ips or backup copies or spinning up new dev boxes or more production without warning or any of that bs.

The bigger you are, the less you need the convenience of outsourcing, not more.

akulbe•about 1 hour ago

More VMware - winning friends and influencing people, like usual.

guidedlight•9 minutes ago

I blame Broadcom. They behave like an aged care home for software, who actively engages in financial abuse.

msie•24 minutes ago

Time to sue!

mitxela•15 minutes ago

Did they break a law?

toomuchtodo•about 3 hours ago

Is a magnet torrent available?

Daneel_•20 minutes ago

There's a normal torrent avaiable from archive.org? https://archive.org/download/vddk_20260825/vddk_20260825_arc...

From this page: https://archive.org/details/vddk_20260825

toomuchtodo•14 minutes ago

Best to grab a copy if you need it before a potential DMCA takedown request forces IA to dark the item (public access revoked).