most people don't use vmware the way you use virtualbox.
The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes.
The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface.
it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem.
That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for.
It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks).
As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
Fair bit of that can be done with Proxmox now. What esxi has going for it from what I hear is the ability to deal with 100/1000s of hosts over many many nodes and Proxmox struggles with that
can you speak to how that is vs the gui web interface goodness of proxmox? I'm interested in playign with ganeti but all the youtube walkthroughs that would motivate me more are super outdated and the website doesn't really sell the product very well.
> vsan... a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is all about what the sales guy is willing to do to make the rest of the sale. It has zero marginal cost if they can get you on the platform and using their ecosystem of tools and software.
In edge deployments where rack space is tight it's actually a great solution if you only have a few U to work with and have a HA requirement for a legacy app as well.
good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
> Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks
Actually, no, they apparently won't, because I tried and was told they are discontinuing that product. They are going full steam on their OpenShift (k8s) product though, and will be happy to inform you that you can run a VM on that, but if you press them you'll find that you're actually running a VM in a container, and that you have to specify it as a k8s deployment, so apparently you can't just throw a VM up like you can in vCenter.
The money making part of vmware licensing is the baremetal hypervisor ESXi, the competitors are xen or hyperv and the likes.
The lock-in part of vmware is the vsphere management software, that allows you to move VM's en mass from one baremetal machine to another baremetal machine, or allows you to nest vm's, etc. manage your entire fleet of vm's which could be thousands or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, from one management interface.
it's basically docker except it's actual entire vm's being moved around. VMWare ESXi being a baremetal hypervisor means you can run different OS's on top of these vm's and imagine being able to move these VM's all running different OS's around in your ecosystem.
That's what people pay the big bucks to vmware for.
It would be very difficult to build the vsphere/esxi ecosystem with pure opensource tools (it's possible with Xen, etc) but you'd be right back at paying some vendor a massive amount of money for building, integrating, and supporting this kind of system. (Redhat will happily sell you something that approximates vmware's tools, for megabucks).
As an aside, the consumer "vmware" software that you install on your workstation is such a small portion of their business, they basically spend no money on fixing/upkeeping. Apple silicon support was in beta for a loooong time, and they don't actually care about their workstation product. ESXi makes the money.