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Since KVM already exists, who would renew their ESXi licenses?

Broadcom would surely rise license costs while at the same time disinvesting.

Also, what will happen with VMWare’s Kubernetes investments? I am guessing all of their open source work will cease to exist?



There may be other hypervisors out there but that's not the hard thing to replace. It's all the junk on top that enterprises will have to replace somehow.

Off the top of my head they have:

- Carbon black for what used to be called antivirus but has metastasized into XDR, an all encompassing endpoint security/detection/response tool

- A whole automation framework (vRA/vRO) that companies use for automating deploying VMs and other stuff. Probably straightforward to replace with other automation frameworks but migrating existing playbooks will take time and expertise ($$$)

- A whole virtual desktop management suite (Horizon) including SaaS IDP/Mobile Device Management (Workspace One/VMware identity manager). Can probably patch together a replacement with stuff like Jamf, your SaaS IDP of choice, and Microsoft's hosted VDI but it won't be quick and again device migrations might suck

- Software defined networking with NSX. This could be difficult to quickly replace if you have a whole system built around automating network segmentation/management with it. It seems like your choice is either go with a network vendor and lose tight VM integration or go with a lower tier virtualization platform and get a bunch of hacked together Apache/Linux native stuff and no support

- SDWAN stuff. Probably relatively easy to replace unless you have a huge number of branches or edge devices that need to be physically updated by rolling trucks

- VMware cloud where ESXi/vSphere run on public clouds. To replace it you need to stand up a whole datacenter/colo hypervisor environment/network/storage and staff up to manage them

I could go on but suffice it to say I don't envy the enterprise management types having to consider untangling their dependencies on VMware right now.


They've announced NSX and SD-WAN is a core business unit under the new VMware as Broadcom offering.

EUC, Aria and Carbon Black are still up in the air.


For proper business infrastructure. We are using VSphere for all our clients and it works very well. We can't really deal with half-baked solutions which never translate to the corporate environment.


kvm/libvirt are the industry standard solutions for enterprise linux based distros, and I know for a fact, that multiple mega-corps use it at scale. Pretty much anything Linux based is going to have the best support path in 2023 vs. something made by a company that's being sold over and over again.


SMB do not use Linux. Business owners do not even know what Linux is. In the real world, Linux is nonexistent. Business software runs on Windows.




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