There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
So, it seems that companies’ infrastructure was already entrenched with VMware, and now Broadcom is trying to leverage the fact that VMware is already being used to squeeze more money out of its acquisition?
No problem. I just thought I had covered that when I said:
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
This being said I don’t think even in 2025 proxmox and things like vsphere are comparable. XCP-ng I do think is though. It’s open source and matches features.
Why would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
So, it seems that companies’ infrastructure was already entrenched with VMware, and now Broadcom is trying to leverage the fact that VMware is already being used to squeeze more money out of its acquisition?
Exactly.
You can do live migration like that with qemu, I do it all the time with Proxmox, which uses qemu under the hood.
You’re not wrong in 2025. But VMware was able do it in 2003.
True. Your response just seemed to imply that the two aren’t comparable in 2025, and they absolutely are.
No problem. I just thought I had covered that when I said:
This being said I don’t think even in 2025 proxmox and things like vsphere are comparable. XCP-ng I do think is though. It’s open source and matches features.