I doubt the Workstation and Fusion products are going EoL anytime soon. The mass lay-offs amount to only 5% of global staffing numbers and was announced on the earnings call a few days ago. Still not great, but almost to be expected for a global vendor in the current economic climate, particularly one with a depressed share price since the Dell/EMC acquisition announcement late last year.
Sucks an entire team was let go, though. That does seem odd, but despite being great products and I am sure profitable in their own right, neither Workstation or Fusion are significant revenue contributors for VMware.
Well, the product is likely to not develop much in the ways of new features if their whole product teams are laid off.
Speculation is development efforts are being relocated to China. It is a real shame still, as there are some very experienced devs in that team that have lived and breathed the products for years. Hard to replace that with overseas resources.
Sad to hear, been working with vSphere for years and of all the backend software I’ve ever used, VMware always came out on top on my “most likely to have actual wizards working for them” -shortlist of businesses.
As a vSphere admin for over a decade, I’ve long held the elitist outlook that Workstation / Fusion was for kids. If I need a VM I know where I can spin one (or a hundred) up in seconds, kthx~.
It’s an end-user tool though and not meant for centralized IT management.
Don’t get me wrong, I love VSPhere, but Workstation is a great tool too and I’d be very sad to see it go.
I use Workstation daily to free myself from dependency on specific hardware locally, in the same manner that it works in datacenters with VSphere. My laptop base O/S has Workstation and a few apps mandated by IT and that’s it. I have a VM I keep running all the time with Win7 for email/document stuff, another with Ubuntu for actual technical work, and some special purpose ones I can fire up to play around with different linux flavors. If my laptop craps out (and I’m hard on laptops) I just move a few vmx files and virtual disks and carry on right where I left off on a new laptop.
Yeah, I use Workstation on my work desktop a lot for running code in test environments. We have a couple of ESXi servers with test environments too, but those tend to wind up becoming ‘public property’ and I like to have some private ones that I can mess around with and rollback however I like.
I’m sure it’ll continue to be maintained, but hopefully there’s not a big quality drop from handing it over to an outsourced, inexperienced team.
I also have Fusion on my MBP, but I only ever use it for connecting to the work VPN nowadays, so I’ve been meaning to see if some of the alternatives will work for that instead. Fusion has an unfortunate tendency to break on OS upgrades and require upgrading to a new version.
I like Worstation because it allows me to 1) run WinXP for a few old programs that don’t run at all under anything modern and 2) for sandboxing software downloaded that might bork up my main system.
That said, I suppose there are alternatives, but when I tried them in the past - I was not impressed.
Broadcam looking to buy VMWare for a cool $40 billion
I can’t think of a lot of HW vendors buying SW vendors that has worked out well for the SW vendor (Dell’s EMC/Aquisition aside). Their acquisition of Symantec has been a disaster, at least is seems locally - resource reduction, field sales reduction, shitty releases.
There is some alignment in the edge compute space with the rise of smartnics, but ESX for ARM is still in Fling (evaluation/beta), but I don’t personally think that’s going to change the world or be a significant revenue contributor. I have my doubts there is a real use case for ESX on ARM at the edge anyway. Possibly in the datacenter, but is Broadcom going to try to leverage vSphere to push ARM into DC’s? Seems ambitious.
There is also alignment with CA technologies in the DevOps space with the VMware Tanzu App suite (formerly Pivotal Labs), but I never see CA around anymore either!
Seems more a case, of ‘got money, gotta buy something so we look strategic’.
It’s more or less official. Terms will have a go-shop provision though and word on the the street is Cisco has been sniffing around as well, though by the reading of it, this is a done deal with Broadcom.
If this goes through it’ll accelerate our cloud efforts, no more on-prem hypervisor infrastructure. I’ve never had a positive interaction with Broadcom. This was an interesting read.
Tell me about it, this has shaken up a lot. To compound the weirdness, I’ve been invited to a be the guest on the VMware Virtually Speaking podcast and the recording is tomorrow morning. I figure either this topic will become the whole discussion, or they’ll give me a heads-up first that it’s a verboten topic.
I’m suspecting it’s some kind of issue with the boot manager and secure boot. I did swap out GPUs a couple weeks ago, but the system was working fine for the first week.
I see that Windows 11 22H2 went RTM yesterday, and there’s an ISO available for clean installs. I’m a Windows Insider, so I may try that route. I was planning on doing a clean install when 22H2 releases, anyway, because there’s some added security functionality that only comes on clean install.
Other shoe drops
Haha, that does not even come close to the reality. I think BC are going to do a remarkable job of obfuscating the scale from the media.
Blurred and spoilered so it does not get picked up by seo.
Summary
New org chart under BC has ~14k employees under the four focus go-to-markets. VMW had 30-35k employees at time of acquistion close.
Summary
I can say more, but shit is pretty fluid at the moment and I’d prefer to wait another few days until I know my fate. I have never actually disclosed on QT3, but I am a 12 year tenured VMware employee.
I know many of my ex colleagues who are now in VMWare (in Malaysia) and many of them are let go. Today’s their last day. What an ugly fate. Who’s going to sell VMWare?