ESXi free 8.0 seems to be the last one (now free again)!

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zachj

Active Member
Apr 17, 2019
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Thanks, but from your answer and it sounds like you're closer to product or sales teams, rather than an engineering one, since your reply doesn't answer my question, just dances around it.
To address what was NOT said, but was implied in the VMware port you linked to is: Native Driver Model (for short NDM later) is better (shocking), NDM was around 5.5. Again, VMWare, not OEMs decided for business reasons to drop vmkLinux shim, with piss-poor excuse that OEMs couldn't be bothered to re-write drivers for older hardware. Bear in mind - perfect Linux drivers already existed, just native linux drivers ain't good enought for vmware.

To me, this move is 100% counterintuitive since the WHOLE point of virtualization is to obscure the hardware from virtual hardware. Yes, newer hardware => Faster/Better, but dropping support for older (in some cases, only 2-3 years old) hardware goes 100% directly against that idea.

Dropping support for this Linux shim and going only with native NDM drivers likely allowed a much simpler codebase, but at a cost of alienating a significant chunk of customers, forcing more e-waste and unnecessary spending. Again, I restate my point - this was a business and not a technical call. Was it a wrong call for business or not - it's not for me to decide.

Sorry, but both examples aren't that relevant.
A) You could run Windows Server 2022 on Sandy Bridge Xeons, and it's still getting updates
B) SD cards and USB drivers removal - these are purely technical reasons since SD/USB drivers aren't meant to do lots of writes, and pre-v7 ESXI loaded 100% into memory and worked from memory. Sometime around v7, that behavior changed, and ESXi started to do lots of writes onto boot media. This is what caused to drop of that particular design.
One specific thing vmklinux couldn’t support was PCIe hotplug.

It seems you aren’t going to be disabused of your opinion that this was a money grab by VMware or that it was done with total disregard to customer satisfaction. You’re wrong but if you’re happy being mad then that’s ok with me :)

Companies have obligations to shareholders. Part of that obligation is not carrying forward technical debt in perpetuity when it impacts product stability/performance and new feature velocity. As just one example vmware had to revise the vmklinux shim for every new Linux kernel version. It wasn’t free to simply leave it in the product for the folks who felt like using it. Maintaining it meant fewer developers to work on new features. It slowed down QA because the entire vmklinux regression suite had to be run on every build. Those are technical problems that—yes—have a financial component but are primarily viewed through the lens of “VMware wants to release more new features faster and keeping vmklinux prevented the company from doing that.” You’re right VMware could have hired additional engineers to mitigate those problems. But if every time a company is forced to perpetuate technical debt they had to hire more people then your products would cost more. I’m sure you’re going to argue that the company doesn’t have to pass those costs on to the customer, but at some point they make a company not profitable.

business is hard. Sometimes you can’t please everyone.
 
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Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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Finally. A valid point, on piles and piles of rubbish.
While I am a fan of softer language (we are all friends here), I really can't remember when I had the urge to hotplug a CX3 or SAS2008 card. So is that really an argument to kill off vmklinux. Chances are if you use PCIe hotplug for NVMe your server is probably new enough to be alright with 7.x.
 

Greg_E

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Oct 10, 2024
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Hmmm, I'll have to look at why vxrail is not wonderful. Is it valued because of laziness or lack of knowledge? It seems you can do everything with the "raw" tools that vxrail manages if you know what to do.
 

zachj

Active Member
Apr 17, 2019
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vxrail is better than it used to be but for years the biggest problem with it was that VMware would release a new version of vsphere or nsx and dell would take months to validate it, or they’d release a security patch and dell would take weeks to validate it.

Dell professional services was so backed up that you’d be in the queue to have them deploy a software upgrade and by the time they got around to you’d there would already have been another VMware product release.

you could technically upgrade yourself and you could technically upgrade without dell validation but you’d put yourself in an unsupported state.

And the whole reason that happened is that dell were building he airplane while flying it; they released it a year before they should have.

the second thing that made it suck ass was the support situation; when you buy vxrail you’re roped into OEM support, meaning all your VMware software trouble gets routed through dell. Only if dell can’t fix it are they supposed to escalate to VMware support, but in practice the dell folks were often totally incompetent and they’d just swivel in their chairs and open a VMware support case the moment the case landed in dell. It made support take a lot longer than it would if a customer could have gone direct.

the third thing that made vxrail suck is the totally duplicative vxrail manager software. In the context of VMware cloud foundation (vcf manager and lifecycle manager) the value proposition of also paying for vxrail manager was really dubious. And vxrail without vxrail manager was nothing more than a collection of vanilla R740s…so what are you really paying for?
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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So is that really an argument to kill off vmklinux.
Linux stuff Always bears the risk that the stuff ist licensed under gnu gpl.
A Ton of conpanies stay away from anything with extreme Copylefts in their license.
 

Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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Linux stuff Always bears the risk that the stuff ist licensed under gnu gpl.
A Ton of conpanies stay away from anything with extreme Copylefts in their license.
The workaround for a decade has been to blow money up the ass of the Linux Foundation as a member. Then you can do whatever you want.
 
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