Comment on the VMware debacle: Finally trust open standards!

The Champagne corks may have recently popped out in the Brauhausgasse in Vienna’s 5th district. VMware just announced that various previously free components of vSphere and vCenter, including VMware ESXi, will require customers to pay separately in the future. As a result, VMware bills are bursting at the seams in many places, with no significant technical added value in return. Accordingly, the relevant online forums are full of horror stories of companies that suddenly have to pay 500 percent or even more of the previous amount for their virtualization.

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There’s not just one reason to be happy for Proxmox, headquartered in Vienna: Proxmox seems like the logical choice for companies that need virtualization but don’t have enough workloads to build their own IaaS platform. Is. The people in Vienna probably suspected that Broadcom’s decision would have significantly improved their own business prospects – and since then they have been busy expanding their own partner network as well as the actual virtualization product Proxmox VE.

Martin Gerhard Loschwitz is a freelance journalist and regularly covers topics such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph.

Don’t Conference: A Better Web

What is often lost in the anger at VMware and Broadcom is the fact that the migration from VMware to Proxmox is a genuine upgrade in other respects as well: whereas VMware is a completely proprietary product, Proxmox is based on open source components like KVM, Qemu, and others. And safe. This also means that if Proxmox ever tries to repeat VMware’s stunt, it will be easier for affected administrators to replace the product with alternatives. If push comes to shove, basically any Linux distribution that has Qemu, KVM and Libvirt available will work. This applies to almost all installed Linux distributions. Operation and administration will usually be less convenient than Proxmox VE – but if the continued existence of their own company is at stake, administrators will be happy to put up with it.

told you so

My first professional position in IT was in 2006 at the Vienna company Linbit. It is behind DRBD, which is a type of RAID 1 on a local network. DRBD has been a part of the Linux kernel for a long time. This enables the creation of highly available storage systems. Combined with other open source components like Samba or one of the various iSCSI targets, DRBD jumps onto standard off-the-shelf hardware with hard drives that don’t have to be paid for with unicorn powder as a cheap replacement for SAN. or NAS device.

This was exactly the core of Linbit’s sales strategy at the time: when customers created their own central storage based on DRDB they were no longer dependent on a single provider in terms of hardware or software. Open standards and open source were and are the guarantee that manufacturers don’t drag their customers into the abyss as they gleefully celebrate their demise. One would be inclined to believe that this circumstance would be obvious to a person who has emerged from self-inflicted immaturity, even without any additional explanation, after all, it is self-evident;

Fast forward to 2024: NetApp is as popular as ever, with companies facing bankruptcy as VMware is rendering a central component of their IT infrastructure inaccessible. And like lemmings, companies and even government institutions are making the pilgrimage to hyperscalers, who have taken the lock-in principle to a whole new level. Because once you migrate your own infrastructure to AWS, Azure or GCP, you don’t even migrate it back to your own hardware from the cloud or to the hyperscaler competition. Such projects require huge amounts of effort and money that many people are unwilling – or unable – to afford. It is clear what the outcome will be: hyperscalers will continue to slowly raise prices and their customers will have to pay for the lack of alternatives.

You want to scream with anger when organizations like the Federal Employment Agency proudly announce that they have successfully switched to Microsoft Teams. Or when Chancellor Olaf Scholz personally intervenes in favor of Delos Cloud, whose backend is Microsoft’s Azure. The fact that the head of government of the world’s third-largest economy is begging for permission to transfer even more money to Redmond in a roundabout way is a terrible farce. Especially for those who ultimately have to pay for the fun, namely the German taxpayers.

This needs to be reconsidered

In fact, it is not that no one has warned people associated with politics and business. For decades, representatives of the open source community have consistently pointed out that only free software and open standards can provide a stable foundation for infrastructure, especially critical infrastructure. Kurt Garloff has been promoting the Sovereign Cloud Stack for some time, which allows customers to freely choose between platforms from different providers and, if desired, to migrate to – or operate the respective platform on their own. Allows to do.

For almost every basic component in today’s data center, there are proprietary products and various free alternatives that are often better and provide more functions. Of course: From an IT operations perspective, it takes more effort to find and implement the right option among many free options through testing. In any case, it will take more effort than letting a sales drone gently shower you with PowerPoint slides for hours until you finally convince him that you had the idea to purchase the proprietary solution yourself. However, in 2024, the convenience of those responsible may no longer be a valid argument for technological nonsense. Whoever handles their IT work in this manner will have to vacate their space. “No one was fired for buying VMware” is true, but – once again – that’s part of the problem.

Instead, the realization should eventually become widespread across the board that open standards and free software are not an option, but the only way to remain viable in the long term when it comes to IT infrastructure. Especially when it comes to public infrastructure that serves the general public. Companies and institutions should be willing to get their hands dirty at the beginning in the interest of digital sustainability, rather than relying solely on providers’ colorful brochures. The fact that in many places their sales people are practically friends with the IT managers can no longer hide the fact that when concluding contracts they primarily have their own bonus in mind – not that of a company. Long term success. And anyone who is still digesting the VMware disaster as they are affected by it should urgently look for other swords of Damocles hanging over their own setup and deal with them as quickly as possible.

VMware customers are in luck: providers like Proxmox are taking the coal out of the fire for them this time, but not without publishing the resulting tools under a free license. It is not at all certain that it will be comparatively easier next time. Especially since the next disaster is already looming on the horizon for many VMware customers: it is not uncommon for iSCSI to be used in a VMware set-up in conjunction with NAS devices. NetApp, Dell-EMC and various other providers have also steadily increased prices in recent years. Anyone who bought the last turnkey NAS five years ago will probably soon experience the next unpleasant surprise. This could have been predicted and even avoided if open standards had been followed.

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