I received the below email recently which continues to kill off VMware products.
Skyline was a telemetry product which would analyze your environment for security and configuration concerns, and allow you to easily pull logs from multiple resources and upload them to a support case in a simple 3-click wizard. They announced recently that they were stopping new customers from enrolling in Skyline, and now they are stating that the log collection function is going away, in addition to features that help manage license status. They have not yet announced that Skyline is getting cancelled, but it’s seems pretty obvious.
The blatant money grab is appalling. I actually had some stock in broadcom and sold it shortly after they started announcing these slash and burn tactics for short-term gains. VMware was an amazing product for well over a decade and I look forward to whichever solution manages to fill the gap Broadcom will create over the next 5 years.
We are announcing that on April 30, 2024, VMware will be making several changes to Skyline’s functionality and features.
These changes are necessary as part of our vision for the future of self-help issue avoidance and diagnostics for VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation as part of VMware by Broadcom.
Feature Changes Assigned Entitlements No Longer Expire Skyline will no longer check for expiration of Entitlement Accounts or Subscriptions. Any active Skyline customer will remain active until further notice. Previously, all active accounts were upgraded to the Select Support feature set in Skyline.
This means that customers will no longer see linking of EAs to Organization, Deactivation or Renewal screens in Skyline Advisor Pro.
End of Technical Guidance (EOTG) / End of General Support (EOGS) Information In Skyline’s Inventory detailed view, information is provided about the product’s Lifecycle status (e.g. days remaining before reaching EOGS). Skyline will now only display this information for any product released prior to April 30, 2024. Any products released after this date will display “-” only. Log Assist We are enhancing Log assist to integrate with Broadcom Support systems. However, dependent on the migration scheduling, the feature may temporarily be unavailable beginning May 6, 2024. Log Assist functionality will return upon completion.
After the migration, users must log in using the same username as their Broadcom account id to ensure open support cases can be seen when using Log Assist. Users will only be able to see support cases that they opened. There will also be a new field presented called “Party Name”, which is another term for Company Name.
Thank you for your patience during this transition period.
Best Regards, VMware Skyline Team
If anything, Broadcom has been hugely successful at eroding any iota of trust that anyone involved in the tech space may have had for them. It’s obvious that the corporate types at HQ think that “a large amount of virtualization runs off of our newly purchased platform” means that they can behave like Adobe. They are failing to realize that - unlike Adobe - they haven’t monopolized the market that they are trying to suck dry. Hopefully VMware dies quickly, it doesn’t deserve to suffer.
They are failing to realize that - unlike Adobe - they haven’t monopolized the market
“Never interrupt your enemy while he’s making a mistake; it’s bad manners”
Fucking Broadcom, I’ve elevated them to the same level as HP, total purchasing ban written in policy at work lol
re: Adobe, they have eroded the trust of many industries. The legal industry for instance has largely moved away from Adobe specifically due to licensing costs.
What’s the replacement?
PowerPDF, owned by whoever owns it now. Used to be nuance and kofax.
foxit also gets mentioned in poll results.
Gimp, Okular
Nitro Pro is pretty solid
I think this is the best situation Proxmox could have ever hoped for. Their Virtual Environment product would probably work for most of VMWare’s customers, and migrating VMs is fairly straightforward. I use Proxmox for my production servers, and it’s awesome.
Since this whole VMware debacle we’ve been playing with xcp-ng but I’ve been meaning to look at proxmox. Is proxmox really worth taking a look at?
Proxmox is extremely straightforward. The updates are timely, maybe a little too timely. We’ve had zero issues out of it. I left VMware for proxmox about a year ago.
Proxmox with zfs works so well in my homelab that I forget I’m using proxmox
I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s easy to set up and it’s been working really well.
Yeah, VMWare has too much competition in all spaces to pull moves like this and get away with it. In the Enterprise space, depending on environment, Proxmox, RHV, Hyper-V (though that’s apparently losing support in 2031), Citrix and I think a couple of others (haven’t been heavily involved in that area in a while so don’t know what else is big now). And in the consumer/power user space, most of the above still work fine, for free, along with things like Virtualbox and ESXI just for starters.
That company is generating a huge amount of hate in the industry. It’ll be way too late by the time the captains of that ship realize the size of the iceberg they have intentionally hit.
QEMU
I use skyline in our environment and man, that log collection is crutch for getting tickets updated. Oh, you need the logs? Request what you need and I’ll approve it - or I can just click a few buttons and upload the logs when I create the ticket.
What’s the best free alternative to VMWare Fusion?
I don’t need Windows a huge amount, but it’s useful to have it in a VM on my Macs for those odd occasions when I need the Windows version of Excel for work stuff.
Parallels has been in the OSX type2 hypervisor space for a very long time. It’s not free, but if it’s for “work stuff” i’d feel ok with paying for it.
My impression is that on M(n) silicon Parallels is the most polished virtualization experience on Mac you can get now. Virtualbox lives under the shadow of Oracle which is not a place you want to be.
Oh god, virtual box looks (and behaves) like it was developed as a high school exercise.
QEMU is so much better.
I just don’t know if it runs on OSX.
I think the company the bought VMware Fusion and workstation also owns Parallels
Virtualbox
Apple has their own hypervisor solution built into the OS, so there are apps that use that on the App Store, like UTM. It’s not free, but it seems pretty good and works on Apple Silicon, unlike VirtualBox.
UTM is really good as a free solution, otherwise Parallels is the go-to.
I’ve given UTM a go, and it looks really promising for the kind of things I need it to do. Thanks!
Does QEMU run on OSX? It’s what Proxmox uses for virtualization - it’s great.
Proxmox
Proxmox isn’t an option for vmware fusion replacement. Fusion is a type 2 hypervisor running on Mac. The options are paid parallels desktop and free virtualbox.
Proxmox is a type 1 hypervisor. It’s amazing but not applicable here.
