Is VMware Making A Huge Mistake With vSphere 7?

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[JeffGeerling]

01:08 thanks for the Dramble shout-out! Ha! And 08:15 :)

[lvxmagick]

Wow that was the most sophisticated complaint I have ever heard in my life.

[pkt]

I love your sweatshirt. Can I get it with an asterisk that says, "Unless you're my grandparents."

[cpukid]

This right here is why I made the move to Proxmox. For my at-home "production" VM's, I lost too much compatibility with VMware. Proxmox fits the bill very nicely. What's nice is that I can still virtualize a little ESXi cluster within Proxmox and maintain at least some level of experience that way. Sure, I would prefer to just pay $200/year for VMUG and have a ton of bells/whistles and just run ESXi, but I don't love the idea of needing all/mostly new host hardware to do that. Proxmox certainly has different terminology for things, but many of the fundamental concepts are the same, so I still feel like I gain experience using a non-VMware product as the host OS. Very well put-together video, as always! I hope VMware makes a return to the home lab!

[robertcoffey]

something I noticed, you misspoke at the beginning, every ESXi install has vSphere, you need vCenter to control multiple hosts

[Alphahydro]

ProxMox is very capable and just became more attractive to home lab admins with this move.

[clintbishop]

Wendell you really hit the nail on the head with this video and I hope the heads at vmware see this. Homelabs are having to be thrown out cause storage controllers, cpus and nics are not supported in 7.0. Frustrated!

[rush]

1:42 "a program called vSphere" - should say 'vCenter'. vSphere is the top-level product name. ESXi and vCenter are sub - components of vSphere

[TJWood]

You are spot on. A decade+ of homelab with ESX and ESX at work and here I am in 2021 shutting down my ESX home setup and migrating to appliances amd NUCs running HyperV. Its unfortunate but its becoming too painful and I can see us moving to HyperV at work (we've kept the bean counters at bay so far) for similar reasons. I think vmware will be the company that kills vmware tbh.

[johnh]

I won't even flinch when I see a VMWare press release titled - "VMWare releases Per Byte Storage Licensing for vSAN!" 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 it's coming

[PoeLemic]

Yes, I agree with you 100%. So many companies chase the dollars and leave the lesser-funded home-market and academic-market behind. Like for me, I teach, and it is often very difficult to continually afford the hardware that is necessary to keep my skills up. So, companies (e.g., VMWare) should keep allowing the installation or creation of drivers for older hardware. Because many of my students can't hardly afford tuition, books, and time away from work to learn. Let alone -- all of the expensive hardware to do a home lab. So, they should always remember that, as they develop new products.

[honaker]

I've somehow missed your channel. I'm subscribed now. And I've been screaming at the top of my lungs over this. How is our youth supposed to learn if they hide the product behind a pay wall and make support for older hardware non existent? How can we expect new people to learn VMware products from a 60 day eval license? VMUG is $200 dollars per year. The free versions of esxi are too locked down to learn anything advanced. It's the worst business model for upcoming IT professionals. I know more guys with Hyper V training than VMware because Microsoft is an easier home lab experience with both hardware and evaluation licensing. If you are in college then most of the Microsoft products are free of cost for home use and learning with an edu account. All kinds of devices were lost in vSphere 7: nics, raid controllers, hba's, chipsets, cpu's, etc. At this point, I wish they would pick some specific manufacturer and vendors for consumer grade hardware that would be supported for all Vsphere products. Give me an i5, i7, ryzen, and a few consumer grade motherboards in the VMware compatibility list. It would be for personal use only. Get rid of VMUG price tag and make it free for home users. The young will never learn VMware products if we keep locking down the platform.

Edit: Don't even get me started on VMware certifications or taking a $4000 dollar 1 week class that is required before you can take the $125 dollar foundation exam and the additional $250 dollar for the VCP Professional exam. And for the record, a one week class on anything will never prep you to take a final exam or be able to retain it in long term memory. All I can say is thank god my employer paid for it because I never would have. I could take an entire semester of college classes for $4, 000 dollars... I'm a little heated. Time to make some tea, watch some anime, and chill to edm music in the background.

[GrishTech]

Virtualization: One of my favorite topics

[ehh]

Your hundred present right Wendell its a shame that vmware dont think about the homelab people. I am now a vmware system consultant and i learned all my knowledge on old hardware and i am having a vsphere 7 course right know and even the trainers dont like when i mention linux there is bad culture going on in related to vmware right know i suspect. But the guys in my team hired me because of my linux knowledge so thats is nice. And i want to so say that i am grateful you inspired me to work in IT and since tek syndicate days and now i have a it job :)

[TheToasterPilot]

Great video! As a homelab enthusiast and an VMware admin, its good to see some some of these complaints made more public. CPU support hit home here...

[LaserFur]

I still use Workstation pro. We do "air gap" security and have to support products for over 10 years. so we want to archive the tools in a VM so we can keep supporting products even after the manufactures installer no longer works. For example Visual studio 2019 has to download the debug symbols and the help files from the internet. Then once that is all done the VM can be moved to a computer in the secure area.

[EdwardNewman]

You could join a VMUG and get licenses for all of their software for $200/year to support your home lab. Could be a way to get the learning and training you're referring to Wendell :)

[varmintdavev]

This video spot on, companies aren't going to pay big money for great features they won't use. To a reasonable extent I can do everything you described in the video with Winders Server Clustering, Hyper-V, and Storage Spaces Direct, with the cost included in the OS licensing. Other OS's have their own virtualization components as well. Companies are also using Azure and AWS so all of this backend is someone else's problem. VMware is going to end up an extreme niche like Oracle/Sun.

[tubes]

You should engage william lam (virtuallyghetto). he's a solid voice inside VMware (notice the w) and has pushed for lots of homelab unofficial support over the years.

[NiklasRooms]

I totally do agree on your opinions!
I do run a NUC vSphere cluster at home. It contains 5 Intel NUC's with 32GB RAM each and I love it!
Through my University, I was able to get licenses for everything!

What I personally noticed for my homelab usage:

- The newer updates of version 7 don't natively support the NUC 8i5BEH anymore: They replaced the intel NIC driver through a version this model doesn't work with. It's really annoying having to patch the NUC's manually with each update! It broke around August 2020.

- I really hope there will be a way to add support for REALTEK NIC's again. Many people running a homelab are using a system they already had: and many of those have Realtek NIC's. Especially with SFF PC's, you can't just add a PCI E network card! Using USB NIC's is possible, but they don't support NFS storage. I had to add a Thunderbolt enclosure & Intel NIC to one of my nodes for being able to upgrade it to 7.0. Better driver support would make VMWare way more accessible! Especially with SFF computers.

- The fact I have to run vCenter isn't a problem to me. What is a problem to me: it isn't really stable on slower hardware (especially storage). It often fails during updates which creates a lot of problems. I know it isn't build for by usage so I can't really complain! I don't even complain about the RAM usage vSAN creates on my NUC's (16GB/32GB node are used for vSAN). It still annoys me.

All in all, I'm really happy with VMWare! It's a great product and I've learned a lot working with it in my homelab.
It's amazing having my "own cloud" at home!