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Broadcom Plans To Move VMWare To KVM.

Posted on 4th November 2024

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There is some very bizarre news from Heise.de.

I posted a few weeks ago (here) about how Broadcom, the owner of VMWare, had priced itself out of the market for virtual machine infrastructure, causing most of its customers to look for alternatives. I explained that one of the best alternatives is KVM, which is Open Source. Now, Broadcom has announced that it is going to change VMWare to use KVM as its hypervisor (the core component in virtualisation software), at least for hosting VMs on Linux hosts.

As yet there has been no announcement of:

  • Timescales for this change;
  • A decision on what will happen with VMWare on other host operating systems, because KVM is not available for Windows and MacOS hosts;
  • What impact there will be on VMWare pricing (price is the thing driving VMWare users to look for alternatives).

The main motive for Broadcom's decision seems to be cost: it has been proving very expensive for the company to maintain and improve its product, and the move to KVM will offload a lot of that cost onto the Open Source community.

The decision is also a major commendation for the Open Source business model. There are very many pieces of Open Source software on the market (the best known examples are the Linux operating system and the MySql database), where software is maintained by a community of largely unpaid volunteers. Since so many businesses operate successfully using Open Source for their business critical functions, one really has to question the sense of paying for proprietary software from the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc.