I am updating this in 2025, but the sentiment is the same: the VMware that once was is gone.

This is not something that is terribly surprising .. after all, I've already been through a tectonic IT shift in my IT career, which started with 15 years of Unix Systems Administration. I never expected Solaris to die off as suddenly as it did following the Oracle acquisition, and likewise the speed at which people are moving off of VMware technology is astounding. As Hock Tan said to kick things off: "You'll see some changes here, Broadcom is a serious company, about business". Broadcom has made a targeted effort to maximize profits and minimize overhead: significant staff cuts and raising their bundled VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) prices have led to impressive stock gains, and the core 20% of large customers they consider locked in are paying the way. Gone are the small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford the core virtualization products when they now include the overhead cost of the rest of the suite of software solutions. Even large customers that were using most of the VCF suite of tools are still seeing huge increases (3x) for on-prem compute capacity. Speaking of products, Hock claimed that they had moved from 8000 SKUs to 4 core products. Another VMware source placed it at 40,000 SKUs company-wide down to 100.

On a personal level, I have moved on to the cloud native providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle), while Hock Tan made it clear at VMware Explore 2024 that the way forward for VMware was … back to on-prem. The hybrid VMware-everwhere approach is gone in their marketing, even with the Cloud-native solutions still available (AVS, GCVE).

2025: As anticipated, AWS (not Broadcom) has come out with their own EVS (Elastic VMware Service). We observed open hiring on LinkedIn for VMConAWS people to move over to AWS.

While I may lament the change from VMware to VMware by Broadcom, I will applaud the clear vision and focus on product to a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) product line that includes (and automates) everthing about delivering a virtualization platform. I had previously used LifeCycle Manager with vRA / vIDM, the VCF platform brings along a cloud builder to deploy an SDDC Manager and coordinate lifecycle for the vSphere / vSAN/ NSX trifecta. An additional tool I learned about at Explore 2024 was the Holodeck Toolkit: extremely handy for building that nested lab for testing solution deployments. And of course there is a PowerVCF Module that will interact with the SDDC Manager.

A couple other Notes from Explore:
Skyline (for monitoring) will be integrated into vROps
TMCsm will NOT support EKS / AKS.
Tanzu Platform: Policy-as-Code allows for custom policy templates

One of my favorite sessions was Tanzu Platform (TAMB2194LV) on the last day, which covered a lot of specifics for VMware, but also a design approach that can be applied to other Kubernetes platform deployments.

Finally, an additional 2025 update:
I was part of the GovCloud customer base impacted by Broadcom's decision to shutter the VMConAWS offering in AWS GovCloud. They offered 6 months to migrate everything out, which in typical hybrid environments would be challenging. We were able to complete a 100% Cloud migration out to native AWS, but it was a tight squeeze. Needless to say, this greatly disrupted other activities for 2 quarters, and the customer is no longer interested in Broadcom solutions (we migrated off 2 solutions during the cloud move).

Furthermore, our Tanzu Vanguard advocacy group was disbanded this summer (2025) without much fanfare. The older Pivotal Cloud Foundry members/ customers were the most impacted in the Tanzu business unit, as TKG has primarily moved to the VCF Business unit (except for TKGm that we were using).

RIP VMware of old, long live large environment VCF!

Planning for VMware Explore 2024 later this month in Las Vegas, and there is a great summary of Tanzu sessions on Pawel's blog here: https://virtualvillage.cloud/?p=1390 The panel session in particular should be a good time!

Here's a session list on the Explore site: https://myevents.vmware.com/widget/vmware/explore2024lv/1721319921776001Ib2X

While researching some of the vendor parties, all the previous community list locations were empty. Finally, vmblog posted an entry this week about the meager offerings: https://vmblog.com/archive/2024/07/31/vmware-explore-2024-where-have-all-the-parties-gone.aspx Where have all the parties gone, indeed!?

This is not totally unexpected: VMware was always conscious that while their enterprise footprint was rock-solid, it was the community engagement that helped IT professionals trust the VMware vision. With the Broadcom acquisition and some of their decisions to change licensing options, shake up some of the community platforms, and some tone-deaf responses from Broadcom, there have been loud proclamations (by some noisier elements of the community) that they are moving to other platforms. These have typically been small shops, which say their licensing renewal costs went up 3-10x due to the new bundles.

Other vendors have promptly tuned their marketing: AWS, RedHat and Nutanix all have pages dedicated to 'migrate from VMware', which is a contrast to the messaging during the VMware era. The VMware by Broadcom era has been a tectonic shift, particularly in the smaller business environments. It remains to be seen if this leads to more Cloud native hosting.

I had a great time visiting Chicago and attending KubeCon NA 2023. This was my first in-person KubeCon .. I very nearly attended the 2nd KubeCon NA in Austin back in 2017 (when it snowed in Texas!), but work kept me in San Antonio for the duration of the trip.

With this trip, I also had the chance to participate in the co-located CiliumCon NA, which was a full day of presentations related to Cilium CNI topics, and really kicked things off and got me into a k8s state of mind for the rest of the conference.

There were quite a few interesting presentations, which will take some review to process. In the end, I started jotting keywords to search for review later :lol: I enjoyed Tim Hockins keynote on how far Kubernetes has come.

A fun event during the week was getting to watch the premier of the eBPF Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA with several of the key players in attendance! Immediately after, I attended the Cilium Hive Mind Mingle, which was a celebration of all things Cilium, eBPF and Isovalent.

I think this conference may replace my VMworld / Explore yearly attendance of the past decade, both because of my job focus and the very different vibe of the 2 conferences: Explore has refocused on client stories (rather than technical deep dives), but is still a commercial focus; KubeCon has that OSS energy, with constant inovation and an impossible number of things to investigate.

It's been a few weeks since I returned from VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas, which has given me some time to review the information I gathered from sessions and hallway track discusions with Product team members. A few of the items and features of interest:

• NSX 4.1.1 feature - VPC for tenancy, essentially allows for users to provision their topology. In addition to the Projects feature, the new VPC feature allows for granular RBAC access to create objects without being able to see all objects of that type. This should be great for integrations with mult-tenant CI/ CD flows in Tanzu
• Tanzu - Good tips on resource management for TKG: each vSphere cluster should have independent storage. Use tags on datastore for use by storage polices. Don't allow user self-service of the vSphere namespaces.
• NSX Monitoring - NSX Ops Playbook - contains recommended API endpoints for Operational checks and training. Tips on how to check resources, for example: using load_average instead of running top on the appliance; checking garbage collection frequency instead of monitoring memory; RSS only works on same NUMA node, and check drivers.
• vRNI (ArON) - new application topology in 6.11. They've also upgraded the UI, with better drill-down.

I will be testing some of these in the Lab when I get time, particularly the NSX VPC feature. Interested in checking if quotas on VPC work!

I can't express how much I love some of the new features in Network Insight (Operations for Networks .. bleh). The new heatmap feature in ArON (vRNI) 6.8 is the simplest way to get a quick status on your vCenter and NSX solution health. It is much faster than looking at the list of Issues and filtering by solution.
I recommend reviewing the Product Tour (under Help in top-right) for additional features: the Troubleshooting feature that was demonstrated at VMware Explore looks extremely promising.

With the rebranding from vRealize to Aria, vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) has become Aria Operations for Networks. I met some of the Product Team at VMware Explore 2022, and they are trying out the ArON acronym; I always preferred “Network Insight” as the most descriptive.

There is also a new release (though all the docs still use the old naming): https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vRealize-Network-Insight/6.8/rn/vmware-vrealize-network-insight-68-release-notes/index.html
The most obvious change is the new Home page you start on upon login. One neat feature is the heat map view of issues, you can click on the tiles to jump to the objects.

It will take a bit to get used to the navigation changes, but overall I expect Network Insight to remain an important tool in our troubleshooting and microsegmentation toolkit.

Without much fanfare NSX 4.0.0.1 released earlier this month. Among other features, there is IPv6 support. However, a big requirement is you must complete your N-VDS to VDS 7.x migration before upgrading to NSX 4.0 Oh yes, the NSX-T name is now retired (along with NSX-v), so NSX-T is now .. plain NSX.

Here's the release notes: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/4.0/rn/vmware-nsx-4001-release-notes/index.html

The release notes include a link to this extremely detailed doc on N-VDS migration: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/79872

There was a quick 3.2.0.1 patch in January for critical bugs (related to log4shell still I believe), but almost 6 months after 3.2, we finally have 3.2.1. With 4.x already being discussed for “Cloud First” environments (such as VMC on AWS), and pushes towards managing your NSX-T via vRealize LifeCycleManager, better get those 3.1 versions upgraded now before automation takes it out of your hands! :lol:

Here's the latest on 3.2.1: https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2022/05/nsx-t-3-2-1-rolling-upgrade-for-nsx-management-plane.html/

Don't forget to follow the Upgrade Checklist: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T-Data-Center/3.2/upgrade/GUID-E35506A7-8050-482A-BABA-F356D2AC3B65.html

It's been a while, but NSX-T 3.2 finally released, just in time for the Log4Shell vulnerability last month. While I wouldn't go installing the first (or 2nd) version, it includes a whole lot of fixes and some new features.

Here's the announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/networkvirtualization/2021/12/nsx-t-3-2-innovations.html/

On top of all the other announcements the last month (vSphere 7, NSX-T 3), a new version of vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) has been announced (available later this month most likely).

Here's the announcement: https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2020/04/announcing-vmware-vrealize-network-insight-5-2.html