Broadcom Announces Plan To Acquire VMware For $61 Billion USD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Broadcom Announces Plan To Acquire VMware For $61 Billion USD

Following recent rumors of Broadcom pursuing a VMware acquisition, Broadcom announced today their intent to acquire the virtualization company for $61 billion (USD)...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom-VMware-Acquisition

[rmnscnce]

So, will the acquisition make VMware mainline an open-source driver that mostly doesn't work so that people would resort to the proprietary drivers anyway?

Just kidding, but from a layman's perspective this seems like a weird move that can only be explained as a move by Broadcom to get that slice of commercial virtualization market.

[dekernel]

As a LONG TIME user of Workstation, I really hope they don't jack the price of the product up to the standard insane Broadcom IP point. The product has not let me down once through all the upgrades so the product is solid from my usage point.

[stormcrow]

At first glance this comes across as a Scooby-like noise of confusion. But digging a bit deeper than the obvious surface: Broadcom makes certain processors called "Data Processing Units" similar to the recent news about AMD wanting to buy Pensando. VMWare apparently writes software that runs on top of DPUs so there's likely some IP floating around belonging to VMWare that makes sense for Broadcom to want to integrate beyond the obvious virtualization extensions. It's a vertical integration buyout move.

If you want to know what a DPU is you may need to dig some. But the TL;DR version is they're specialized integrated modules that include a more GP CPU, NIC processor, and a more specialized ASIC to accelerate specific tasks depending on the context such as specialized real time analytics. They're a data center part meant to be sort of the glue on very high bandwidth networks and the like.

[mlau]

Haha Broadcom.. where companies go to die...

[bofkentucky]

Haha Broadcom.. where companies go to die...

Don't forget about CA and IBM

[luno]

hope they don't stop working on 3d acceleration and vulkan in Mesa due to this, 256 MB limit of VirtualBox for graphics sucks. Linux and MacOS has good qemu support (GUI frontends) but Windows doesn't even have any accelerated graphics VM support except for Vmware (Hyper-V is joke if you want to any graphics development in Linux VM)

[ruthan]

There is wild thing called Qemu-3dfx for Windows.. Absolutly user unfiendly hell.. compiled version is behind paywall. But 2d is problem because of use uncomplete VBE drivers .

[stormcrow]

hope they don't stop working on 3d acceleration and vulkan in Mesa due to this, 256 MB limit of VirtualBox for graphics sucks. Linux and MacOS has good qemu support (GUI frontends) but Windows doesn't even have any accelerated graphics VM support except for Vmware (Hyper-V is joke if you want to any graphics development in Linux VM)

That's because Hyper-V's market is server consolidation and deployment rather than workstation use despite the hype machine with WSL2. The vast majority of people writing Linux desktop programs are using bare metal Linux or Linux hosting Linux guest VMs. It's pretty silly to do otherwise.

[Mahboi]

At first glance this comes across as a Scooby-like noise of confusion. But digging a bit deeper than the obvious surface: Broadcom makes certain processors called "Data Processing Units" similar to the recent news about AMD wanting to buy Pensando. VMWare apparently writes software that runs on top of DPUs so there's likely some IP floating around belonging to VMWare that makes sense for Broadcom to want to integrate beyond the obvious virtualization extensions. It's a vertical integration buyout move.

If you want to know what a DPU is you may need to dig some. But the TL;DR version is they're specialized integrated modules that include a more GP CPU, NIC processor, and a more specialized ASIC to accelerate specific tasks depending on the context such as specialized real time analytics. They're a data center part meant to be sort of the glue on very high bandwidth networks and the like.

Talk about being right on schedule!

And I was looking up details on DPUs, thanks for the quick rundown.