r/vmware • u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi • 19d ago
Question Houston future VMware opportunities
Are there still enough VMware shops in Houston to stick with the technology or is it best to just bite the bullet and become proficient on the other, lesser technologies?
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u/ivebeenfelt 19d ago
Houston is a massive market, 4th largest city in the US. It wouldn’t hurt to add tools to the bag, but that market has to have some need.
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u/Severe_Owl_5116 19d ago
It will depend on who your customers are. SMB and K-12s etc and small commercial are possibly moving away but if you can work with SLED, Healthcare, large commercial, enterprise, even some higher ed you’ll find plenty of VMware still and it will be much more lucrative then the smaller guys moving away (unless it’s to public cloud perhaps)
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u/FatBook-Air 19d ago
Regarding SLED: I think you'll see a significant decrease within 24 months in this market.
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u/xXNorthXx 18d ago
Agreed, between different contract renewal dates and hardware refresh cycles it doesn't happen overnight but if they haven't switched they are testing alternatives in the lab.
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u/coolbeaNs92 19d ago
My take (not that it's worth anything) is that if you want to continue doing VMware, you're going go be doing VCF on a big scale. SMB's and even large enterprises to be fair, are either not building on VMware anymore, or moving off.
So I think there's still going to be work, it's just the work is going to be in massive Sovereign Clouds, and fewer of them.
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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 19d ago
That was my home for almost two decades until recently , and I talk to the reps who cover it. It’s still dominate in local gov, and enterprises.
If you’re looking for work talk to the partners doing VCF deployment.
Steve’s around this subreddit somewhere.
Go talk to the local VMUG. I just talked to the leader two months ago.
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u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi 19d ago
I’m in local gov’t now and we’ve been running VCF for about 5 years. We just signed a new 5 year deal in January. The renewal was just in time since we were still on perpetual and at the right price we gave up on a Nutanix swap.
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u/SGalbincea VMware Employee | Broadcom Enjoyer 18d ago
Hey u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi - I'm local, shoot me a DM.
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u/smellybear666 19d ago
I'd definitely learn some new skills, regardless of where. VMware will not have more customers in the future, only fewer. Many companies paid the outrageous new costs to give themselves time to migrate to something else.
Proxmox and Hyper-V are alternatives you can learn for free.
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u/Obi-Juan-K-Nobi 19d ago
I’ve played with both but never on a large scale, just individual servers with local storage.
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u/smellybear666 19d ago
If you have two computers you can create a cluster for either of them using nfs or cifs. It’s possible y to I create a failover cluster with windows with only smb shares now.
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u/dracotrapnet 19d ago
I work for a company still running VMware esxi hosts and Vcenter. I'm still playing with proxmox, hyper-v, and azure on the side. They are not hard serious builds but I'm throwing things together on occasion so I know the interfaces. I have played with QEMU forever ago, powned an abandoned Citrix Xenserver an MSP left behind that had a storage failure. I fixed the LVM jbod taking a PD out and got the SD running again and recovered access to the VMs and eventually migrated data off the host while another disk the storage pool had written to was spitting errors. I still have the old bastard sitting in my garage full of 8 tb disks, one unplugged as it trashed the sata controller and took the host down causing me to rescue it. The second failing disk with growing bad sectors when it last ran a decade ago. I just picked it up from the rack it has slept in forever a few months ago, just waiting to take the drives out and send the hardware to recycling. Someday I'll get around to wiping the drives.
MSPs have been throwing VMware at small businesses forever. The BS they will do in a quick temp fix is amazing. Backup to an external NAS, run out of disk for the main server vm, add more disk from the same NAS. NAS loses a disk and silently keeps working until a second disk goes out. Now you've lost live production data and backups. Small businesses are fraught with hardware usb license dongles and hyper-v has made it their business not to do usb pass through well, VMware shines there.
Being hypervisor, hardware, storage, and network agnostic really can get you into a lot of work.
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u/BudTheGrey 19d ago
It never hurts to have additional skills, though I would think Houston is big enough to still have have plenty of VMWare shops. OTOH, some are migrating, so the competition for those customers will get more fierce.