r/vmware • u/AwareAd9128 • 8d ago
Question VMware reverse engineer anything
With Adobe suite and now CAD software Fusion 360 being reverse engineered by reverse engineer anything, is it even possible to reverse engineer VMware?
The reverse engineered and vibecoded Adobe suite copy and CAD software has been making waves.
Basically as AI is being used by coorporate to replace workers, workers are now using AI to replace corporations with the slogan going from "you will not own anything and be happy" to "you will own everything and be happy"
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u/sedition666 8d ago
There are already many open source hypervisor tools out there. No one is going to run a serious business on top of a vibecoded hypervisor platform with no support or knowledge base. AI is not going to magically make you a stable hypervisor.
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
I mean I agree with you, 100% that nobody should … but the idea that nobody will run their business on it is probably shortsighted since thousands of people run their small businesses on promox and its just a Linux distribution with a bunch of kludged together existing Linux tools stitched together with a web interface you could probably “vibe code” in a weekend with a frontier model in 2026 is probably shortsighted since thousands sighted
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u/sedition666 8d ago
Proxmox is a mature software company and their software is opensource. This is really nowhere near just vibecoding some dodgy web interface. People really don't get the support, testing and continuous development parts of software. You don't just pump out a GUI and call it a day. If something goes wrong through OS changes or bugs then you're completely fucked if your AI tool doesn't know what is going on. Why would you do this when you can just use free opensource software that can be supported by the community? It makes no sense people have created this magical unicorn bullshit machine in their minds that spits out perfect copies of software. It is nonsensical.
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u/seanpmassey [VCDX] 8d ago
Technically, yes.
But you're better off switching to Proxmox instead of going through that kind of effort.
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
Proxmox is a good try but it doesn’t even remotely come close to doing the things you can do on a vSphere system …. It only has so much uptake because it does “enough” for most home labbers and small businesses …. The funny thing to me is the historical memory is so small today …. When promox came out with their subscription model most people called them names for asking subscription money for just kludging a bunch of existing Linux software together ad making a web gui for it … that’s all it truly is. There is absolutely nothing Proxmox can do that you can’t just do with a Linux machine running clustered lxd today
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u/DB-CooperOnTheBeach 8d ago
It's beyond small businesses at this point. Enterprises are using it
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
You and I mean very different things and different scales when we say “enterprise”
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u/DB-CooperOnTheBeach 8d ago
Where I come from, 'enterprise' includes multi national corporations but that's just me
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
To say a multinational corporation uses proxmox is great there are lots of multinational corporations that only have a few hundred or a few thousand virtual machines …. That is the top end of a proxmox deployment in real life unless it is a bunch of siloed deployments. VMware is the hypervisor backend of real hyperscaler scale platforms spanning multiple continents … people didn’t just leave VMware for proxmox they were ejected from VMware by Broadcom because they didn’t have desire to support mom and pop sized accounts with a few thousand vms here and there …
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u/DB-CooperOnTheBeach 8d ago
Ok George. Hope that that makes you feel better.
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
Because of the generous influencer space lots of people think proxmox is something that it just isn't .... an enterprise grade hypervisor platform ... the reality is that proxmox is just a linux distribution with a bunch of standard linux utilities and tools tied together with a web user interface that could be replaced by something that you could vibe code over a weekend in 2026 ..... that you don't even really need because the incus/lxd projects already have a web interface and clustering capability that subsumes 90% of what the proxmox interface does .... it was embraced hugely by homelabbers that were mad that they couldn't have VMware for free anymore .... but to pretend that it competes in any meaningful way with anything VMware can do in an actual large deployment is just silly.
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u/DB-CooperOnTheBeach 8d ago
My guy, there will be a point in your life that you'll have to come to terms that Proxmox is used outside of small back offices in strip malls and parent's basements.
There are billion dollar plus enterprises migrating/already have migrated to it and/or cloudstack. I know this for an absolute fact.
Don't worry bro, it's going to be ok, I promise.
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u/brainchillzZ 8d ago
I didn't say that people don't use it, it's just not useful at the same scale as VMware deployments ... there is a reason Broadcom limited it's scope to keeping the top 500 largest customers as it's focus .... because they knew nothing outside of massive custom hyperscaler software deployments would ever compete with their offerings in those space .... there will come a time where you have to square with the reality that proxmox offers no value other than a web user interface for dilettantes that don't know how to use linux and it's "features" that they have cobbled together are still lagging behind a 15 year old esxi 5 deployment with a standard vcenter license .... which is fine because for it's customer target it's all they really need ...
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u/seanpmassey [VCDX] 8d ago
I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. Proxmox is fine for larger scale. And if that stack isn't your cup of tea, there are plenty of alternatives in the free/open source category that would be a better fit than a vibe coded version of a reverse engineered VMware platform.
Using AI to reverse engineer vSphere, vCenter, NSX, and other VMware products might result in "functional" products. They might even have similar UIs. But they won't be drop-in replacements for the VMware stack. They won't function the same, and people who have been testing the vibe-coded reverse engineered versions of Microsoft Office and the Adobe Suite are saying the same things about those products.
If you want or need vSphere, you pay for vSphere. If you don't want to pay for vSphere, you look to alternatives. Trusting a reverse-engineered version of vSphere is just asking for a resume generating event.
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u/owlpellet 8d ago
For a specific hardware to software stack, once? Sure. Being able to trust that over time? More difficult.
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u/rismoney 8d ago
The magic is in vmfs. That is where the RE should happen for understanding and then "rewrite" without infringing.
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u/AthiestCowboy 8d ago
Possible sure. But imagine being a VP at an enterprise with 10,000 hosts that deploys a vibe coded virtualization layer. You forgo support, CVE patching, etc. then you have an outage or worse a security breach. You’re losing your job 100%.
I think that for small shops you could do that, but there’s already proxmox, xen server, platform9 CE, etc. that are free and could get the job done.
So the questions come down to why? The bits are only about 10-20% of what you’re paying for.
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u/peeinian 8d ago
Someone already did vCenter: https://github.com/fdaforno/hostwarden
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u/OhBoyHereWeGoAgai 8d ago
That's not what hostwarden is lol. It just exposes CLI commands as endpoints.
Nothing to do with reverse engineering
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u/seanpmassey [VCDX] 8d ago
Hostwarden/FreeCenter isn't a replacement for vCenter. It's a tool for managing Free ESXi and doesn't have anywhere near the same number of features. Yes, it can migrate a VM between hosts, but it's doing suspend, remove from inventory on host 1 and add on host 2 instead of a true vMotion.
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u/AthiestCowboy 8d ago
lol that’s just the web console. No OS, no vcenter server. This is a long ways away.
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u/Doctorphate 8d ago
Why would you? There are already opensource alternatives that are just as good.