<story><title>VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-earnings-statement-as-it-prepares-for-dell-acquisition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chipx86</author><text>Workstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really.&lt;p&gt;I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.&lt;p&gt;I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi&amp;#x2F;vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.&lt;p&gt;In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.&lt;p&gt;That came out in 2011.&lt;p&gt;Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested&amp;#x2F;Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can&amp;#x27;t remember.&lt;p&gt;Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling&amp;#x2F;creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.&lt;p&gt;I left around this time to focus on Review Board (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reviewboard.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reviewboard.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) full-time.&lt;p&gt;Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there&amp;#x27;s a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation&amp;#x2F;Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn&amp;#x27;t go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.&lt;p&gt;We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.</text></item><item><author>venomsnake</author><text>That is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so far.&lt;p&gt;But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven&amp;#x27;t had there a lot of killer features since &amp;#x27;07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.&lt;p&gt;Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.</text></item><item><author>awalton</author><text>Well, for starters...&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10976579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10976579&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jeffjose</author><text>What departments&amp;#x2F;roles are these targeted at? Are they more support roles - HR&amp;#x2F;Training&amp;#x2F;IT or are they more engineering&amp;#x2F;products - engineers, PMs etc?</text></item><item><author>thewarrior</author><text>Are there more layoffs than usual now or am I just imagining things ?</text></item><item><author>mgarfias</author><text>A little late. I got the call yesterday</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>virtualwhys</author><text>First of all, thank you, accessing ESXi servers via vSphere has been a god send over the years (FWIW, still running relatively recent version of vSphere on an ancient 2003 Server VM ;-)).&lt;p&gt;Workstation was my go to as well for desktop development needs for many years, but switched to VirtualBox after Workstation 10. Kernel updates on Linux often broke Workstation. You needed to wait for VMware to release an update, upgrade to the next version (that would also soon lag behind latest kernels), or search for a patch over on Arch[0].&lt;p&gt;VirtualBox does the trick but Workstation&amp;#x27;s a better product.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&amp;#x2F;packages&amp;#x2F;vmware-patch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;aur.archlinux.org&amp;#x2F;packages&amp;#x2F;vmware-patch&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>VMware Confirms Layoffs as It Prepares for Dell Acquisition</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/26/vmware-confirms-layoffs-in-earnings-statement-as-it-prepares-for-dell-acquisition/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chipx86</author><text>Workstation was heavily developed up until, well, yesterday really.&lt;p&gt;I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.&lt;p&gt;I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi&amp;#x2F;vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.&lt;p&gt;In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.&lt;p&gt;That came out in 2011.&lt;p&gt;Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested&amp;#x2F;Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can&amp;#x27;t remember.&lt;p&gt;Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling&amp;#x2F;creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.&lt;p&gt;I left around this time to focus on Review Board (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reviewboard.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.reviewboard.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) full-time.&lt;p&gt;Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there&amp;#x27;s a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation&amp;#x2F;Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn&amp;#x27;t go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.&lt;p&gt;We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.</text></item><item><author>venomsnake</author><text>That is sad. Desktop virtualization is incredibly useful. And vmware are the only one that can pull off a macos virtualization in windows host decently so far.&lt;p&gt;But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven&amp;#x27;t had there a lot of killer features since &amp;#x27;07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.&lt;p&gt;Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.</text></item><item><author>awalton</author><text>Well, for starters...&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10976579&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10976579&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>jeffjose</author><text>What departments&amp;#x2F;roles are these targeted at? Are they more support roles - HR&amp;#x2F;Training&amp;#x2F;IT or are they more engineering&amp;#x2F;products - engineers, PMs etc?</text></item><item><author>thewarrior</author><text>Are there more layoffs than usual now or am I just imagining things ?</text></item><item><author>mgarfias</author><text>A little late. I got the call yesterday</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vardump</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to get Replay Debugging [1] back... That of course was already gone in VMWare Workstation 8.&lt;p&gt;That was and still is a killer feature.&lt;p&gt;I know about rr and such, it&amp;#x27;s just another level to be able to record whole system state.&lt;p&gt;[1]: VMWare Workstation 7 demo about Replay Debugging: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=YjZWn3iDPiM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=YjZWn3iDPiM&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>