Broadcom is officially the mafia now.

Dixontclaire@reddit

We need to prosecute all these scumbags.

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Noitrasama@reddit

Welcome to predatory corporatism. Run by psychopaths

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Dixontclaire@reddit

Correctly said!

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Tech4dayz@reddit

C levels only need the line to go up for a few quarters to get a huge bonus at the end of the year. Then they get fired when the line crashes from their short term thinking, they get a golden parachute, then the next place hires them at 2x the rate of the last place. Rinse and repeat infinitum.

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Much_Willingness4597@reddit

A few quarters? Hock Tan has been CEO since 2005? I think he’s had 2 earnings missing in 20 years.

I would argue you could call the company disciplined, but pretending it’s being run by short term executives is just weird?

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DurangoGango@reddit

Redditors believe in this mythology of how corporate leadership works that is a self-referential fantasy. Everyone in it is stupid, especially investors, who systematically get scammed by these corpo raiding CEOs that only do it for the supposedly rich short-term bonuses.

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Much_Willingness4597@reddit

Executive bonuses or structured generally these days as performance stock units (PSOs) and not simple American out of the money options. Multi-variable requirements, vesting only over multiple years.

Broadcom is known for doing two year multi-year grants, so equity awarded this year will not fully vest until just over 5 years from now. At one point they did a long year multi-year grant so people had to stay 7-8 years to get it all. Their churn rate after finishing an acquisition is incredibly low because of this (when you have a L4 in some cases making over a million at one point in the recent past, why would people willingly leave?).

Hock tan as far as I can find drew $0 in bonus. He has to stay employed to have his stock vest.

What’s really bizarre is all this executive compensation stuff you can clearly go. Read the SEC filing on. It’s fairly straightforward English.

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DurangoGango@reddit

What’s really bizarre is all this executive compensation stuff you can clearly go. Read the SEC filing on. It’s fairly straightforward English.

That assumes people want to know the truth rather than be comforted in repeating what everyone else is saying and feeling righteous for it.

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fl0wc0ntr0l@reddit

This comment totally misses the point that the conversation is regarding VMware's performance, not Broadcom's.

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Much_Willingness4597@reddit

The executive compensation of VMware’s leadership ended at deal close. There was no earn out. They simply had all of their RSUs and PSUs and bonuses accelerate.

This was all in the SEC filings.

Earn outs are generally done on small businesses nothing at this scale.

While the C levels got a ton of money they are all pretty much unemployable now.

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Feeling-Tutor-6480@reddit

Is this what they teach MBA these days

Yikes

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bubthegreat@reddit

Taking my MBA courses now and very much no, it’s teaching about making sure work culture is good, how it impacts turnover, making sure I line up the company values with values that let people live out their own values by working there, healthy communication, etc.

Yep. Squeeze the customers to juice short-term profits, cash out their stock options and move on before the company craters when all their customers move to a new platform.

Yep, this is intentional. The system, as far as Broadcom are concerned, is working exactly as intended. They have a history of doing this, because it works for them.

That’s not me defending them, for the record. They suck, but they’re sucking this specific way because it works for them.

i think they actually stated they wanted the top 500 companies in the world as clients; the rest would be bullied away.

Looks like the're doing it.

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iBeJoshhh@reddit

It was the top 300 that are paying more than 8 figures per year, everyone else they don't care about. That's basically verbatim what they said.

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jms2k@reddit

I work “for” a fortune-50 company and they’ve dropped almost every Broadcom product (BlueCoat, SEP). Only have VMWare left, and that’s next, all because of their pricing philosophy. They typically have great products, but woof.

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DragonfruitSudden459@reddit

They typically have great products, but woof.

Given dells recent history, they'll probably try to sell it to Sophos or something dumb.

"That's next quarter's problem."

Seriously. That's the attitude.

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monsieurlee@reddit

Also the next CEO's problem.

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rdxj@reddit

Said elsewhere, but Hock Tan has been CEO since like 2005. That doesn't really seem to be the mindset.

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Gedwyn19@reddit

The end game is golden parachutes for the c level execs and layoffs for everyone else.

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valarauca14@reddit

What is the endgame though?

I worked for a company that we paid 50 k for processor for license, a Sun box with 4 CPUs was costing us $200,000 a year.

For a different project, we scaled out with Linux and MySQL, we looked at Solaris on Intel but it was proprietary. Sun saw it as competing against it's hardware

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MEGAgatchaman@reddit

Broadcom: Hey /u/jfish4391 which solution did you migrate to? /u/jfish4391 : Nutanix.! suck it Broadcom!

One week later: Broadcom: Hey.. we bought them too! Suck it jfish!

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SquizzOC@reddit

Larger corps that have the budget and see the value will be just fine using these guys till the end of time. Today, they do virtualization the best. Period.
So those that want the best, have the budget, will continue to use them. i.e. their top 500 customers which is the bulk of their sales especially after cost increases.
For everyone else, Hock Tan basically said "Fuck off, we don't need you, we will sell to you, but you'll pay for it."

So anyone without a 100 million dollar IT budget is basically screwed till they move to an alternative sadly.

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StunningChef3117@reddit

Im curious is vmware virtualisation really better than kvm and i mean kvm not qemu

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pascalbrax@reddit

KVM is really good and we're planning to move from VMWare to Proxmox soon-ish.

But I admit, there's some features in VMWare (which we're not using, but) that are really neat and powerful that no other hypervisor AFAIK has.

StunningChef3117@reddit

Alright let me rephrase what part is better? Is it ha features is it load balancing or is it raw performance?

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itspie@reddit

Really depends on what features you're using. SRM alone for us was fantastic as we could automate failover of specific VMs and raw storage luns ad-hoc through a single interface.

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Different-Hyena-8724@reddit

This is sadly how I feel like a lot of reseller products will go over the years as they lay down a trusted foundation for others to follow.

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Ssakaa@reddit

Pretty much the blatant example of the Pareto Principle concept applied to customers, "20% of customers are 80% of your value", taken through a few iterations, carves off all the cheap ones, keeping only the whales. In a game dev scenario, you want to keep a meaningful part of the 80% because they fill in gaps in the game, in something like an MMO... in VMWare, they're just a drain on resources.

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vNerdNeck@reddit

You are kinda right. I wouldn't say it's 100M IT budget though.

it's the folks below \~100 VMs that this really hurts. Anyone in the 200+ VM camp, the pricing honestly isn't terrible for them in most cases, Especially if they were already using NSX or any of the aria sweet.

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RequirementBusiness8@reddit

I’m seeing larger corps working to get away as well. It’s a longer road for them, but they aren’t happy either.

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Alaknar@reddit

What is the endgame though?

The line must go up, up, UP!

You buy an established company, right? You squeeze your clients TIGHT while releasing as many employees as possible. This makes the line go sky-high. Sure, lots of clients leave, but to counteract that, you squeeze those who are locked-in even tighter.

Eventually you're left with a shell of the company and a few clients who are too big not to pay ridiculous fees. The profit margin is still there, because you kille off most of the work-force.

For clarity: Broadcom owns both of these companies (CA and Symantec).

The endgame lasts exactly one year… And then it resets for next year’s endgame.

Many c’s only care about their yearly bonuses… That’s why you see some weird decisions like this happening

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Silence9999@reddit

They don’t care about the long term. They’ll be long gone on their yachts pooping in their gold toilets.

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iBeJoshhh@reddit

They'll sell VMware right before the big customers leave, and they drained as much as they could from it. That's what these investment firms do.

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Doesn't matter, Hock will have had several quarters with good numbers to take to another gig after that.

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burnte@reddit

Their endgame is to make sure they make more than the $69bn they paid before the product is completely dead. The problem is they're going to need to milk it for a long time before they make back $69bn. I have no clue what they were thinking with that valuation.

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bofh@reddit

I have no clue what they were thinking with that valuation.

That’s there’s a bunch of companies that can’t migrate away from VMware (or at least, think they can’t) who can be squeezed hard, and a bunch of smaller companies too slow to see the writing on the wall and who will back themselves into a corner and can be squeezed in the meantime.

They don’t ‘think’ this, they know it. It’s a successful business model for them.

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Spiritual-Bluejay422@reddit

its simple, pretend you have 10 customers and each pays $100k a year and 1 employee is dedicated to 1 customer.

Now double your prices to $200k a year and lets say 5 of the 10 customers leave well you are still making $1million a year BUT you dont need 5 extra employees so you get rid of them and now you are making the same $1million a year but you just cut 50% of your employee costs so thats all "new" profit to you.

and so on and so on

That is the mindset, its moronic, its stupid, its counterproductive, but it makes investors happy

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Fun-Bluebird-160@reddit

Maximum value has been extracted.

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JohnClark13@reddit

Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs

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ITrCool@reddit

C-Suite gets their bonuses and sit fat and pretty, until the next acquisition.

Oracle does this the same way.

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jmeador42@reddit

You have said it.

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buy product for x amount

Squeeze customer for the most possible amount of y with varying tactics going from sugar sweet to barely legal tactics over time until all customers are gone or the squeeze is not worth the effort anymore

if y > x buy product.

there is no endgame. getting the most money out short term is the game. as long as the money is more than the product cost, its fine by them

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Joshua-Graham@reddit

Think of Broadcom as behaving more like Private Equity and their actions will make more sense. They have no interest in products and innovation, they only care about money extraction.

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CharcoalGreyWolf@reddit

They use the spike in profits from the price increases to sell off the company at a profit. It’s a pump and dump.

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kenrichardson@reddit

Push out smaller customers to other technologies, meaning they need fewer support staff.

Squeeze the living shit out of their largest 500 customers to the tune of billions of dollars via strongarm license renewals (3 year lock-in, short renewal windows, etc.)

Sell off the parts to the highest bidder when there's nothing left to wring from their big accounts.

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night_filter@reddit

They just need to goose the numbers for this quarter, and then they can take their golden parachute when things fall apart. Let the next guy figure out what to do then.

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username17charmax@reddit

They have been quite open about this, really. Their focus is F500 customers or whatever the top tier is called nowadays, and the increased profits from raising the prices on those customers alone more than makes up for all the small businesses leaving. They know very well that the larger customers will experience the most difficulty migrating off. For us, they did not allow us to reduce our renewal. They actually did not care too much about our core counts, they just wanted our last price paid plus an arbitrary multiplier so they could meet their sales targets. It was astonishing how frank they were in this discussion.

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gravityVT@reddit

They only care about short term profits and making their shareholders richer.

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LegitimateCopy7@reddit

the endgame is quarterly performance. milk everything dry.

NoSellDataPlz@reddit

Cloud is not the end-all-be-all people make it out to be. A lot of businesses are migrating back out of the cloud partially and sticking with a hybrid environment because they realize it’s more cost effective, benefits certain work loads better than cloud all-in, and give control over one’s data.

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MeatWaterHorizons@reddit

My company already is about 80% off of the cloud in everything we do. having our own severs became the path of the least resistance

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Different-Hyena-8724@reddit

So do you all plan on going that way or just cloud doesn't offer enough cookie cutter stuff for your recipes?

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MeatWaterHorizons@reddit

We have recognized that using cloud services with the ever increasing costs of subscriptions, the need for multiples of them, and managing all of them is not in our best interest since we are not big enough to afford all of that long term. In house servers with off site and onsite backups and fail over options is cheaper and easier for us to deal with than multiple cloud services.

Of course the upfront cost is quite a bit but once we have it, all we have to pay a sub for is the offsite backup, our firewall sub, and our antivirus software (huntress) to keep everything secure. The servers will have paid for them selves in about a year to two years. Our recent move from cloud servers was also due to our service provider leaving the business. We also got pretty sick of server side network outages that would collapse our ability to operate. They were supposed to have back up network options but they routinely failed to fail over when their main network went down leaving us in the dust for hours. It routinely cost us money with sales walking out the door to our competition.

We currently still have our domain controller on the cloud but that's going to be in house soon and all locations will have a VPN built to connect them to the server at our main location.

We were planning on getting everyone a sub for office 365 but we have streamlined who needs it and who doesn't based off of actual use cases and we were able to cut that cost down a lot too. For example I don't use it enough to warrant paying a sub for it. If I need office style applications I just use googles free options or libre office. I'm not doing anything super fancy with it.

Our email server is managed by some one else but he has been super stable on his pricing. He just raised his prices after like 20 years of not raising prices and it wasn't that much more. He's also very responsive to customer service issues. If I need a new email account made he has it done in about 5 minutes. We also have a web portal that we can use to access our email accounts that is included so we don't need outlook for most people. Really the only people that are still using Microsoft office is the bosses because they are used to it and it's what they know.

if we were doing maybe double the numbers we are currently doing we might still be using the cloud. Maybe. The ease of use that was promised with cloud services for a business our size was not actually there. I'm sure at scale it's worth it but just not for us. We are in the furniture industry and it's still hurting pretty bad from the economic turbulence caused by the pandemic. It was looking like it was on a path to recovery but then the tariffs hit so that's now off the table. We're in tax season and we are seeing lower sales than in the past few years which were already significantly down on average from before the pandemic. It's not just us either. Our competition is hurting pretty bad too. People just aren't buying furniture right now. As a result we've had to re-evaluate what our IT needs we're and how we could cut costs without sacrificing security. Common sense would say IT security is probably one of the last things you want to make cuts to but we've been able to make it leaner, more affordable, and more secure for the size of our company. If we we're double the size it might be a different story.

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Different-Hyena-8724@reddit

Thanks for sharing that insight. I'm personally anti cloud in my professional "demeanor". This helps me look smarter. (Yes I know at the end of the day hybrid global architects are the top tier talent.)

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sbrick89@reddit

the goal is to find a nice ROI balance between commodity services that SHOULD be outsourced (cloud/etc) vs specialized services that are worth running in-house.

exchange and basic websites (static or minimal ordering, but nothing past basic ordering) is super easy to put in any cloud, just compare the features (i like exchange for its RPC/HTTPs push tech, so I have O365/EO)

files are an interesting one since they're both commodity and also super expensive in the cloud... i suspect it'll find a happy medium using cloud as a tier 1 recycle bin.

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SkullRunner@reddit

I agree with you.

But from a business perspective as Broadcom, the VMWare market is just getting smaller and smaller YOY due to alternatives eating the market, so they are fleecing before they shutter it.

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Same_Net2953@reddit

It's Month over Month now for us. The service provider I work for has been churning customers monthly since the Broadcom acquisition but much more recently. We're at a point where a huge chunk of the customers that were expecting to get bent over the barrel by them are finally at a point where they can migrate away from vSphere for good. We're not a small MSP either, we're one of the big ones.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

On-prem does not necessarily equal virtualization. The market is moving towards containerization and VMware is behind the ball on that one. This is especially true of their very large customers that make up a majority of their revenue, so they are trying to wring out as much profit while they can.

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NoSellDataPlz@reddit

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying virtualization is the end all be all either or that VMware is even a good product choice anymore. I’m just saying that a lot of people are still trying to push the lie that going whole hog in the cloud is how business is moving and where skills development should be myopically focused. There are some things that can’t be containerized like Active Directory and related infrastructure (NDES, NPS, RDS, blah blah blah) and still require virtualization, though.

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nope_nic_tesla@reddit

Certainly, virtualization will continue to be around in one way or another for many, many years. I mean, we can look and see how much IBM mainframe business there still is out there!

But I think the above comment is accurate that on-prem virtualization is a dying business model that has probably reached its peak. Broadcom is betting on massive profits now instead of slowly dwindling profits over time.

aussiepete80@reddit

Just wait. Nutanix love to do deals to win the contract then reality sets in a few years later.

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vhalember@reddit

Yup, they have "analysts" look for tech items they can acquire and exploit.

VMWare is their latest.

They found 100% of Fortune 500 companies used VMWare. These companies have 1,000's of VM's each and deep pockets. You can't flip that many VM's to a competing product quickly, so Broadcom's shitty business model is to shake down these companies mafia-style as the OP suggests.

Broadcom has no intention of supporting VMWare forever. They'll sell the husk eventually, and move on to the next item to burn to the ground.

The sickening part is Broadcom's stock is up +900% in the past five years. They're very good at being a parasite.

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SevaraB@reddit

Yup. Lots of us started migrating when the acquisition was announced and didn’t even wait for the sale to be completed. This is not new behavior by Broadcom (speaking as a former DX NetOps customer. Fool me once…).

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Leftblankthistime@reddit

Computer Associates has been doing this for decades.

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topazsparrow@reddit

Many companies began their migration process off VMware to Nutanix or other competitors in 2023/2024.

Nutanix decided to do the same thing though and follow suit. Rather than taking more market share, they just did nothing and upped their prices.

HPE VME is going to wipe the floor with these guys. Lots of companies already discovering that HyperV is perfectly serviceable for a lot of their needs as well.

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chicaneuk@reddit

Really interested to check out HPE VME. We are already customers for servers and storage from them.. so it would be interesting to see what the product can do.

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Dixontclaire@reddit

The execs at Broadcom are from 3rd world countries and should be deported due to their immense Greed.

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valarauca14@reddit

If you increase costs 10x, you only need to keep ~10% of your customers to maintain your current bottom line, while also massively decrease the workload of your support staff (and likely hardware support).

Additionally this self-selects for the customers who can afford it and will very likely tolerate additional price hikes. VMWare is adopting Oracle-Style tactics. They basically only want 1Bil+/year companies & Government offices that'll just continue to accept their increasingly absurd price hikes without much question.

They're going to milk you for every red cent until you leave their ecosystem. They are a business, not your buddy or friend. Fundamentally business & economic relationships are adversarial, marketers & sales people try their damnest to make forget this, but you never should.

Highly recommend jumping to a competitor. I've had pretty great experiences with proxmox.

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lost_signal@reddit

Hardware support is frankly going the other direction, as there’s increasingly more diverse hardware to support (GPUs, DPUs, really huge differences in core configs etc).

As far as the number of accounts quite a few were on the VCF train.

“as of the end of Q1, approximately 70 percent of our largest 10,000 customers have adopted VCF.”

There’s actually sales teams devoted to smaller accounts still outside of the strategic section (Had drinks this week with one of their leaders). He had some pretty good stories about people finding value.

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EViLTeW@reddit

If you increase costs 10x, you only need to keep \~10% of your customers to maintain your current revenue, while also massively decrease the workload of your support staff (and likely hardware support).

Close. If you increase your prices 10x, you only need to keep \~10% of your existing revenue source to maintain your current revenue.

I think what will really destroy VMware is when a massive security incident happens.

When there aren't enough VMware employees left to honour the contracts, they'll just tear up the contracts and wind the company up. You can't sue a corpse.

Then they'll flog the IP and the office furniture and count their money.

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Drakoolya@reddit

Yr acting like I was defending Broadcom or something. lol

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nostril_spiders@reddit

It may have read like I was arguing against your entire point.

I intended a finer distinction than that.

It's not that they are targeting a different market segment. They are targeting no segment. This is just wringing out the last few drops before flogging the Herman Millers.

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agent-squirrel@reddit

As a higher education institution in Australia, we have this consortium of organisations across ANZ called CAUDIT that goes into bat on our behalf with vendors. They've managed to lock VMware down to the current pricing for a while but we know we will have to move on really soon.

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winaje@reddit

They want their 200 biggest clients worldwide. Everyone else is considered a leech by them.

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Drakoolya@reddit

100% correct.

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Stonewalled9999@reddit

BCOM says EFF you if you want to get security updates

streamline = line BCOM's pockets

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King91OM@reddit

As many greedy corporates are, buy a company when its at it's peak, squeeze as much revenue as it can. Sell it when no one wants to use it any longer. Rinse and repeat. These corporates have no interest whether a software or company dies. Who cares about us users who depend on software such as these to run a company. All these CEOs, whatever Os they are only care about is profit and money, nothing else.

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NotQuiteDeadYetPhoto@reddit

FWIW a company with about 5000 instances shut down every single one of them due to the price hike and changes.

As someone who runs proxmox at home, but VMware at work I'm curious how you feel about using it in a production environment?

not the one you replied to. but we do proxmox, vmware and hyper-v on FC SAN. Nimble, eternus all-flash, hpe primera.

we also do proxmox+ceph on nvme drivers for some customers. The resiliency is worth the performance overhead.

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smoothvibe@reddit

Yeah, for most normal day to day operations VMs ceph is absolutely the best option with its hyper-resiliency.

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pascalbrax@reddit

CEPH requires at least 10GBit connections, 25GBit woul be better. And it's for a reason.

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SnaketheJakem@reddit

Hyper-V complicated?? It's even easier to use than VMware.

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UnstableConstruction@reddit

It's also quite stable if you set it up right.

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pascalbrax@reddit

if you set it up right.

Exactly, my Hyper-V never crashed once. I just replaced it with Proxmox.

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I don't know how big your business is, but if it's on the Smaller side take a look at Scale Computing. Stupid simple.

Broadcom tried similar tactics with us. \~250k seats, millions a year in contracts.

Less than 13 months later we were fully transitioned to Defender. That year suuuuucked, but got some decent bonuses in addition to the company yearly

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CaptainZhon@reddit

Better start your migration

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zxLFx2@reddit

Making someone time-pressured for a sale is a classic tactic from a car salesperson or an informercial (act now, supplies won't last, etc).

Anyway, you have a lot of power here my friend, especially in the "negative" direction, if you were to try to influence the board and your department to reject this contract. If you can put together a plan that IS ACTUALLY FEASIBLE AND YOU CAN BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR that can get you to a different vendor without having to sign this contract, then you can recommend that to the board instead of this Broadcum proposal.

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sirishkr@reddit

Broadcom’s betting VMware is too sticky and you will have no choice but to pay up. Some others, like Platform9 where I work, are betting on the opposite: https://platform9.com/vjailbreak/

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Artur_ka@reddit

Just move to Nutanix and be done with VMware.

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*by Broadcom

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SecretSquirrelType@reddit

Oracle has played this game for decades

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headcrap@reddit

Our contact is under legal review. We've been converting our environment to Hyper-V for about a year.. but our renewal came up this month.

Though vCenter shows our licenses as perpetual and we plan to just finish our conversions.. apparently via our VAR Broadcom has come back to play hardball.. renew or get it out of our environement. Oh.. and the renewal is only for everything we renewed last year.. no downsizing.

Suffiice to say, management shit brix and now I'm fast-tracking the last conversions "right now".

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mercurialuser@reddit

Licenses are perpetual, they cant ask you to stop using the product !

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headcrap@reddit

They already have.. as mentioned, it went to legal to sort it out. Boss wasn't going to be a scapegoat for potential breach of contract BS.

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davidbrit2@reddit

I’m trying to figure out what the hell Broadcom’s strategy is with their VMware acquisition.

They literally announced it right from the start: squeeze as much money as possible out of their largest, most locked-in customers, and tell the small customers to either fuck off or hand over nonsensical amounts of money.

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PappaFrost@reddit

If corporations are people, fine, but do they ALL have to be psychopaths? LOL

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daHaus@reddit

Sounds like they're setting themselves up for an anti-trust lawsuit

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PsyPilot@reddit

We run on Hyper-V and recently Proxmox.

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PsyOmega@reddit

The majority shareholder in broadcom is Vanguard.

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worm45s@reddit

I'd bet 80% of the time was spent waiting for VMs to export and be importend into Proxmox due to their storage. You basically need to export them from ESXi in a format that can be imported to Proxmox, that's like the cause of most downtime.

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sep76@reddit

since kvm can boot the vmdk drive. one can also do the NFS trick, even before the migration tool existed.

you needed to shutdown, and boot the vm ofcourse, but the downtime was normally less the 2 minutes. if you have done the prepaparations for the new proxmox vm previously

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worm45s@reddit

since kvm can boot the vmdk drive. one can also do the NFS trick, even before the migration tool existed.

as I said in other comment our storage was on dell storage center which was connected to our cluster via iSCSI and we were using temporary server for migration so we couldn't do that + we have to keep the downtime to a minimum. Even if we could connect - in that case you'd have to bring all the VMs down on ESXi, connect the storage to Proxmox so it can see vmdk files, and then start all the VMs on proxmox. Then you'd have to check if all the VMs are running fine and fix any issues which wasn't feasible with our smaller team.

Our prefered way at the time was to schedule downtime for 1-2 VMs at a time and migrate them by also converting them to OVF format. And we did preparations, we have tested every VM migration by migrating cloned VMs to see what can get broken. Most issues from what I remember where issues with either software licensing (needing to re-activate certain licenses) or network interfaces.

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agent-squirrel@reddit

There is a live migration process now where Proxmox mounts the vmware datastore. Not sure if that's what you meant?

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Migration

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worm45s@reddit

Live-Import

Proxmox VE also supports live import, which means the VM is started during the import process. This is achieved by importing the hard disk data required by the running guest operating system at an early stage and importing the remaining data asynchronously in the background. This option reduces downtime. Please note that the VM on the ESXi is still switched off, so there will be some downtime.

There will still be downtime. Also if you mount ESXi datastore in Proxmox I don't think it can be mounted on ESXi at the same time too so you have to migrate everything at the same time. I might be wrong here but live migration will not be always possible depending on your hardware configuration.

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agent-squirrel@reddit

Ah yes fair.

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BarracudaDefiant4702@reddit

A weekend project is nothing. Even if you out sourced it at $500/hour, it will pay for itself in the delta in licensing costs the first year compared to paying Broadcom.

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maxis2bored@reddit

Oh for sure, but it's not me paying the bills. It would be me working the weekend though...

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sep76@reddit

I did not get the impression they spent 24/7 doing the migrations, just a few hours over a weekend to migrate some vm's ?

that beeing said. I usually do load-balanced services over redundant vm's. So i can migrate vm's during the working-hours. :)

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worm45s@reddit

To quite Asianometry Broadcom is a publicly traded private equity fund masquerading as a semiconductor company.

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jaredearle@reddit

It’s incredible that we just migrated our VMs to AWS and saved a shit ton of money. When AWS is the cheaper option, and not by a small amount, you know they’re on a late-stage capitalism speedrun.

At home, I’m all in on PVE. I look forward to seeing you all on r/Proxmox.

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mcwidget@reddit

Broadcom have approx 6200 VMware customers. They want that number down closer to 200.

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mycall@reddit

Wait until you discover that Xen is free

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ezoe@reddit

It seems Broadcom is trying to squeeze the profit out of financially failed product.

Yes. VMware is a failed product. That's why they were sold to Broadcom in the first place.

Just recently left a job at public library, we had about $2000 a year (with a three or five year contract, one-time payment). After Broadcom’s acquisition, the new one year contract was $15,000. For a public library in a town of 60,000 people! Safe to say, the library is looking at other virtualization options.

Really feels like the new strategy is to push the little guy out. I wish my library the best in finding new options this year, because god knows that price is unjustifiable for the public’s tax dollars.

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ScienceofAll@reddit

This is capitalism endgame, a dystopia where corporate entities hold "all the cards", have no legal repercussions and we're all captives to their whims, be it software or other physical products etc etc... And bro indeed that is pure blackmailing mafia style, or not far fetched from similar tactics ransomware faks use .. :/

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nirach@reddit

It tickles me a little bit how stubborn my boss is being on this.

We have our first renewal quote coming up soon, I'm wondering if that'll change his tune.

We have maybe 400 VM's across ~30 hosts, I can't imagine the leadership is going to approve a 300% price rise on VMWare alone.

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SnowIndividual9073@reddit

Fuck them

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IcyUse33@reddit

Oracle has been doing this for decades.

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RockisLife@reddit

Scale computing is a new platform up and coming to replace VMware

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XCP-ng is a great and inexpensive replacement for VMWare. Has 90% of the features at a fraction of the cost. Not that hard to learn either. Anyone who is tied to VmWare needs to be planning now to migrate off

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Accomplished_Sir_660@reddit

Corporate bullies will bully until there is no one left to bully. Hate to say it but MS a bully too

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catonic@reddit

I didn't even think about this until I found myself unable to access a Sharepoint site that worked six months earlier just because my browser user agent contained something other than WinNT. Change the browser user agent, magically things work. Anti-competitive.

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DeathRabbit679@reddit

Install Openstack

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gumbrilla@reddit

This is on you. The best time to have move was over a year ago, the next best time is now.

Forget the next phone call they do not care, and you are wasting more time in some fantasy. Stop handwaving. Stop being emotional. Start acting.

Ok_Procedure_3604@reddit

Why wait to break that land speed record. They don’t care.

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daven1985@reddit

I left last year. Been running a HyperV Stack, no issues.

Used Veeam as the 'migration tool' and it took me about a week to move 60+ servers.

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murgalurgalurggg@reddit

Broadcom is predatory and needs to die. HyperV is our jam.

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vNerdNeck@reddit

.... nah...at this point and judging from this sub they would by Proxmox instead. It would be dirt fucking cheap for them in comparison.

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DoctorOctagonapus@reddit

I've got a call in the morning with a vendor to demo Nutanix. Neither I nor my boss know anything about it so it'll be interesting to see what they can come up with or if it can replace the VMware house we currently have.

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vNerdNeck@reddit

Nutanix isn't a money saver. It'll be the same cost or more in most situations.

It's honestly very sad, VMware gave Nutanix a golden fucking ticket to be the kind of the market and they flat out refused to take it.

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RichardJimmy48@reddit

Neither I nor my boss know anything about it

They literally don't want your business. You aren't big enough for them to even have on their radar.

Why haven't you started migrating by now anyway? We have two sites that are planning to migrate away because the cost is nuts.

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scriptmonkey420@reddit

I went through the CA Technologies buy out in 2017-2018. And then there was their previous buyouts and those all ended the same way VMware has now.

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Substantial_Hold2847@reddit

They want you to use their product, they just don't want to pay to support it so much. They're trying to price out out of managing your own environment.

Broadcom's revenue grew significantly and net income has risen also. Broadcom is expected to recover its $69 billion investment in VMware within approximately 5 to 7 years, based on the following factors. Also, it has taken 50% of the purchase as a long and gets tax write-offs while paying it off.

From the sources:

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has positively impacted its financial performance. fiscal year 2024, Broadcom reported a 44% year-over-year revenue increase, reaching a record $51.6 billion. This growth was significantly bolstered by the integration of VMware, which contributed substantially to the infrastructure software segment's revenue of $21.5 billion.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2024, Broadcom's revenue grew by 51% year-over-year to $14.05 billion, aligning with analysts' expectations. Net income rose to $4.32 billion, up from $3.52 billion in the previous year. This strong performance is attributed to the successful integration of VMware and increased demand for AI products.

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware has significantly bolstered its financial performance. In fiscal year 2024, Broadcom's infrastructure software revenue surged to $21.5 billion, up from $7.6 billion in FY 2023—a $13.8 billion increase primarily attributed to VMware's integration. Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

In the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, Broadcom reported revenues of $14.92 billion, marking a 25% year-over-year growth, with net income soaring by 315% to $5.5 billion.

Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/broadcom-job-cuts-vmware-workforce-half-acquisition-2025-3?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.ft.com/content/8567815a-cc7e-4339-a635-c4f5af9da50d?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.investopedia.com/broadcom-q4-fy-2024-earnings-8758941?utm_source=chatgpt.com

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BitOfDifference@reddit

My var said they could get a 1 year renewal. Drop your VAR and find one that can. No need to fret over renewal dates unless you need to call in to support anytime soon.

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mohosa63224@reddit

It's like dealing with Oracle. Ugh.

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NoTime4YourBullshit@reddit (OP)

Oracle has been like this for a very long time. If I were a software developer designing some solution from scratch, what reason could I possibly have to base it off anything in Oracle’s product lineup, given their pricing and on-going maintenance costs. I’ve always asked this question at conferences and such and I’ve never gotten a very good answer.

Quite frankly, I feel this way about Cisco too. The only reason anybody ever gives me is legacy bullshit. This is the way it’s always been done. They’re living off a reputation they built 30 years ago and have nothing innovative to offer anymore.

There once was a saying in the tech industry “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” I suspect everyone who ever said that has since been fired.

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Sobeman@reddit

you are to small of a company for them.

You should of moved to hyper-v/nutanix/proxmox 2 years ago.

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mohosa63224@reddit

I did that five or six years ago.

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Particular_Arm_4004@reddit

Migrate to a cloud solution and only pay for what you use.

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mohosa63224@reddit

Depending on your use case, though, sometimes keeping things on-premises is actually cheaper in the long run.

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mohosa63224@reddit

I remember when VMware was the best. But there are so many other options out there now, it's ridiculous.

All I can say is that I'm glad I migrated everything off of them during a refresh before the Broadcom takeover occurred. F**k this.

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kuahara@reddit

Thank God we were up for renewal right as this acquisition happened and Broadcom showed us how ugly they were before we renewed.

Spent $214k building out a hyper-v solution instead.

In hindsight, I kinda wish I went with Proxmox, but I'd never heard of them when we needed to go out for bids. Proxmox got raving reviews from tons of redditors in another thread.

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iBeJoshhh@reddit

We declined their renewal, and they threatened litigation, even though we have perpetual licenses. How are they going to sue us when it clearly states we have the product forever. We are not getting strong armed into forcing us to switch tour perpetual license to a subscription.

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Dave_A480@reddit

Broadcom buys mature software & min-maxes their customer-base - getting rid of the small/midsize customers that are the most expensive to support & buy the least profitable tiers....

And keeping the huge ones that are most profitable in terms of what they buy vs the labor required to keep them onboard....

They figure that the employees they can lay-off doing this will more than make up for the lost business....

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AvonMustang@reddit

Work for what was one of those huge VMWare clients but am not involved at all in picking data center infrastructure. It seems like our migration to kubernetes went into overdrive after Broadcom bought VMWare and am pretty sure nearly all our LInux VMs have moved which is the vast majority of our servers and all of them in my business unit - 6600 some VMs.

The thing about big companies is they can throw a lot of resources at a problem...

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zazbar@reddit

A lawyer and his briefcase can steal more than ten men with guns. -Al Capone.

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22OpDmtBRdOiM@reddit

What are the costs of migrating to something else?
Naive question. 200, 300k might be not that much, but how far would that get you with migrating to something else?

Contact Technologent (not my employer) - they apparently have a product call Ascend that automates the migration from VMware to Nutanix. My understanding is the Nutanix environment is less resource intensive and a much more attractive price.

This is a HUGE issue.

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Neither_Day_8988@reddit

They literally revoked our licences used to train various other organisations(With a single days notice), which we had full permission to do before the acquisition. Broadcom have no idea why people used VMware in the first place and are just trying to take advantage.

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SLJ7@reddit

I would be right with you; that is incredibly predatory. I hope you can get whatever backing you need to politely tell them to either give you more time or get fucked.

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ThePorko@reddit

And most of symantecs assets and now airwatch.

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alexandreracine@reddit

They gave us a deadline of two weeks to renew, or the price will be 25% higher.

Yikes!! Proxmox sounds really good now!!

PS: It's pretty good, and you can get support for it.

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sep76@reddit

You can absolutly. But it is debian, what kind of supporrt do you realy need. There is no hidden black box everything is opaqe and troubleshootibg a breeze. If you have any inhouse linux knowledge.

get ready for that migrate, the arent going to be reasonable, because they dont actually want your business.

Outrageous-Insect703@reddit

From my vendor:

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Secret_Account07@reddit

Yeah that doesn’t seem up for debate. I’m angry on your behalf.

This is not how you run a good business and treat your (paying) customers.

IT community is a tight-knit group. Pissing them off doesn’t usually end well when there are alternatives. Microsoft and other monopolies can get away with a little more.

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ThreadParticipant@reddit

I spit on the ground at the mention of Broadcom

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onefish2@reddit

Migrate to Proxmox. Call it a day.

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stupidic@reddit

I'm convinced that Broadcom was induced to purchase and kill VMware at the behest of Microsoft and other cloud providers.

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StephenM222@reddit

Vmware licencing meant we are in the process of moving to cloud hosting solutions.

Probably. I don’t know what the term is these days for “The guys we buy our software from.”

Most things we just buy directly from the vendor. I never got why some vendors force you to buy through VARs. Maybe so they don’t need a sales staff?

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lost_signal@reddit

Probably. I don’t know what the term is these days for “The guys we buy our software from.”

They’re a chip manufacturer. Seen this a couple of times with other chip manufacturers who have diversified. They have no clue how the world works outside of their production runs and their application of a commodity chip based business model will kill off their acquisition. They don’t understand the corporate software world and most likely won’t be told.

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tierrie@reddit

They very much understand that they provide the OS for VMs and it takes time to migrate away from them. And there's a perfect price/pain point that results in short term gains for them at acceptable losses in retention.

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dinominant@reddit

This is functionally equivalent to ransomware. They are impacting your operations and access to you data via a radical cost increase.

gif

Oh they be milking. We got few thousand ucs servers running VMware and while we are planning to switch there’s not much viable replacements for our scale

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Immediate-Serve-128@reddit

Could see it coming the minute broadcom bought em.

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They said this openly. They don't care about the small business you bring. It does not scale really, all business only want the big clients, they pay on time and pay big.

They will focus on the top % biggest as they cannot move off easily and price hike.

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gordo32@reddit

I have several friends that are moving to Proxmox. So far, everyone seems happy (though they're all relatively small companies)

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ivebeenfelt@reddit

They only care about renewing the top few hundred customers. The rest can pay or pound sand.

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BiologicalApparatus@reddit

Buy product X for A.
Until product X dead: Invest B into product X sales. Sell product X for C.
Sell product X corpse for D.

Profit = -A -B +C +D

Goto 1. with product Y.

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BuffaloRedshark@reddit

I’m trying to figure out what the hell Broadcom’s strategy is with their VMware acquisition. Because if the goal was to kill it, they’re doing a great job.

Hasn't that been pretty much what they've done to everything they've acquired in the last few years?

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KRed75@reddit

They actually may be committing RICO crimes.

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hefightsfortheusers@reddit

We use hyperv. We had one customer we picked up that was on esxi, but the last company never licensed it, so they were limited to 6 cores. Looked into licensing it since it was already set up. The price was absurd. How is Windows the cheaper option now?

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Neither-Cup564@reddit

Give it a few years.

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Jacklon17@reddit

I hate B#@$com

Use CA SDM still and the support is abysmal.

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eig10122@reddit

Broadcom is where other companies go to die.

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1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit

Because if the goal was to kill it, they’re doing a great job.

Broadcom's stock is up almost 48.81% over the past year. They are doing great.

The virtualization market was changing due to resources moving to the cloud and this is how they planned to leverage VMWare: Drop the small guys, increase costs so that only the companies that really see the value will stay.

This also allowed them to cut back on their own internal VMWare Dev costs.

The world was changing due to cloud. Things were never going to be the same, especially with all the low cost Hypervisors alternatives for the small and medium sized business.

This is what IBM did all those years ago when they dropped out of the PC and microcomputer businesses and focused on the midrange and Mainframe businesses.

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jblackwb@reddit

It makes sense. They're bleeding small and medium sized customers. The only way they can keep hope to get 3 years of revenue from those customers is if they lock you in now.

A one year commitment would give you just the of time to migrate away to a new solution and they'd lose on the revenue from years two and three.

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AmateurishExpertise@reddit

That's F-off pricing. If you want to retain VMware, the best bet might be to try going through a VAR, that seems to be where Broadcom wants to push everyone that's not Fortune 50.

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The strategy is to make copious amounts of money by any means possible.

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ADtotheHD@reddit

What do you mean you’re trying to figure it out. Their goal has been the same since day 1, which was jack up the prices again and again and again for people that were locked in or couldn’t exit quickly. You literally have to be living under a rock to not know this and you should not be shocked at this outcome. You should have been looking to make moves literally the minute Broadcom bought them, like the entire rest of the IT world.

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thecravenone@reddit

Organized crime is when a business raises its prices.

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NoTime4YourBullshit@reddit (OP)

No a price raise is when they just charge you more to buy their product. A shakedown is when they threaten to penalize you for not buying their product, which is exactly what they did.

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Pixel91@reddit

Pricing out anyone but the very tippy-top. Not sure what makes them think that alone will be more sustainable, but perhaps they have data that says so.

The latest core-count minimum reflects that, too.

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cjcox4@reddit

Broadcom wants you to move to something else... and many have.