More buzzword salad from VMware by broadcom

Posted by rumandbass@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 196 comments

https://news.vmware.com/company/vmware-by-broadcom-business-simplification Honestly they just need to own what they're doing and stop pretending to be innovating. They aren't fooling anyone. Are we missing the plot because we're angry? Can anyone defend this?

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PowerShellGenius@reddit

VMware is done, outside the biggest "money is no object" environments. Absolutely finished. The only question is whether you need at least one renewal before you can pull off a smooth migration. The biggest issue is short-sightedness. If the IT industry could come together in some sort of conference or forum and standardize on something open-source, pay-for-support-only, like Proxmox - in a visible enough way that shows enough demand that backup providers will see the value in supporting it, and hardware vendors will see the value in certifying for it - we could make this the only time this happens. But if we all flock to Hyper-V because it's ever so slightly more ready for prime-time than Proxmox, and forget that Microsoft is a behemoth publicly traded company too and will do the same thing the second they think it's more profitable than playing the long game - Hyper-V will go this route within a decade. Our industry was able to come together around Linux when we realized that a server or embedded OS is a staple we don't need anything fancy from, it just needs to work, and be something we know can't be yanked out from under us. We, as a whole industry, have successfully fled almost all proprietary UNIXes, and we still pay good money for enterprise support (Red Hat, etc) - but do so knowing it's a free market, and we are less trapped because the software itself is open and competing distros exist. Will we realize the same thing about virtualization?

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lewis_943@reddit

> Our industry was able to come together around Linux Mate, my hypervisor is largely dictated by the other software it needs to connect to. The second Veeam supports proxmox I'll start looking at it. They're sooooort of the way there with KVM? Fuck knows what I'd do about all of the closed source Linux virtual appliances (audio codes SBC anyone?) that don't come with root access or templates for anything other than public cloud or VMware/Hyper-V. Meanwhile virtualisation rights are already included in my windows VM licenses. That might change in the future, but not for at least 10 years after the last server OS that has those rights. Hell, Hyper-V server 2019 is still free, supported and available until 2029 - so 5 years. That'll last the lifecycle of any server hardware I've recently bought at the very least. Hopefully in a few years either proxmox or KVM (Ovirt?) has broader vendor support. I'm hoping these events with the punitive costs of public cloud will propel that development.... But Linux for hypervisors isn't gonna become an immediate staple.

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PowerShellGenius@reddit

I get that vendor support for an open source hypervisor has to come before widespread industry adoption. I am saying that until/unless some sort of conference comes together where the industry of business tech customers (which is basically all companies these days) come together in some forum *not* organized/controlled by the software vendors, and a massive number of them at least sign some non-binding declaration of "here's what we want to do, here's what's stopping us, fix that and we will do it" - that can never happen. If Veeam knew that tens of thousands of paying customers are interested in backing up Proxmox environments - and anyone developing competing backup solutions also knew about that demand - and Veeam knew that their competitors knew - Veeam would support Proxmox this year. But as of right now, nothing - other than informal reddit conversations among mostly non-decision-makers in various compaines' IT departments - exists to show that demand is worth doing R&D for.

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PM_ME_YOUR_BOOGER@reddit

Why not flock to Hyper-V *and* purchase stock in MS so the company has actual say? Idk, seems like an easy backdoor

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SicnarfRaxifras@reddit

Stock back door - because the amount of money you would need to buy enough stock to have a say in MS would mean you are probably one of the whale companies that doesn't care about the increased VMware prices. Satya Nadella owns 1,337,768 shares of Microsoft stock, representing 0.02% that's worth around half a billion. and that pales by comparison to big corporate investors e.g. Vanguard has approx 615- 640.2 million shares ( depends where the reporting info comes from) which is about 260 billion and that's only 8%. The whole market cap is just over 3 Trillion and this is also about 6 times that of Broadcom. A company is going to need hella deep pockets to get any sway in MSFT.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

I don't think vanguard is a good example? Those shares belong to the Satya Nadella's, me, you, anyone who holds stock at vanguard.

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SicnarfRaxifras@reddit

That’s not how shares and voting rights work mate

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Ah, now I see what you mean. Don't know when it changed but all of my individually held stocks send ballots. Etfs typically don't.

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eatmynasty@reddit

If you’re not big enough to afford VMWare, you should be on a public cloud provider.

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westerschelle@reddit

Yes let me get right on that and tell our C-Levels this. Who the fuck needs to be in compliance anyways? Real compliance is more like a vibe.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

The cloud is the HOA of computing.

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Sparcrypt@reddit

Yeah because *those* aren’t all subscription based with constantly changing features and price hikes at a moments notice…

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professional-risk678@reddit

> If the IT industry could come together in some sort of conference or forum and standardize on something open-source, pay-for-support-only, like Proxmox - in a visible enough way that shows enough demand that backup providers will see the value in supporting it, and hardware vendors will see the value in certifying for it - we could make this the only time this happens. "IT industry" wouldnt do this in the best of times. The reason VMWare even existed in the first place was because Citrix was so abrasive even to people who knew what they were doing. xcp-ng still works but its not well maintained and is relatively user hostile. On the other hand Proxmox is great but it was created because the creation of VM's, LXC's and LXD's in linux was so abrasive. This was also done in someone's free time. The point im making is that this is a tough ask for someone that isnt being paid. Someone that IS being paid will likely be paid with VC money that is expecting to see a return on investment. Open source funding is a slow drip.

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SilverSleeper@reddit

>VMware is done, outside the biggest "money is no object" environments. Absolutely finished. The only question is whether you need at least one renewal before you can pull off a smooth migration. I disagree with this. Standard is still an option and it's priced failry compared to other solutions (nutanix) IMO. Yeah, you lose features but to pretend that it's completely unaffordable isn't true. DRS and dvswithces are the biggest losses going down to standard for small environments. Both of which suck but neither of which are deal breakers.

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zero0n3@reddit

What really matters is your workload. If you are primarily windows server OS, you should be moving to hyper-v clusters a la S2D or SOFS. The savings are enormous and you can do that without needing SCVMM. If I have a rack or more of hosts I’d probably get SCVMM though. Then add azure integration, network virtualization (is that a thing on VMware ?) etc and MO NEED TO ALSO BUY HUPERVISOR licensing (all but VMM is part of datacenter licensing) and it’s a no brainer.

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lewis_943@reddit

I mean, you say that, but trying to use WAC on a hyper-v cluster fucking suuuuucks. Running in an environment with lots of techs (MSP) and no SCVMM is god-awful.

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zero0n3@reddit

But at least as an MSP, you can run SPLA. So instead of like 22/month/2xpcore (for datacenter), you pay like 30/month/2xpcore for CIS suite which comes with the datacenter and SC licenses! So at say 4x 6host S2D clusters, your sitting at maybe 48 cores as host, 1152 total, so 576 2pcore licenses, or 13k v 18k a month. Sounds like a lot, but that I gotta assume, VMware was way more than 60k a year for a example setup like that (esp with their vsan pricing) Save more money? Instead of using VEEAM per VM MSP pricing , use DPM for client level backups, and then use Veeam to backup your DPM servers :). (DPM part of SC license) (don’t do this though haha, there are some big drawbacks)

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lewis_943@reddit

Mate, IDGAF about SPLA licensing, I'm just the systems bloke. I'm not involved in either the accounts or profit of the place. All I know is that WAC sucks and doing any work on the WAC-managed Hyper-V cluster takes like 9x longer and has 30x more error messages (even when the job is successful) than the VMware cluster. I get that WAC is a really, really useful admin tool for managing the locahost on a windows core server, but it can't replace a vsphere console and using it to manage a cluster is just dogshit.

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Tx_Drewdad@reddit

> Change is never easy "Tough luck"  > subscription licensing "You're going to give us money. Lots of it."  > Radical simplification across our portfolio, "We're killing off anything that isn't immediately profitable."  > Standardization across our ecosystem "Small and midsize companies can suck it."  > Simplification "We like it when customers have no choice."

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mike9874@reddit

To be fair, the subscription licensing has been available for a few years, and it's what everyone else in the industry is doing. Broadcom just had the balls do to the final cutover from old to new licensing instead of dual running

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ImpossibleParfait@reddit

Yeah, that is certainly the reality. The search for endless increasing profits.

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

> The search for endless increasing profits. Corporations only exist to make profits and increase shareholder value. This is how business is run.

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moxyvillain@reddit

I don't know why you're getting down voted. Businesses don't exist to help people. They exist to increase shareholder value. That being said I wonder what the next company will be that broadcom is going to buy to run into the ground.

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

> I don't know why you're getting down voted. I do. Most of them just work for someone else and don't deal with money. When you work for your self, or start your own companies, you understand more about how businesses can run and change over time. Yes, VMWare was King for a long, long time. But their kingdom was getting shipped off to the Cloud. VMWare, while still the best virtualization platform in the world, was in trouble. As their empire got smaller, their costs didn't shrink, and to make matters worse, their ability to get new customers was minimal or zero. (Most startups I work with start right in the cloud these days). Porters Five Forces Model says it best. Competitive forces for any company will be: Competitive Rivalry, Supplier Power, Buyer Power, Threat of Substitution, and Threat of New Entry. Threat of Substitution, and Threat of New Entry is what hurt VMWare. They would not recover.

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moxyvillain@reddit

I mean if that hospice nurse had a syringe with green death juice. No disagreement on your statement, but broadcom can also go right to hell.

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Sparcrypt@reddit

People say this as if it’s an excuse for them to do literally anything. VMWare is going to be run into the ground to extract as much money short term from customers who can’t move quickly to another solution. There are far better ways to run a company for profit and longevity, but places like Broadcom have their own business.. which is taking existing businesses and destroying them for their own quick buck. So please don’t pretend “this is how business is run”. It’s not. This is how a business is run *into the ground*, very deliberately, because they can pick the carcass for more than they spent on it.

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

Some businesses succeed, grow, produce great products, and lead us into new eras. Others maintain the status quo, trying only to try and cut costs and reduce operations, as that is their only path forward. Others are just dying, losing market share, or just having their market dry up or change over time such that their products or services are just not needed anymore. VMWare was damaged goods. Their market for their product was quickly evaporating as companies moved their servers to the cloud. Don't underestimate this problem. Companies with the right leadership can grow quickly. But almost no company can shrink without problems. VMWare was shrinking, sinking some may say. So yes, this is how businesses are. Some grow, some flat line, and others shrink and die. VMWare was sinking, and the investors wanted an out. Broadcom was that out.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Broadcom will squeeze it to death until all possible profit juice is extracted. Then move on to the next acquisition using that juice. Ad infinitum. Their business model is 99% profits, 1% maybe deliver a usable product.

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Alex_Hauff@reddit

just look at their stock, they know how to please their shareholders. So no they don’t run a company into the ground. BTW Hock was named on Meta board of directors, what do you think he will push ?

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Sparcrypt@reddit

… what are you talking about? No they don’t run *their* company into the ground. Just the ones they acquire. They’ve done this plenty of times already, VMWare is just the next in line.

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Alex_Hauff@reddit

the market says otherwise but it seems

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Sparcrypt@reddit

No the market says exactly what I'm saying, you just apparently don't understand what the market is.

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crazifyngers@reddit

This is Milton Friedman influence. There are still people that believe that corporations have a responsibility to their community.

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patmorgan235@reddit

We're starting to move away from Milton's view(at least publicly) https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/19/the-ceos-of-nearly-two-hundred-companies-say-shareholder-value-is-no-longer-their-main-objective.html

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

They lie...

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

Non-profit corporations were supposed to have a responsibility to the public, but when you look at how much of the money they collect actually goes to their "cause" as compared to the executive's salaries, bonuses, and perks, it's all a sham.

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Optional-Failure@reddit

Yes. And one of the ways to do that over the long term is by not focusing only on the short term while taking steps to invite competition to steal your customers at the first opportunity. Providing increased or stable value to customers so they remain your customers, recommend you to friends & associates, and don’t jump ship when another business enters your field with lower prices is a perfectly valid method of ensuring long term profitability and increased shareholder value. I have no idea why Redditors constantly insist on not understanding that.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Because we live in the age of NOW. DOPAMINE NOW. PROFITS NOW. ALL THINGS NOW. With very little forethought. Or in Broadpileofshit's case, this is literally their business model. Aquire, juice profits asap, move to next aquire. They don't give *two fucks* what happens to the products they aquire. They can't. PROFITS NOW demands it.

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westerschelle@reddit

And it is a bad thing. You are also wrong. They do not exist to make profits. VMware was already making profits. They exist do make ever increasing profits.

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ImpossibleParfait@reddit

That's a sweet way to reword exactly what I said.

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moosetherobot1@reddit

Look at Microsoft and AWS. AWS makes the profits because of subscription licensing, Microsoft has been doing the same. Give an azure free account, suck the free people in and lock them in. Then begin charging after some time. Once the users incur charges they lock themselves into a contract that was free but now costs money.

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shigdebig@reddit

Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

To add to your fairness post, VMWare was losing a lot of lic seats due to the industry's move to the cloud. Something had to change. So they will now centralize on their biggest customers and focus on their needs, cutting the cord on many of the other less profitable products and directions. It is what it is. Only time will tell if it's the right choice for the shareholders and the customers.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

Shareholders, lol the real ones jumped when they heard Broadcom was entertaining a deal.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

Exactly this.

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Box-o-bees@reddit

![gif](giphy|gaZ51cn7sUY4U|downsized)

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twnznz@reddit

"We like it when customers have no choice." I felt a great disturbance in the force. Like a thousand IT managers cried out “OH REALLY” and were suddenly silenced (by Gartner).

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vogelke@reddit

This is *lovely*.

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badlybane@reddit

If only they knew VMWARE doesn't have a monopolized market like they do with network ports. Karma is coming.

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lalalandjugend@reddit

Not really. Broadcom payed what, $61bn? If they can squeeze out 70 until it dies, including what they will get from whoever is dumb enough to buy the husk, they made a profit.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Yep, this is all that matters to them. Period. Some actuary ran the numbers and gave the greenlight to purchase. "Yep, we can milk this one!"

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moxyvillain@reddit

This was the first round and their marketing team went all chatgpt to church it up a little.

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inkarnata@reddit

> "You're going to give us money. Lots of it." "...Over, and over again.."

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WasteofMotion@reddit

Perfect.

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iwoketoanightmare@reddit

![gif](giphy|eCURldHXqks6tNyNGr|downsized)

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CaptainObviousII@reddit

Broadcom's takeover of VMWare is going about as well as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter and transition to X.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

I mean the optics are similar. The difference is that the big companies are essentially forced to keep using VMware since no other platform has all the bells and whistles and support, plus existing staff are experts on just VMware. Broadcom knows they can pump the profits to make up their investment quickly. We'll see if this goes the way of their other acquisitions in a few years I guess.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

Pretty much this. But I am also hearing talks about riding it out for the terms of the SnS (some are on 3 years) and then moving to Nutanix. Dell is also showing interest in partnering with Nutanix again and Adopting support for Proxmox. So things are going to be very interesting very soon here.

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McGregorMX@reddit

I would love to see proxmox get this business revenue, and really pursue some of the ambition they have.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

I've been working on Proxmox, cleaning up the deployment, admin, and engineering experience with a few of the devs...well for a while now. Been trying to get it as turnkey as VMware has been and I think we are mostly there now. I am currently working on a post node install script to get tooling for top, numactl, and performance tuning going...etc. and ... Dell is VERY interested in what I am going to show them out of one of my clients datacenters that have a full VDI deployment working on Proxmox 7.4 and Ceph, serving about 4,000 users. I have been also hounding Veeam to bring in API support for KVM, not just Proxmox, so that Nutanix also has a more robust backup solution. They are now working on that too. Vendors are listening. We just have to talk to them a few times.

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wyrdone42@reddit

Here's a huge item I haven't seen. Compatibility and integration with storage vendors. The "Datastore" being on shared fiber channel/iSCSI storage has been a hallmark of VMWare since the beginning. Ceph may compete with vSAN or an NFS mount, but it's not really there for a true san implementation.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

well, Ceph is Object based so its not really comparable to a traditional SAN due to protection groups and such. However, proper NVMe helps with some of that. In regards to performance, as long as you have enough OSD per NVMe, and enough NVMe drives per host I have never ran into any performance issues. It's all about appropriate scaling for that 4k-16k access layer. Its when you mix OSDs between 7.2k, 10k, 15k, is when it becomes really painful for bursty loads. But if we treated CEPH with a 2-Teir, per host, system(HDD/SSD) then it starts to scale out quite well against the likes of Nimble, but with 6-8nodes min...just like Nutanix :) My hopes with Dell is to bring OEM support on VXrail with Ceph. In my private lab tests with this, there is something there that needs to be seriously considered...But time will tell.

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wyrdone42@reddit

*Shudder* VXRail *Shudder* I lost three weeks of my life to dealing with a VXRail upgrade that went sideways. It should never take several days to put a host into maintenance mode.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

Yes, I had a similar experience too. But Also with the M1000 chassis. The common factor was a faulty CMC in both cases. This is why I absolutely hate Dells lifecycle controller. Its "ok" on rack servers, but its garbage on clustered node systems and their blade chassis. But we can test for that before going full deployment :)

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wyrdone42@reddit

Mine was the fact it was on "Quanta" 4 node hardware when it was under EMC before they merged with Dell.

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McGregorMX@reddit

This is awesome stuff. I'm very much a beginner when it comes to proxmox. I really appreciate efforts, like this, that are pushing proxmox, and making it a legitimate enterprise solution.

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MacGyver4711@reddit

Would be nice if a big company adopted and certified their hardware for Proxmox (I know it runs on whatever, but certification is always nice). Had a chat with my local Dell rep the other day as our vxRail rig is showing its age, and the likelihood of replacing it with a new vxRail is sort of like the ending of Dumb and Dumber with the Swedish bikini team... Looking a license costs this year it will be approx 5x compared to last year (yet to be confirmed), so skipping VMware Sns for the last year is tempting.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

This is exactly what I am talking with Dell Engineering about next week. Dell is entertaining a "Dell Enterprise repository" for Proxmox and Dell Power Edge servers. Making it a support option. Dell already has a Linux repo setup for Ubuntu and Deb, adding in application servicing on top could be simple for them based on how they scaled out already. [https://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/](https://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/)

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

> Dell is entertaining a "Dell Enterprise repository" for Proxmox and Dell Power Edge servers. That would be a big step...back when I was in an onprem shop HPE having certified VMWare bundles that you knew would work with their servers and VSphere "cookbooks" showing you how to build a supported config went a long way towards ease of use/support.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

Right? Say what we will about Dell/HP, but if one(or both) took this on it would be huge all around. I just prefer Dell for this right now personally.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

Used to be [FS.com](https://FS.com) ended that bullshit.

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WasteofMotion@reddit

Lol 'support'. More like a c level comfort blanket

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Tetha@reddit

How it holds up, mh. We're not the team in charge of those decisions, our sister team is in charge. But we're getting very close to the position that we can burn down a third of our VMs anytime and push them to a different HV within 2-3 days if we commit the team to it and the networks and storages are connected. And I fully expect that to happen within the next 15 month. Because we're the right troup of maniacs to do just that because our sister team needs that.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

So it's going well? You have to understand Twitter was hemorrhaging money before Musk's acquisition. I'm sure it has nothing to do with you hating free speech on the platform or the people that were unbanned. I smell a salty liberal.

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dispatch00@reddit

You should really do some self-evaluation and travel. Expand your little brain.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

No thank you, liberal.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

Already had to deal with the Branch Covidians telling me I need to be jabbed to work or travel. GFY

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supernot@reddit

Free speech….lol. That’s fucking rich.

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SithLordThalix@reddit

Very high effort, thanks!

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lordmycal@reddit

The real problem with VMware is that it's been the industry gold standard and now Broadcom has shit all over the trust that the community has in the product. They've killed it for the casual and homelab users by killing the free version, which makes it unlikely that people trying to learn virtualization are going to use vmware to understand it. Future admins are going to be learning on the competition's platform. The sad part is how dominant VMware has been and how nobody else has really stepped up to challenge their mantle. Hyper-V works, but it's overly complicated and Microsoft support is awful. Proxmox is getting there, but they are still a ways off from being an Enterprise product, especially with the lack of 3rd party support (backup providers in particular). And Nutanix just wants to sell you overpriced hardware. No competitor offers the stability, ease of use, ease of troubleshooting, and the support that VMware does. I really hope the competition sees this as a golden opportunity to invest in their product and to uses it to steal the crown.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

It wasn't just a gold standard. It was a god damn pillar of our industry. Even with all the other options out there, VMware was still mainstream because of the low cost bundles. My VCDX has been screaming since Broadcom loomed, now its on Fire. I am in meetings that are telling us that VMware is going to be a memory with in 5 years with the way things are going today.

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chicaneuk@reddit

How many products do you buy / license year on year and have absolute confidence you have the best product on the market. That's how I felt withVMware.. I never had any desire to shop around and try other products because vSphere just worked so well as a package. I went to numerous VMworlds, went to VMUG events, etc. I am genuinely devastated at what has happened to a company I admired and whose products I enjoyed using. We don't have our renewal costs yet but I am told from our licensing partner that the estimates are bordering on comical and that in no uncertain terms we cannot afford (and just won't on principal) be paying it and will be moving to new platforms.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

I have been with VMware since 2003 in one form or another, I am a VCDX holder I based my entire career about the full stack up to and beyond VMware, while helping to mature what VMware was to become. I have made a lot from my time I have vested into VMware, to say I am beyond devastated about Broadcom is the understatement of the century for me. This has me considering retirement. But sadly, I saw the writing on the wall as soon as BCM showed interest in VMware. I held out until the EU dropped their anti-trust case against the merger then hit the ground running towards KVM (RHEV, lets be honest...) which in my circles would be Nutanix for turnkey and Proxmox for hardware agnostics. Not a single one of my clients, references, or partners wants to adopt back into VMware after SnS expires nor spend any time on HyperV. Doesn't leave many options. Everyone will get renewals in about 8-12 days from now, I expect this sub, VMware's sub, many many news outlets, and all MSPs to be very busy figuring it out. Take this time to DR this away from VMware to whatever solution you need to move to. Once SnS is out, that's it, On-Prem is dead(who's going to run out of date software...). My biggest client's SnS expires in late November, I told them to decide on a 3y renewal last year instead of the typical 1year and here we are. The pre-quotes I got are not comical, they are insane at almost 400% and not a mistake I already vetted the portals with a personal contact at BCM.

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chicaneuk@reddit

I work in education and from everything I read we may even be in for a price hike that could be as much as 10x what we currently pay. I can't fathom it.. we aren't even expensive as a customer.. we were very self sufficient in troubleshooting issues and raised at most a support ticket a year! All they had to do was mint our license keys and we took care of ourselves. Why would you cut off that easy revenue?!

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

>I work in education and from everything I read we may even be in for a price hike that could be as much as 10x what we currently pay. I'll just say it, All Non profits, EDU, and "public service" discounts are gone. You are going to be expected to pay near the full """fair""" retail price like everyone else. BCM has decided that its going to lean in and leverage its top 500-600 clients and none of them are getting those deep 75% discounts. Best get your piss pants on and wear a poncho for the raining piss your management team is going to have over it.  > Why would you cut off that easy revenue?! Drugs, there has to be a lot of drugs involved in this. Its the only explanation.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

All Broadcom management *has* to be on insane amounts of uppers.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

I dont know about legal on that front, but MSFT pulled non-profit support for hospitals and nearly every medical group in 2020.

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EViLTeW@reddit

>I'll just say it, All Non profits, EDU, and "public service" discounts are gone. You are going to be expected to pay near the full """fair""" retail price like everyone else. If this is true, we'll probably only "renew" half our hosts and the other half will be migrated to Proxmox and/or K8s on bare-metal. The vast majority of our VMs are Linux, so moving to containerize things will be a big lift, but it's a lot easier to justify a year of effort than a 10+ times (based on other comments I've seen) bigger annual renewal cost.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

>The vast majority of our VMs are Linux, so moving to containerize things will be a big lift And proxmox has LXC built in.

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Adimentus@reddit

Veeam, from what I've heard at least, has been working on projects to integrate their backup systems to work with proxmox since this whole thing started happening. I'll start looking into that and see where they are at.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Please, dear IT Satan, this is all I ask...

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CallMeAnanda@reddit

I have a couple questions. why would you assume competition for VMware is something like Hyper-V? KVM/Qemu is the main competitor in my mind. Also, my understanding was that industry was moving to container based workloads anyway. I don’t see how anybody feels stuck here, unless you’re really in the hardware weeds.

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lordmycal@reddit

I think you underestimate the amount of software that runs on windows server.

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CallMeAnanda@reddit

Oh. Gross.

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dispatch00@reddit

> Microsoft support is awful I have no fucking idea how to even open a ticket for a Hyper-V issue. Luckily we run vSphere standard so we'll probably not be facing the astronomical increases some customers have been.

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wyrdone42@reddit

Until you want any other product than just vSphere Standard. No ability to buy Aria (aka vRealize suite products), NSX, vSAN, etc. You could probably buy Horizon, but that's because they spun it off into it's own company.

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Kind-Background-7640@reddit

Sadly Hyper-V doesn't really compare to VMware.

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zero0n3@reddit

It can if you compare VMware to SCVMM. The hyper visor code is close to what you get on azure as well. And you have easy integration with azure for any on prem workloads with windows admin center / SCVMM. If I’m going budget I’d take scvmm over nutanix especially if the majority of my workload is windows servers. Back office on S2D clusters, azure for desktops. Best of both worlds and reduced licensing costs. I mean you’re already paying for datacenter licensing for your hosts.

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5SpeedFun@reddit

PBS works great.

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Justsomedudeonthenet@reddit

It does work, but it doesn't have anywhere near the features of veeam. Like item level restore, support for cloud and object storage, and backing up physical machines (at least for windows).

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

Yeah agreed, I'm sure nutanix is looking at their pricing and seeing an opportunity. Proxmox would be stupid to not add weekend support and not start working with the big bcdr providers. I'm personally looking at scale kvm.

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CaptainObviousII@reddit

Yes, MS will definitely see some movement too.

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LaHawks@reddit

Considering that VMWare revoked all of our licenses without warning because we have the Plus version they're phasing out.... I'd rather deal with Elon at the point.

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barkode15@reddit

Just remember, they did this for your convenience. They've heard from their customers who have been clamoring to get screwed and they're just delivering on that wish. They thank us for helping line go up...

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evilcRaftKnife@reddit

I think Elon Musk is doing just fine. Like Elon, Broadcom are going to make a shit ton of money.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

Huh? Twitter has lost 70% of is value since he took over.

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NoSellDataPlz@reddit

It’s a privately held company. Its company value only matters to potential buyers at this point. Since I don’t see any evidence of someone buying X from Elon, the value of the company doesn’t really matter to anyone. Elon said he’ll bring the company public in a few years, let’s see it’s value then. Otherwise, VC and PE companies lie in order to inflate company valuation. I thought this was common knowledge amongst those of us who deal with companies steeped in M&As.

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westerschelle@reddit

I guarantee you, if he does he will not do an IPO. He will go public via a SPAC.

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bbqwatermelon@reddit

Ah but making money on it was not the goal of the buyout so it is not a useful parallel to Broadcoms takeover.

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evilcRaftKnife@reddit

And why the down vote? I never said I thought is was a good thing.

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evilcRaftKnife@reddit

What does that mean?

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tech2but1@reddit

I assume the people that downvoted this don't understand basic business. Elon might have completely fucked Twitter and essentially made it worthless but he's done that while making money off of it. It might only be worth 30% of what he paid for it but if has made the other 70% back in profit then it doesn't matter. Same applies to Broadcom, whether the company is worth anything or not and what they paid for it is irrelevant. They only bought VMWare for the subs, not for the value of VMWare itself.

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sofixa11@reddit

>It might only be worth 30% of what he paid for it but if he has made the other 70% back in profit then it doesn't matter. That's a big if. Considering the amount of advertisers that left, is that the case?

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tech2but1@reddit

I don't know, he made a big push and then also got everyone to buy a blue tick thing so before he royally fucked off advertisers and integrators (when he pulled the API) I guess he did make bank. Even so it's still making some money so I doubt he'll lose out overall. Plus it'll be a tax write off regardless! Whichever you look at it it won't have cost him anything.

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wyrdone42@reddit

VMWare Standard, while still obtainable can no longer be purchased with any other product. Effectively killing it. They are forcing you into a package with Enterprise Plus (which is 10x the price). All those MSP's out there? Yeah better look for another hypervisor FAST.

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tehreal@reddit

Is it actually 10x the price?

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wyrdone42@reddit

Current pricing: vSphere Standard per core: $50 (Was lower if you were on perpetual licenses and just paying SnS. Looking at some old statements as low as $20 per core) vSphere Foundation: $150 per core vSphere Cloud Foundation: $350 per core

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tehreal@reddit

That's yearly?

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wyrdone42@reddit

Yep hence the "Subscription" part.

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BlackSquirrel05@reddit

RIP VMWARE. Microsoft must be pissing their pants with glee.

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Cisco-NintendoSwitch@reddit

Nutanix eating well tonight. Recently did a RH event where the lab was migrating a server off VMWare into RH OpenShift idk if they’re seers but this was before the acquisition was announced.

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what_cha_want@reddit

RH has been talking up the move from VMWare to OpenShift since the Broadcom acquisition announcement, at least our account team has. OpenShift is also subscription based though.

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H3rbert_K0rnfeld@reddit

And very not inexpensive

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geeky217@reddit

https://veeamkasten.dev/ocpv-migration

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TEverettReynolds@reddit

Which is how business should work. Hell, maybe an Open Source solution could rise to the top in this vacuum...

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wyrdone42@reddit

A lot of vendors are adding support for Proxmox and OpenStack.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Absolutely love proxmox.

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GoodTough5615@reddit

I start wondering WHY we pay support for vmware our perpetual licenses and in 10 years we didn't opened ant case with them, and we had been stuck on 6 until recently. I'm going to speak next time that the renewal comes and our perpetual licenses will die, that probably we will just stop paying for support and keep the perpetual... even more now that broadcom is expected to not going to develop the product a lot.

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Exmond@reddit

Perpetual licenses are dead, straight up. You can't get them anymore.

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GoodTough5615@reddit

but we already have them and our old support contract is still going. I think it expires this year or next. I guess our perpetual are still us until the next renew, no?

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EViLTeW@reddit

As I understood it, the perpetual licenses are yours forever you just can't get support or software updates/patches without a maintenance agreement. So, part of moving to the new subscription model is that you agree to have your perpetual licenses revoked.

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unacceptable_00@reddit

This is not true. Subscriptions are new term right to use. They do not revoke your perpetual right to use the version of software released on or before the end of your support contract. There is no program with BRCM to trade in your licenses.

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EViLTeW@reddit

Good to know. Many comments on Reddit over the last week have made it sound like moving to subscription required surrendering your perpetual licenses.

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Exmond@reddit

As far as I know you have them, and you can run Vmware forever on them. (Please note, I don't have any official notice of that, please do not run your technology strategy off of reddit comments). If you hit an issue , say the purple screen of death, you are unable to get support through official vmware channels.

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mrhoopers@reddit

Perpetual licenses never made any business sense. I gave you $10 and for the next forever years you have to update and patch the software? This made sense in the early days because companies didn't do much patching. Security wasn't that big of a thing. Now it is. Broadcomm can go jump off a cliff for what they're doing but the subscription stuff? That's pretty much how it should have been for supported software, IMHO.

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torchat@reddit

It is, but keep perpetual and raise support costs. Separate feature and maintenance releases. Feature release is additional $$$, maintenance release is $.

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mrhoopers@reddit

Unfortunately, at some point you have to move to a new code base or something will happen requiring a version upgrade as opposed to a point one. As much as I hate subscriptions (for software, not car seats) they make sense.

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EViLTeW@reddit

>Unfortunately, at some point you have to move to a new code base or something will happen requiring a version upgrade as opposed to a point one. That's exactly what the person you replied to said, and it's what many software developers have done for decades. Perpetual license for use of a product, a support license for X years of point releases, and an additional license fee for major version upgrades. The problem with perpetual licenses is that if you do something stupid that the client doesn't agree with they get to continue using the product without paying you more money (but also without support/updates).

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mrhoopers@reddit

Poorly worded. I was attempting to agree and add to their point. I agree with your problem point.

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wyrdone42@reddit

Not only "You can't buy perpetual licenses" but also "You cannot retain a support contract for perpetual licensed products."

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random-user-8938@reddit

does anyone have any real life info on what pricing will look like? specially for smaller environments? the places that maybe needed to license 2 or 3 hosts with essentials or essentials plus? i know prices are going up a lot but what does that mean in real dollars.

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unacceptable_00@reddit

Generically, look to pay 3x a flat SnS renewal.

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asciishallreceive@reddit

The table on this post has been accurate to what I've seen from vmware. https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-podcasts-57/decoding-the-new-broadcom-vmware-vsphere-licensing-packages-for-small-deployments-6398 vSphere Essentials Plus Kit $35 per core *sold per 96-core kit, maximum of 3 hosts so the very bottom end is 96 cores @ $35/yr = $3360 -- even if your hosts don't have 96 cores combined.

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jjarboe01@reddit

Nothing but hot garbage from Broadcom. They fuck up everything they acquire. They don’t care about the smaller companies. They only care about big dollar figures. RIP VMWare, hope the devs all bail and built a product to compete that’s just different enough to not be illegal!!!!

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tech2but1@reddit

Isn't that how XCP-ng came about? Ex-Oracle engineers miffed with the Citrix buyout, or something like that?

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flo850@reddit

XCP-ng is a fork made by a french company (vates) not affiliated with oracle. More a reaction of citrix closing the source when we were already making xen orchestra for a few years

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CaseClosedEmail@reddit

Zoom is made by an ex Cisco employee. Remember Cisco certs for collaboration? Me neither

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Sparcrypt@reddit

They don’t need to bail… they were all fired already once the acquisition was finalised. Hopefully they’ve all moved off to the competition. I’d love to see something like Proxmox improve and become an option for enterprise for example.

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jjarboe01@reddit

You are probably right unfortunately for them. That’s typical of how that shit company operates. I would love to see them go to Proxmox and make it truly enterprise grade. VMware was great, but it will not be anymore

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Sparcrypt@reddit

Oh nothing probably about it.. they announced that they fired like 2000 engineers the day things kicked over :/.

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

All it takes is one person to be miffed enough to donate their time and next thing you know...

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

"Hi, this is VMware. We are going to talk about how we fucked you, why we fucked you, how we are going to keep fucking you" "Btw do you want lube?"

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

Pay by the second pricing on the lube, for sure.

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moxyvillain@reddit

"Enterprise bundle"

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Adimentus@reddit

extra $100k a year for lube

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

"per seat"

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geeky217@reddit

Per ring piece. 🤣

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wyrdone42@reddit

If I had an amount of disposable income, I'd order a 55 gallon barrel of lube to be delivered to Hock E Tan (Ceo of Broadcom) with the message "At least give them a reach around while you're screwing smaller companies."

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

...cant we just crowd source this? I'd donate 1k...just sayin....Fuck these guys.

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Pyrostasis@reddit

>Btw do you want lube? They offer it in their Volume Licensing bundle, minimum 50 gallon order. They give a discount if you order at least 10,000 gallons. You'll need the gallons.

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fresh-dork@reddit

can't i just get the barrel off of amazon?

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Pyrostasis@reddit

That off brand shit? Dude, if it doesnt have the Broadcom logo on it, you cant guarantee a friction free experience.

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fresh-dork@reddit

no friction? then what's the point?

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Pyrostasis@reddit

If you are getting friction you might enjoy yourself and that just doesnt belong in the new "Broadcom" experience

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ThirstyOne@reddit

Broadcom innovations brings you LaaS, Lube as a Service, now for only 27 times what VMware’s lube used to cost.

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Versed_Percepton@reddit

"and with a weird aftertaste"

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FujitsuPolycom@reddit

"Hey! We're shitty like every one else!" "Come on guys!?" "Guys?" Fuck broadass and every thing they touch.

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chicaneuk@reddit

I love how they repeatedly state how they moved to subscription because that's what the industry is doing. It's of absolutely zero benefit to the customer.. we all fucking know it.. it's just so you can guarantee a continual stream of income. If a one year license of the product was cheaper then I would be more supporting of the move.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

Right, sub? Fine, but at least make it affordable. They are not seeing the forest for the trees. They are trying to earn back their enormous investment as fast as possible without realizing that they're driving that repeatable income into the arms of competitors. They can't be that blind can they?

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United-Assignment980@reddit

"We’re putting all our R&D investment towards fewer offerings" I'm assuming they'll also be increasing the investment by a large margin, given the costs increases.

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rumandbass@reddit (OP)

"we have also outsourced our r&d to India where we only have to pay people 20% of what we pay them elsewhere*".

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Dushenka@reddit

A certain swiss company with about 100'000 employees already started planning to get off VMWare. Broadcam is shooting themselves in the foot big time.

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roztworek@reddit

They are in for a surprise if they think they will be able to squeeze the big boys easily. I work for a Fortune 200 company, and from what I've heard, discussions have already started(atm onprem is 80% Vmware/20% Hyper-v). They will follow the same path as Oracle. In just two years, any Oracle Java software is forbidden, with Oracle databases mostly gone (a few strugglers left, all are in the process of decommissioning).

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overworkedpnw@reddit

This absolutely screams “an MBA wrote this nonsense hoping that if they threw enough buzzwords at it that nobody would notice the fuckery in action”

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RunitOnce992@reddit

Honest question, who do they think they are fooling here?

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dat510geek@reddit

If you are going hyperv, all engineers will just ensure you brush up on you az-800/801 and az-104, exams optional. That should cover you. Ill find the old courseware codes for scvmm at some point too.

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SGKz@reddit

>Business model transition to subscription licensing which is the standard in the industry Ayy lmao what a bunch of clowns 🤡

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SGKz@reddit

That sounds like a really bad standard. Good for profit, not so good for customers.

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boostwtf@reddit

VMware: Business Simplification (these nickel and dime customers can all fuck off) Portfolio Innovation (why are there 3000 products ffs, let's make it... 3) Ecosystem Standardization (we gonna charge you rent on your rent)

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confused_patterns@reddit

God even the new clip art is bullshit.

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sonic10158@reddit

What company will Broadcom eat next?

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Jug5y@reddit

I read one paragraph and now all I can see is static snow

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fitz2234@reddit

I started using Linux in its early days when I was a teenager. Slackware 1.x days. Windows 95 comes out, and after what MS did to OS/2 and all the FUD regarding Linux, I truly hated MS and Bill Gates, just really thought it was true evil. Flash forward to today. MS for its flaws still, isn't what I'd call evil. But I sure AF would Broadcom total scum of the earth.

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-rwsr-xr-x@reddit

I still go back to this one quote I found somewhere on a related thread in one of the subs: > _They (Broadcom) just created a huge increase in order volume from their top customers just by spending 61 billion dollars to tank VMware and on prem computing._ > If you're a VMware customer in the top 600, they make money off of you directly. If you're not dealing with them direct, they sell chips that enable another top customer to run your workload._ > _Checkmate. Broadcom now profits off of 99.99% of all IT spend in the world._ There's prior art here with how they handled SAV. This feels very much the same.

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fonetik@reddit

There was a good way to accomplish this, but somehow Broadcom managed to make it a shitshow. In general, I like the idea of focusing on the core products and getting away from EUC and Airwatch. Theres a ton they could do with that and a great excuse to make a big release out of it. What have they done? Caused a panic for the bosses and created uncertainty in their core product. The only thing the bosses know is it’s probably going to cost more. I don’t really give a damn. I’ll make money running VMware or whatever comes next. Not sure why this sub is so angry. This is good for engineers.

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dirtkayak@reddit

Any Technician, Sysadmin, or Manager that was an advocate for them. \*\* poof\*\* gone.

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jmhalder@reddit

Prashanth Shenoy, blink twice if you're being held against your will. You've only worked there a year and a half. Too soon to jump ship?

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NameEnvironmental358@reddit

Broadcom: ![gif](giphy|TgFjctg9Y12728LTZs)

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terribilus@reddit

Written by George Carlin?

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Nestornauta@reddit

Not defending, but we use VMware as a commodity (no advanced features, no vSAN, no complicated networking), we automate everything with Ansible, the features match the cloud foundation license to the teeth, we were lucky, renewal was around 30K less than last year, I understand not everyone will fall in that bucket and if we had to move to the next tier renewal would cost 50K more than last year. I guess we will be riding the Cloud fundamentals and not using any advanced features. Not much innovation from VMware for us. Lol

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K3rat@reddit

Does anyone aside from marketing and sales people actually read the whole article? I got 4 sentences in and can tell that they were trying to change the narrative.

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Rhythm_Killer@reddit

Business Transformation: A Strategy Summarized in One Word - Greed Fixed it for you there guys

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Chevron7Nice@reddit

It's crazy how dumb of a play this is - I've been in meetings with vendors all week. We're a small shop and they've been telling me all their small and big fish are actively planning their exit to hyper-v.

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issa62@reddit

This is the issue someone in the USA bocked Broadcom buying the other big chip company, so they took their billions and bought all software companies they can starting with one of the biggest software patent holder CA software and they keep going.

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issa62@reddit

I used to work for a company that got aquired by ca software and then from Broadcom, it was a shit show.

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Sufficient_Focus_816@reddit

Maybe there will be a positive outcome with improved handling of audio through the virtual machines with broadcoms background... /s

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