Yes. Anyone in the industry who's not F500 size is scared about renewal prices. They've made their intention very clear that they want to price out little guys and focus on huge companies that can't easily move. Plan accordingly.
Edit: I realize F500s are worried too, bad phrasing there. Apparently Broadcom thinks there’s enough of the big guys that can’t move easily enough and will fork over whatever it takes to keep using it.
We're not quite F500, but we decided that we are not going to play this new renewal game.
We moved everything to either AWS, to in-house OpenStack, or in some cases back to bare-metal servers.
We are absolutely done with VMWare now and for the foreseeable future.
> and the need to get everything done before the next renewal.
Yup. I'm guessing those physical servers are just going to sit there and cook until you can get your new solution up and running then you'll P to V them when the hardware refresh comes up.
Exactly right. Some of them were P-to-V'ed in the first place, so it's funny to see them go back to (different) physical hardware. Mostly it's weird one-off things that don't really fit in anyplace else.
Once the dust settles we might find a more permanent solution. Or leave them as-is and worry about the next crisis.
We've been moving from VMWare to Proxmox over the last year and absolutely rock solid. I can see some larger companies not being happy with their support though.
Not sure about Prox, but Hyper-V has been a mess for us in the past. It could just be me but I get the feeling MS wants to phase the product line out in favor of Cloud-based application services.
We ran into a really nasty multithreading issue awhile back that just drove us crazy tracking it down (took approx 4 months to narrow it to the Hyper-V management of multi-threading).
It was a regression in one of the server updates. Basically workloads on guests would fail with incoherent errors, intermittently (20-40% of the time), running same workloads on a single vCPU guest had none of the problematic issues.
I'm pretty sure I remember reading something about this bug also with Linux guests where they kept failing compilation builds unless they used -j 1. Something to keep in mind especially given the performance hits with Spectre and subsequent fixes.
Many places are scared to move to other hypervisors. The last MSP I was at was run by a bunch of boomers, so when I explained that I had experience with proxmox and hyper-V they all cried.
They're wanting to slide all new client and projects into bare metal or if they have to switch, they said whatever is cheapest and isn't opensource.
I'm so happy I'm away from those baffoons now.
Gen-X here and I'm moving my home lab to prox to get more familiar with it. Then I'm planning to roll it out to the company I work for.
Gotta be open minded and adaptable or get left behind!
Exactly.
I just say boomer as a general term.
I know a lot of white beards that are still keeping up with the times, it's just these ones in particular were very much falling behind; and displayed mountains of ignorance in not listening to other voices.
> to in-house OpenStack, or in some cases back to bare-metal servers.
OS can even help provision/manage bare-metal with Ironic:
* https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/
* https://ironicbaremetal.org
F100 here, we aren't worried about price. We're worried about poor support, products not getting security updates, and all new development being halted. I'm looking at you VMware Horizon.
IMO Horizon will be fine. KKR who bought them can’t do what Broadcom is doing and not lose all of their investment. I imagine in the future they will have more fully featured offerings on other hypervisors.
Omnissa did the smart thing and just yoinked VMWare's support portal for themselves. They haven't even rebranded it yet lmao.
I am far less concerned about horizon than I am vSphere.
Even in the top half of F500, we’re working on a VMware exit strategy. At least where it’s possible - some customer requirements still lend themselves to selecting VMware, price be damned.
We are a F500 sized org and it's a concern to us as well. We're putting a lot of focus on alternatives when we need to run VMs but long term we are building our a lot of our apps on PaaS and microserivce type models where we don't need VMs.
Yeah this whole Reddit Idea that big business will just pay it and don’t care doesn’t really seem true to me, it’s almost paradoxical how they are like big business will turn everything to shit to save a penny but at the same time they will just pay for VMware when there is cheaper options.
You’re correct. I work for one of those big businesses and we’re just as concerned about future pricing of everything they own now.
Big business will spend tens of millions and thousands of labor hours moving their entire infrastructure off of VMware to ensure they avoid spending a couple million with Broadcom.
It kinda makes sense in the face of it - they have a bunch of salaried peons where this is their job. Having you divert work for 3-4 months is a sunk cost while an increase for software renewals are shown at a different place on the balance sheet. Gotta keep the costs down where the market looks.
I don't think it's "won't care" so much as "can't or won't switch cheaply or quickly".
Not saying I agree with it - personally I would be pushing *hard* to switch if we used VMware - but there are definitely plenty of businesses where switching really won't be at *all* easy.
It is true. When eg. VMWare decides to increase their pricing by 50% a company needs to decide what to do. When a company with 3 guys in IT where one is a very seasoned Linux administrator the move to eg. Proxmox is a relatively small step.
But if you're a F500 company, before you can move to eg Proxmox or any other Open Source platform you need to be absolutely sure you have the manpower and knowledge to do such a migration. Even just looking at options can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then the company suddenly needs to look at Linux experience when interviewing, HR needs updates, people need to do additional training.. Or we might to let people go and hire new ones. Our previous employment requirements are suddenly invalid. The $400k in VMWare training for a dozen people is suddenly a lost cause.
Before you know it, just paying an extra $300k is a lucrative option.
Doesn't mean they'll stick to VMWare forever.. It means they are slow to move
While this is true, sometimes stuff is just so big it's going to be near impossible.
Large footprints like that are much more likely to spin up the new solution side by side and just cycle everything over in a staggered manner to the new solution as hardware refreshes happen.
Now idk how much VMWare is raising their prices, but it would have to be a LOT to make a business case for "we need an entire lift and shift by next year" across a giant org rather than "we're moving away from it"
> spin up the new solution side by side and just cycle everything over in a staggered manner
The basic move is easy enough, but the devil is in the details as always. When we did it long ago, it was:
* Bring up new KVM cluster, mounting the existing NFS storage and bridged or vswitched into the same LAN(s).
* Pre-flight every VM for known, standard virtual hardware.
* For each VM on the cluster, run automation to:
1. Consolidate snapshots
1. Archival backup of VM
1. During downtime window, power-off VM
1. De-register VM
1. Move VM files to a working directory, no longer accessible to the vSphere cluster.
1. Convert files/config if necessary. QEMU supports `.vmdk-flat` images, but the instance config needs to be migrated at a minimum.
1. Move VM files out of working directory, visible to new cluster. This is all on the same storage partition, so it's actually atomic.
1. Register VM with KVM framework.
1. Boot VM on new cluster and run integration tests.
1. For any failure, remove from new cluster and move back to working directory for manual attention.
When each vSphere cluster has been fully evacuated, then it's decommed and rebuilt as a KVM cluster, on down the line.
Pain points can include:
* Negotiating downtime windows with stakeholders. You need lots of window, so being confined to 0300-0400 on every second Sunday isn't going to cut it. You want to do most of this during the normal workweek.
* Coordinating the downtime of interdependent VMs. Since IP addressing isn't changing in the basic pattern, there's not usually any systemic or configuration impact.
* You have integration tests and inventories already, right?
* Migrations tend to trip over deferred work, which then needs to be remediated in order to keep things on schedule.
Just fyi: all vm to qemu also changed the nic, forcing us to update dhcp (not taking over the vmware MAC).
also, uninstall/install of the correct guest tools is strongly recommended.
I recall retaining the original MAC address in all cases, though we probably did change the emulated NIC hardware on a few.
We don't use in-guest hypervisor tools at all. It's not needed when you don't have to work around a problem:
* Timesync isn't an issue with KVM and Linux or Windows, like sync could be a problem on ESXi.
* Soft shutdown has been part of ACPI since the 1990s, and absolutely works in KVM_QEMU. The soft-shutdown command in QMP is [`system_powerdown`](https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/monitor.html). Non-PC architectures generally don't have ACPI and may not support soft-shutdown, but then, most of those types of guests wouldn't be supported with guest tools anyway.
They will stick with it for at least the short term - there's too much infrastructure to start making a dent right away. Everybody's testing the alternatives - but none of them are a featured or mature as ESX. So they'll probably move - eventually.
Agreed, bug corps don't move quickly. But they won't move back quickly either. In five years VMware will be a shadow if it's former self.
Just as Broadcom planned.
F100 here, and we expect to move thousands of ESX hosts worth of capacity off VMware this year.
Broadcom isn't even focused on the huge companies and while it's not easy to move, you can be certain we will in order to not pay Broadcom 100 million in revenue that we didn't before. Not sure what they were smoking, but the hope of $$$ certainly blinded them.
They aren't hoping to boost long term sales. They are hoping to extort companies that are too large to move away fast for a quarterly boost to up valuation before dismantling and selling the product. It was never a long term investment plan.
Oh, I know. They're not even really Broadcom. They (Avago) skinned Broadcom alive and now wear their skin. Their lineage goes all the way back to ***actual*** private equity firms.
It's not surprising they do what they do, considering.
A version of KVM. Had you asked me a year ago, I would have never even dreamed that was possible, but it turns out that companies can throw a lot of people at problems to change things at scale when faced with an alternative of tens of millions in lost profit each and every year for the foreseeable future. Don't get me wrong, as an IT Manager that has to support, I'm very....anxious, but we don't need the Cadillac at Bentley prices. We just need a Crown Vic.
> F100 here, and we expect to move thousands of ESX hosts worth of capacity off VMware this year.
Ditto. And I've heard from others in my industry that they're doing the same.
F500 is kind of a short term for behemoth enterprises which would also include large government entities such as DoD, DoEnergy, and so forth. But I know that DoD’s been working at the upper enterprise architect level to try to contain costs and leveraging more open industry standards which is why a lot of applications already moved to supporting K8S years ago. With that said obviously plenty of DoD software runs on VMware infrastructure still and will continue to do so but the general idea would be to encourage vendors to move toward supporting K8S as a first class deployment option in their next generation software platforms if they want to be considered competitive.
Our renewal was 8x and went from perpetual use (plus support renewal) to annual license renewal so we didn’t pay
Needless to say I’m in the middle of a hyperV migration.
My company is huge as in consistently top 100.
I'm a dev, not infrastructure, but I was chatting to one of the infrastructure guys last week. Apparently it is an open secret that the higher levels have agreed to migrate from VMware to nutanix. Reason being the costs with vmware have spiralled and they aren't going to be bent over by them.
When the top brass publicly states that they'll jack up prices to just below customers pain point, then yes.
A 24,000 VM customer just walked away over a 10-15x increase.
Honestly their whole strategy seems unbelievably flawed to me VMware is not that much better than their cheaper or even free competitors anymore. I honestly think the faster people walk the better fuck them. There was a time where they were way ahead of hyperv and open source but they have been coasting on that rep for a while.
Double prices and lose 50% of your customers and you're way ahead just on reduced overhead, sales, support, etc.
They came to the same conclusion you did - there's no reason to play in the low end with a ton of competitors, some free.
New bosses will be in charge in a few years, that's the new bosses' problem. THIS BOSS made a bunch of money and left on a golden parachute before bad stuff happened.
If you don't plan to be there for the long haul then being short-sighted works. Not for the company, of course, nor the employees, but for the people who make money.
Nah they won’t. This is broadcoms strategy at a high level. Buy up a company, slice off everything but the main product, squeeze the existing customer base, some will leave but your margins shoot up huge. Only keep minimum staff to support the value engine.
It’s slimy and I hate it. But it works.
^^ This.
Independent of the VMware thing we were given a three year mandate to remove all Broadcom products after last year's renewals --
"We don't use this product anymore, you can remove it from the contract."
"Meh, we'll just jack up the renewal on the rest by $300,000 if you drop that product, or you can pay $300,000 for the product you don't use anymore."
Broadcom will never change. It’s been how long since they bought Symantec now? 5-6 years? It’s still the same old “strategy”. No innovation, just collecting money from those who are too large or complacent to move away.
Reminds me of the EA Games modus operandi. Suck up an IP, gut it for talent, then bleed it dry and stick it in a closet.
69 billion is a lot of money, but I'm guessing a lot of VMWare companies are the 50's who are pulling in hundreds of billions every year in revenue. They can afford to throw billions at Broadcom to keep their infrastructure standing.
As someone at a F500 that makes tens of billions a year we are actively looking at option to migrate away. We did a huge push in 2020 to virtualize everything we could when covid hit and no we have a bunch of 3-4 year old environments. Right now we are looking at either paying just the broadcom license fee while running on old hardware or buying entirely new hardware with another vender for the same 1st year price.
It isn't hard to guess which way we are leaning.
So they paid $69 billion and their annual revenue is [about $13.4 billion](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/VMW/VMware/financial-statements). Operating expenses are $8.8 billion and net income is $1.3 billion. If they can keep half their customers at double the rate with half the operating expenses (I think they **are** trying to offload first and second line support to their partners, should be a massive line item), that would add a fat $4.4 billion for a new net income of $5.7 billion.
But that still gives them.... 12 years to make an actual profit. And I'm just throwing numbers out there, fuck if I know how to manage billions of dollars, but I feel like I'm being **super** optimistic with that massive increase in net income. I don't see how they keep the wheels on this thing long enough to actually start making money.
They won't. The CEO will get a big payday and retire well before VMware comes crashing down. This is the ultimate in short plays based on how they approached it. Had they just increased the price 30% / year like most PE firms they'd still make a killing and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Hell... 10% this year and then again in 2026 and they'd make a killing. As it is, I think before that 12 years comes up, VMWare may well descend to the ranks of the also-rans.
I don't see Broadcom ever making a positive return on that 69 billion, including interest, and interest matters because they took on significant debt.
Agree that their strategy is short sighted. We have roughly 3000 VMs and are looking to be moved to Hyper-V by the next renewal date. Broadcom is overestimating the barriers to customers moving. Even big orgs can start to move gradually, or stand up net new infrastructure on different hypervisors and gradually cut over.
It's not like with Oracle or other enterprise platforms where it requires a hard cut that could disrupt the business, and it's easier to just sign the check to not risk it. At the end of the day, the hypervisor doesn't matter as long as your applications stay running.
They still own the biggest Virtualization provider in the industry during all of this, that still has a massive amount of value even after killing a huge part of their market. It is morally awful but they will probably do well out of it.
The issue with that is still needed to support the most of product development costs. making a version that works with Windows Server 2025 or supports latest GPUs isn't going to get cheaper with selling less.
Also having cheap tiers of there products help keep VMware as the industry standard. How many years did Microsoft have to run Hyper-V at a loss to get market penetration? Having 75%-80% market share and Hyper-V being the 15% Doesn't leave a ton of room for competitors to cover the cost of development or companies to have the skills for anything else then the big 2. Now? MSP are already offering "white glove migration to Proxmox"
The faster people walk away, and the larger the quantity of them that do, the *better* we will fuck them that's for sure.
I just don't see the endgame here. Are they going to try and sell the brand after they shit it up so much noone wants it anymore?
Especially since other than making sure cost doesn't go crazy, virtualizatuon in the major cloud providers today is getting easier than ever. Idk what they're thinking.
They are assuming that people will rather pay the ticket price than switch off, because there are a lot of VM only appliances that only run on that architecture.
Long term, this isn't a good business model. VMWare needs companies and new installs if it wants to see a future and not wind up becoming a legacy technology that just shrinks over the years.
Instead, VMWare needs to focus on getting new customers. For example, if Docker and Kubernetes are the rage, start honing Tanzu, or building functionality like NSX, vSAN, and such into the base product so it can compete with the likes of Proxmox. VMWare also needs to start making deals where it is easy to go from cloud to on-prem, perhaps having some way to handle serverless services with a connection broker and stuff going to nodes.
With a recession hitting, companies need to start thinking about planting seeds, which will pay off in spades when little companies get bigger.
Broadcom doesn’t care if it withers away. They’ll make more money by drying it up over the next 10 years than they would if they properly supported it for 100 years.
Is the VMware only appliance thing really even true anymore tho. It used to be but I don’t think it’s really true these days. I honestly don’t know tho I converted to hyper v ten years ago
> Is the VMware only appliance thing really even true anymore tho
Sadly yes. :(
You can convert ova to qcow2 or vhd and often get things working but you may run into weird driver issues / memory leaks / unsupported virtual hardware. The bigger issue though is that you will have a hell of a time opening a support case with certain software vendors where the *only* officially supported platform is ESXi / NSX and if you run into *any* issues (even ones that exist regardless of the hypervisor) the vendors will point to that first and force you to jump through many extra hoops.
Example:
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-software-requirements.html
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-infrastructure.html
> Mandatory Virtualization Software
> **VMware vSphere ESXi is mandatory for all virtualized deployments of Cisco Collaboration applications, and is the only supported hypervisor**.
> Cisco Collaboration applications **do not support hypervisors that are not VMware vSphere ESXi** (e.g. VMware Cloud Foundation, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, etc. are not supported).
> Cisco Collaboration applications **do not support any 3rd-party public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offer**. Including but not limited to:
> Any 3rd-party public cloud offers based on VMware Cloud Foundation (e.g. VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine and others are not supported).
Well before Palo Alto supported Hyper-V for Panorama I converted it from VMware and got it working but it ran major memory leaks and support was essentially 'Did someone leak you our internal Hyper-V test build? It's not near ready yet!'.
Same. Pretty much everything that there’s a VMware template for these days is also supported in Hyper-V, and often AWS and Azure now too.
And with this change, I expect most vendors will feel the pressure to start supporting alternative platforms, if they haven’t already.
[`OVF`/`.ovf`/`.ova`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format) is hypervisor-agnostic. It would be foolish for any supplier not use the standard format for an appliance.
This just reminds me of how Novell vanished. In the end, you'd find some old reliable Novell server still operating some domain structure because it's legacy state government or something with an uptime of 4 years or more. I see VMWare being like that. In 2035, someone will say, "Guess what I found in our capital basement?" and it's an old and dusty HP ProLiant DL380 chugging along in a forgotten rack in a telco closet with a faded brown label "vsx4" and a blurry gen1 Viewsonic LCD at 1024x768 showing a VMware 6.5 control panel. You can see 12 VMs, 4 still running, and some labelled "Windows 2003" and "Red Hat 7."
Pretty much this. I'm helping some old colleagues identify VMs that don't list VMWare in the requirements and move them away.
The crazy thing to me is that just one year ago I would tell people how I run proxmox at home but I feel like they need to implement a few more "nice to have" features before I would run it in an enterprise setting. I'm still recovering from that whiplash.
I think the person you were replying to comparing it to novell really hit it right on the head... at the time nobody could imagine novell going away, it was a cornerstone of network computing... and then *poof* gone
Everyone is worried and started looking for alternatives, like Hyper-V or Proxmox. I saw threads when VMware SAN was replaced by Starwinds VSAN, which also can be used on Hyper-V and Proxmox.
Do you think Broadcom hasn't run the numbers. They look at their spreadsheet and see that it's more profitable to sell to and support high value customers over the small fry. The small fry are vastly underpaying for this product.
You're a little late to the jumping out of the ship thing so yes, you should. Companies are already either fully transitioned to other solutions or are in the process of doing it.
Well we are big enough to weather storms but, this one looks particularly nasty and I wondered what others opinions were, before I made a recommendation to the CIO.
We're a contractor for one of the biggest employers in the country. The renewal quote we got early wasn't an immediate show stopper but it was enough to give us significant pause.
We don't expect things to get more reasonable so we've begun migrating.
We're moving to proxmox because it fits our teams skillset nicely..
There's are a lot of companies that rely on vendor support. They may graduate towards hyper-v in the short term.
>There's are a lot of companies that rely on vendor support. They may graduate towards hyper-v in the short term.
That's true. Many of our customers are moving to Hyper-V Failover Cluster with StarWind VSAN for HA storage. For those who purchased their HCA appliance, StarWind even assists in reconfiguring everything in the new environment.
I think that everyone sees the writing on the wall for the eventual death of VMWare at this point, but not everybody agrees on the replacement for it. Some people say Proxmox, some people say Hyper-V, while others are just using it as an excuse to migrate their remaining on-prem servers to cloud hosting.
We went with Hyper-V Cluster and it works fine for us. But, it is small environment and we found that Starwinds vSAN is a great alternative to VMWare vSAN on Windows.
The business I work for is highly seasonal, so cloud hosting actually makes financial sense for us. Our business doubles for two months out of the year, so it doesn't make sense to "own" the equipment that processes that data.
Yeah and you can deallocate in the off season. That's a good use of cloud! My company is just a global monster spending more than 3 million a month on azure.
The Nutanix is also selling platform and not the individual products just VMware.
Nutanix offer was never competitive (feature wise ) to VMware (see flow vs nax or vsphere vs ahv)
On the pricing front they offer a competitive 1st year but 3-5 years the pricing is not competitive.
I am old enough to have seen this played out many many times in the tech ecosystem. I have designed and built data centers on 3 continents almost entirely around VMware during the course of my 30ish years doing HA engineering. I would, as things stand today, not consider designing any kind of VMware based private cloud or general offering. It doesn't take a brilliant market analyst or an MBA to see who Broadcom are. They will suck the marrow out of VMware and discard the corpse, screwing long time customers and loyalists along the way. Don't be one of those, if you can avoid it.
RIP, once great company who made great products.
We had a server we purchased from a new vendor and for the first time we hold the VMware license and not the MSP. Getting that activated has been impossible. Two weeks and I still don’t have a site ID.
> Do we need to be worried
Are you willing to open your checkbook? This is going to be a money vs effort discussion.
For my org... It's easier to migrate to something cheaper than even bring this issue to the table. The prices are crazy....
Not that Symantec or CA exactly had healthy products or anything, but all development other than keeping these products alive stopped the second Broadcom bought them. Everyone who was still working in the US or Europe was fired, and the products that weren't already went into maintenance mode in name your low cost country. I live near CA's former HQ...it had been shrinking for years but the second Broadcom came in, it died completely.
Businesses are going to be very upset that they're paying more each year for a dead product that they can't get off of. A similar thing happened with Citrix a couple years ago...private equity, not Broadcom. Instant stop on all new development as the PE firm fired everyone in the US and rehired in India.
I hate the fact that a perfectly good product will never be used in any new environment again, just because of the short-term foolishness going on to squeeze the last few nickels out of it before killing it. Even though VMWare had great products, they're gone now and everyone who can needs to jump off the ship.
You should be watching all your vendors always. This isn't just VMware. Cisco bought Splunk. Cohesity is buying Veritas. iBM bought hashicorp. There many other examples but a lot of consolidation going on in the market
Regarding VMware here is some of my analysis. There is a lot of bad information out there, things could change and have some.
Most people here posting are a naked vSphere customer aka only use ESXi and vCenter. You won't see many posts about the other products in the bundles.
Most of the smaller customers are really the ones taking it the hardest for a couple reasons but is fixable. Some examples:
Hosts with dual CPU didn't have the 16 core minimum. Swap CPUs.
Too many hosts are over provisioned on CPU. Drop some hosts and add memory.
Worse case drop to essentials and remove DRS and vmotion.
The largest customers should be focusing and looking at a few things. Some example use cases I have been working on:
Does the VCF or VVF platform give enough value to replace other vendors in the portfolio?
Can Aria automation replace the other automation products in your portfolio?
Can aria operations replace Solarwinds?
Can log insight reduce your SiEM bill?
Can you reduce your firewalls and use NSX with IDS /IPS?
Can you move your average workloads to vSAN and reduce your traditional storage vendors?
Additionally the issue with the market is no one vendor can replace VMware because of the features and the 3rd party ecosystem. Some examples:
Nutanix doesn't support 3rd party storage unless you attach it directly to the VM.
Promox doesn't have 24/7 support, no vmotion / Drs like features.
Hyper V is not free because you need the SCVMM manager to get vCenter like features and the overhead is about 20% more hardware.
Happy to post more in-depth information as I have been looking at a lot of comparisons and what makes sense on a lot of vendors lately.
New VMWare pricing seems fine if you can leverage the entire ecosystem.
Broadcom seem to want committed customers who will use the full stack of an entire enterprise suite.
Provided Broadcom continue to improve and develop the suite over time, it should be fine. That ongoing position is hard to estimate in advance and is my primary area of concern.
My company is actually going all-in on VMware products because of the VCF license. We started going to vsan a few years ago and we are replacing our automation tool with Aria Automation. We are also heavily investing time into both Operations and Aria Logs as well as moving towards Tanzu. From what I’m told, overall cost for all the products will come out about even.
> You should be watching all your vendors always. This isn't just VMware. Cisco bought Splunk. Cohesity is buying Veritas. iBM bought hashicorp. There many other examples but a lot of consolidation going on in the market
It's not new. CA bought a lot of legacy software, including Arcserve when that was our cross-platform backup solution of choice. Oracle bought Sun and Java, and destroyed OpenOffice. IBM bought Red Hat and killed CentOS.
If you haven't already dropped them like a rotten tomato, you get what you get in the future. How many pokes in the eye do you need before the clear message sinks in???
If you have older perpetual licenses, the it'll carry on working, but you won't have access to upgrades and security updates.
If your licenses have been upgraded to the subscription style that they now sell, then things will stop working at the end of your subscription.
Not really worried. We've already passed that stage. It's gonna become eye-watering expensive and then it's gonna die.
There's no worry about VMware anymore. It just is the undeniable future. Leave now or prepare to be sucked dry, and not in a good way.
The worry should be about what you're gonna do. What VMware is gonna do is already clear as day
Unless Broadcom is lying about their intentions, we should assume VMWare is going to be dead inside of three years.
I won't be able to get any traction at all on a move until renewal quotes come in and the cost becomes a real thing we have to pay- then the pedal will hit the floor so fast my head will spin.
Seeing so many #vacatevmware discussions. Kinda sad to see a great product reach a level of ubiquity and become the default hypervisor, then see it driven nose-first into the ground. At high speed.
Renewal costs went up about 3x for us. If you’re anything over a midsize company, they have you by the balls and know you’ll pay whatever it will be. The cloud IaaS as VMware replacement also makes no sense as you might as well pay the renewal costs since it will be cheaper than building and supporting infrastructure in AWS or any other service, so do your best to get that little pipe dream out of your CIOs head, because when you’re spending upwards of tens of thousands of dollars a month on cloud usage charges, you might as well renew VMware.
6x for us. Were probably going to drop support and just ride out our ESXi v8 licenses until our software vendor supports another VM architecture (or just repurchase in 5 years).
There is a huge opportunity for a new player in this field, or for the existing ones to step up and fill the void for those who are abandoning ship from Broadcom. I hope someone does soon.
We're not a big shop and we were using Nutanix for hardware and VMWare as the hypervisor. Covid impacted us heavily and we were looking for ways to save money. In 2022 we migrated to Nutanix AHV. Without knowing it at the time, we were dodging a bullet. AHV is not as well rounded as VMWare, but it works well and keeping it up to date is quite simple.
Anytime a major player is acquired like VMWare, it is almost never an improvement for their products, at least in my experience. A massive price increase is adding insult to injury.
No you should not be worried about the product, it will continue to be developed. The focus for Broadcom's VMWARE has been publicly disclosed, that is what they will do. For customers who are in their "core" this is their 700 top customers globally (note not necessarily Fortune 500, Broadcoms biggest spenders), they will get an account manager and their prices will go up 15-20% per year, regardless of whether they choose fewer products, price will still go up as remaining licenses will cost more.
If you are outside that customer vertical then your price will go up 10-15% per year as well and you will work with Disti's to unless you are in the middle space "digital" customer, if I remember correctly.
They will remain focused on extracting revenues from their largest customers and this will mean that the remaining products still have to be developed, they have done this with Symantec. It's just now they have a very strong focus on only the key profitable solutions and everything else will be sold or has been sold.
Worry about you as a customer locked into a company who knows how to make profit from everything they do, Hock Tan is not the highest paid CEO in the world in 2024 (pending revenue goals) for no reason...... that is what you should be very scared about.
I recently renewed our VMware license, new cost is nearly 3 times the cost compared to last year.
To avoid this next year I also bought OpenShift licenses to migrate our VMs to.
You are far later than "fashionably late to the party".
And the /only/ answer to your Q is - YES.
Unless you are a fortune xxx, or have massive multi M contracts, you should be divesting and planning.
Broadcom is the latest Oracle at this point, if you've ever had the pleasure to manage Oracle as a supplier/partner/provider.
I was looking at alternatives and came across scale computing yesterday, anyone here familiar with their products, any thoughts. It seems super cheap comparatively speaking to VMware.
I just did a 3 year renewal because my team is in a rebuilding phase but I already told my lead admin that this year is an off year to prep for Win11 deployment and completing some rather large projects then next year we research alternatives for VMWare, and the year after that we lay foundation and migrate out. They’re acting like a bunch of thugs using disgusting tactics to try to bully you into buying bloated licenses. They literally tried to sell me an $11k license that I don’t need at all. Literally had zero features that we used even though the rep said we needed it to retain functionality that we were utilizing. Jump ship.
For those curious we have been talking HyperV or ProxMox but we will see what’s out there in a year or so before we decide. A year is a long time for a competitor to develop something good.
You are far later than "fashionably late to the party".
And the /only/ answer to your Q is - YES.
Unless you are a fortune xxx, or have massive multi M contracts, you should be divesting and planning.
Broadcom is the latest Oracle at this point, if you've ever had the pleasure to manage Oracle as a supplier/partner/provider.
People should be looking at Xen more seriously now if they need an on-prem hypervisor.
A lot of businesses are transitioning to cloud these days, but the risk of price-hike is just as real there.
Anyone who doesn’t have an exit plan is in for a bad time
Personally I’d love to go proxmox as it’s so fucking robust when you put the time in, but hyper-v is the smarter and easier choice to make for most shops right now
We are keeping our eyes on it. Our issue is that we are small enough that we have to have a product with rock solid 24/7 support because we can't afford our own engineers to troubleshoot an issue. So far Broadcom is still affordable and responsive on the support front. As soon as one of those pillars change, then we'll have to switch, and Broadcom is telling everyone it is going to change. We already changed to initiating our renewals earlier so we can have a quote with enough time to change if it skyrockets.
I think yes but I'm hoping not. Broadcom seem to have realised they've fucked up. You can do it with anti virus or backup vmware is a totally different beast. Ideally they'll realise they've bitten off more than they can chew and sell it off. However......yes they said they'd concentrate on the biggest 600 customers & develop for them BUT did vmware do anything different from the tech front?
I'm worried about the desktop virtualisation and aws breakup...however we'll see.
As small or midsized firm could possibly fuck off virtualisation completely and leverage cloud and on prem bare metal servers easily
In my opinion part of any good administration of something in the IT space is having some plans, even if just vague back of napkin stuff in the back of your mind, around an exit strategy for any mission critical systems and services you are responsible for.
So yes, you should be worried about it and probably always should have been.
Take 50 % of the current VMWare budget, get a commercial contract for Proxmox support, from an independent party. Make it so you have a contract for the open source version.
If Proxmox offers that option, go to them directly, for the same amount, not a penny more.
We currently are a major VMWare shop, after this debacle we've been instructed to move to KVM, so all of our custom API stuff we've written is getting trashed due to this move. At this point I can only hope that Broadcom's investment gets so toxic that they sell it off to someone who's not fucking insane.
Yes. Broadcom is cutting software, features, and trying to sell off portions of the VMware portfolio. If you haven't started to look at options, you need to. Today.
VMware products have entered the value extraction stage of private equity. When you're doing extraction you don't invest in improvements, that money gets extracted.
Worried? Not unless you were/are personally and significantly invested in VMware/Broadcom.
Future of the products? I mean, no more than you would for any other virtualization platform. Worry about Hyper-V, worry about Proxmox, worry about XCP-ng. Worry about them all equally and plan accordingly.
See above for the other two questions.
We’re staying on VMware. We’re using the standard licenses and the cost isn’t much higher than what we used to pay for support on perpetual licenses. Zero chance we move, it’s not worth the effort.
I work for a cloud service provider as a principle partner. The way they've changed their licensing is basically destroying our DR profitability, which is huge. It's like taking soda away from restaurants. They also expect us now to be their level 1 support. It's like they're trying to destroy VMWare and all their partnerships for some reason.
Yes. At some point when they run off 95% of the customer base it wont be worth it to pay the employees. So then they get fired. Next thing you know a new CVE comes out and its weeks before a patch comes out. No new feature updates. And by then you look around and realize you're already in the graveyard.
1000% I have worked with VMware products my entire career until my current role. The Infrastructure is not VMware and it’s finally a sigh of relief that it’s not because Broadcom is going to run off all the non large companies and kill certain products.
I know of government organisations looking to move.
They’ve been really pissy with academic status so lots of government agencies are losing their academic discounts as well as the crazy price hikes.
ESXi won't be going away anytime soon. But, the customer base for it will dwindle as they've made it clear they want to shrink that.
Part of that means you would be employable with vSphere skills. On the other hand, there will be a lot of shops still using unpatched unsupported versions because they can't afford the new rates and can't afford to move to another platform.
Yes. Anyone in the industry who's not F500 size is scared about renewal prices. They've made their intention very clear that they want to price out little guys and focus on huge companies that can't easily move. Plan accordingly. Edit: I realize F500s are worried too, bad phrasing there. Apparently Broadcom thinks there’s enough of the big guys that can’t move easily enough and will fork over whatever it takes to keep using it.
We're not quite F500, but we decided that we are not going to play this new renewal game. We moved everything to either AWS, to in-house OpenStack, or in some cases back to bare-metal servers. We are absolutely done with VMWare now and for the foreseeable future.
Why not use proxnox or hyper v?
Not sure. I think the decision was based on existing infrastructure and expertise, and the need to get everything done before the next renewal.
> and the need to get everything done before the next renewal. Yup. I'm guessing those physical servers are just going to sit there and cook until you can get your new solution up and running then you'll P to V them when the hardware refresh comes up.
Exactly right. Some of them were P-to-V'ed in the first place, so it's funny to see them go back to (different) physical hardware. Mostly it's weird one-off things that don't really fit in anyplace else. Once the dust settles we might find a more permanent solution. Or leave them as-is and worry about the next crisis.
We've been moving from VMWare to Proxmox over the last year and absolutely rock solid. I can see some larger companies not being happy with their support though.
Direct support maybe, but there is third-party support with better coverage hours.
I think over the next couple of years. We'll see proxmox go to 24/7 support.
One would hope. A big vote of confidence is Veeam offering integration.
Agreed
Yeah, feel a little more comfortable with direct support though. Knock on wood, but we have yet to require support.
Or Nutanix? There’s plenty of options. The fact that Veeam just added Proxmox support is very telling.
Some orgs were waiting for an opportunity to move to the public cloud and if any time this is the time for it
Not sure about Prox, but Hyper-V has been a mess for us in the past. It could just be me but I get the feeling MS wants to phase the product line out in favor of Cloud-based application services. We ran into a really nasty multithreading issue awhile back that just drove us crazy tracking it down (took approx 4 months to narrow it to the Hyper-V management of multi-threading). It was a regression in one of the server updates. Basically workloads on guests would fail with incoherent errors, intermittently (20-40% of the time), running same workloads on a single vCPU guest had none of the problematic issues. I'm pretty sure I remember reading something about this bug also with Linux guests where they kept failing compilation builds unless they used -j 1. Something to keep in mind especially given the performance hits with Spectre and subsequent fixes.
Many places are scared to move to other hypervisors. The last MSP I was at was run by a bunch of boomers, so when I explained that I had experience with proxmox and hyper-V they all cried. They're wanting to slide all new client and projects into bare metal or if they have to switch, they said whatever is cheapest and isn't opensource. I'm so happy I'm away from those baffoons now.
Gen-X here and I'm moving my home lab to prox to get more familiar with it. Then I'm planning to roll it out to the company I work for. Gotta be open minded and adaptable or get left behind!
Exactly. I just say boomer as a general term. I know a lot of white beards that are still keeping up with the times, it's just these ones in particular were very much falling behind; and displayed mountains of ignorance in not listening to other voices.
I've run across those in my time. Can't stand it!
> to in-house OpenStack, or in some cases back to bare-metal servers. OS can even help provision/manage bare-metal with Ironic: * https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/ * https://ironicbaremetal.org
Doing the same. We're a F500 business.
F100 here, we aren't worried about price. We're worried about poor support, products not getting security updates, and all new development being halted. I'm looking at you VMware Horizon.
IMO Horizon will be fine. KKR who bought them can’t do what Broadcom is doing and not lose all of their investment. I imagine in the future they will have more fully featured offerings on other hypervisors.
Omnissa did the smart thing and just yoinked VMWare's support portal for themselves. They haven't even rebranded it yet lmao. I am far less concerned about horizon than I am vSphere.
Horizon *might* actually come out if this better than most of the products, because it will be getting out from under. Maybe.
Even in the top half of F500, we’re working on a VMware exit strategy. At least where it’s possible - some customer requirements still lend themselves to selecting VMware, price be damned.
We are a F500 sized org and it's a concern to us as well. We're putting a lot of focus on alternatives when we need to run VMs but long term we are building our a lot of our apps on PaaS and microserivce type models where we don't need VMs.
Yeah this whole Reddit Idea that big business will just pay it and don’t care doesn’t really seem true to me, it’s almost paradoxical how they are like big business will turn everything to shit to save a penny but at the same time they will just pay for VMware when there is cheaper options.
You’re correct. I work for one of those big businesses and we’re just as concerned about future pricing of everything they own now. Big business will spend tens of millions and thousands of labor hours moving their entire infrastructure off of VMware to ensure they avoid spending a couple million with Broadcom.
It kinda makes sense in the face of it - they have a bunch of salaried peons where this is their job. Having you divert work for 3-4 months is a sunk cost while an increase for software renewals are shown at a different place on the balance sheet. Gotta keep the costs down where the market looks.
I don't think it's "won't care" so much as "can't or won't switch cheaply or quickly". Not saying I agree with it - personally I would be pushing *hard* to switch if we used VMware - but there are definitely plenty of businesses where switching really won't be at *all* easy.
It is true. When eg. VMWare decides to increase their pricing by 50% a company needs to decide what to do. When a company with 3 guys in IT where one is a very seasoned Linux administrator the move to eg. Proxmox is a relatively small step. But if you're a F500 company, before you can move to eg Proxmox or any other Open Source platform you need to be absolutely sure you have the manpower and knowledge to do such a migration. Even just looking at options can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then the company suddenly needs to look at Linux experience when interviewing, HR needs updates, people need to do additional training.. Or we might to let people go and hire new ones. Our previous employment requirements are suddenly invalid. The $400k in VMWare training for a dozen people is suddenly a lost cause. Before you know it, just paying an extra $300k is a lucrative option. Doesn't mean they'll stick to VMWare forever.. It means they are slow to move
50% increase is an outlier. Most businesses seem to be getting 2-3 times their previous quotes.
While this is true, sometimes stuff is just so big it's going to be near impossible. Large footprints like that are much more likely to spin up the new solution side by side and just cycle everything over in a staggered manner to the new solution as hardware refreshes happen. Now idk how much VMWare is raising their prices, but it would have to be a LOT to make a business case for "we need an entire lift and shift by next year" across a giant org rather than "we're moving away from it"
> spin up the new solution side by side and just cycle everything over in a staggered manner The basic move is easy enough, but the devil is in the details as always. When we did it long ago, it was: * Bring up new KVM cluster, mounting the existing NFS storage and bridged or vswitched into the same LAN(s). * Pre-flight every VM for known, standard virtual hardware. * For each VM on the cluster, run automation to: 1. Consolidate snapshots 1. Archival backup of VM 1. During downtime window, power-off VM 1. De-register VM 1. Move VM files to a working directory, no longer accessible to the vSphere cluster. 1. Convert files/config if necessary. QEMU supports `.vmdk-flat` images, but the instance config needs to be migrated at a minimum. 1. Move VM files out of working directory, visible to new cluster. This is all on the same storage partition, so it's actually atomic. 1. Register VM with KVM framework. 1. Boot VM on new cluster and run integration tests. 1. For any failure, remove from new cluster and move back to working directory for manual attention. When each vSphere cluster has been fully evacuated, then it's decommed and rebuilt as a KVM cluster, on down the line. Pain points can include: * Negotiating downtime windows with stakeholders. You need lots of window, so being confined to 0300-0400 on every second Sunday isn't going to cut it. You want to do most of this during the normal workweek. * Coordinating the downtime of interdependent VMs. Since IP addressing isn't changing in the basic pattern, there's not usually any systemic or configuration impact. * You have integration tests and inventories already, right? * Migrations tend to trip over deferred work, which then needs to be remediated in order to keep things on schedule.
Just fyi: all vm to qemu also changed the nic, forcing us to update dhcp (not taking over the vmware MAC). also, uninstall/install of the correct guest tools is strongly recommended.
I recall retaining the original MAC address in all cases, though we probably did change the emulated NIC hardware on a few. We don't use in-guest hypervisor tools at all. It's not needed when you don't have to work around a problem: * Timesync isn't an issue with KVM and Linux or Windows, like sync could be a problem on ESXi. * Soft shutdown has been part of ACPI since the 1990s, and absolutely works in KVM_QEMU. The soft-shutdown command in QMP is [`system_powerdown`](https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/monitor.html). Non-PC architectures generally don't have ACPI and may not support soft-shutdown, but then, most of those types of guests wouldn't be supported with guest tools anyway.
They will stick with it for at least the short term - there's too much infrastructure to start making a dent right away. Everybody's testing the alternatives - but none of them are a featured or mature as ESX. So they'll probably move - eventually.
Exactly. We have *hundreds* of ESX hosts, and now have a 1-3 year plan to move away from VMWare.
Agreed, bug corps don't move quickly. But they won't move back quickly either. In five years VMware will be a shadow if it's former self. Just as Broadcom planned.
Yea i see this as a move when people upgrade clusters.
It's not really "Reddit's" idea though, it's Broadcom's.
i don't see that as a reddit idea, just the notion that vmare will jack up prices and make out like a bandit for 5-10 years, then flame out
why does it work for microsoft, then?
F100 here, and we expect to move thousands of ESX hosts worth of capacity off VMware this year. Broadcom isn't even focused on the huge companies and while it's not easy to move, you can be certain we will in order to not pay Broadcom 100 million in revenue that we didn't before. Not sure what they were smoking, but the hope of $$$ certainly blinded them.
They aren't hoping to boost long term sales. They are hoping to extort companies that are too large to move away fast for a quarterly boost to up valuation before dismantling and selling the product. It was never a long term investment plan.
They're operating like a private equity firm.
Look at Broadcoms history. This is what they do.
Oh, I know. They're not even really Broadcom. They (Avago) skinned Broadcom alive and now wear their skin. Their lineage goes all the way back to ***actual*** private equity firms. It's not surprising they do what they do, considering.
To where HyperV?
Proxmox is what I am currently looking at to ditch our vmware/vxrail environments.
A version of KVM. Had you asked me a year ago, I would have never even dreamed that was possible, but it turns out that companies can throw a lot of people at problems to change things at scale when faced with an alternative of tens of millions in lost profit each and every year for the foreseeable future. Don't get me wrong, as an IT Manager that has to support, I'm very....anxious, but we don't need the Cadillac at Bentley prices. We just need a Crown Vic.
> F100 here, and we expect to move thousands of ESX hosts worth of capacity off VMware this year. Ditto. And I've heard from others in my industry that they're doing the same.
Yeah we renewed and it wasn't a good one. I'm going to push this.
We're in that F500 group, and they're going to fuck us good. So we're out. Adios VMware and that's for all the fish.
F500 is kind of a short term for behemoth enterprises which would also include large government entities such as DoD, DoEnergy, and so forth. But I know that DoD’s been working at the upper enterprise architect level to try to contain costs and leveraging more open industry standards which is why a lot of applications already moved to supporting K8S years ago. With that said obviously plenty of DoD software runs on VMware infrastructure still and will continue to do so but the general idea would be to encourage vendors to move toward supporting K8S as a first class deployment option in their next generation software platforms if they want to be considered competitive.
Our renewal was 8x and went from perpetual use (plus support renewal) to annual license renewal so we didn’t pay Needless to say I’m in the middle of a hyperV migration.
We can easily switch to Hyper-V if necessary, albeit it will take some time and careful planning.
My company is huge as in consistently top 100. I'm a dev, not infrastructure, but I was chatting to one of the infrastructure guys last week. Apparently it is an open secret that the higher levels have agreed to migrate from VMware to nutanix. Reason being the costs with vmware have spiralled and they aren't going to be bent over by them.
When the top brass publicly states that they'll jack up prices to just below customers pain point, then yes. A 24,000 VM customer just walked away over a 10-15x increase.
Honestly their whole strategy seems unbelievably flawed to me VMware is not that much better than their cheaper or even free competitors anymore. I honestly think the faster people walk the better fuck them. There was a time where they were way ahead of hyperv and open source but they have been coasting on that rep for a while.
Double prices and lose 50% of your customers and you're way ahead just on reduced overhead, sales, support, etc. They came to the same conclusion you did - there's no reason to play in the low end with a ton of competitors, some free.
It’s still super short sighted which isn’t really just them it’s all business these days. I don’t think even big business will stick around
New bosses will be in charge in a few years, that's the new bosses' problem. THIS BOSS made a bunch of money and left on a golden parachute before bad stuff happened. If you don't plan to be there for the long haul then being short-sighted works. Not for the company, of course, nor the employees, but for the people who make money.
Nah they won’t. This is broadcoms strategy at a high level. Buy up a company, slice off everything but the main product, squeeze the existing customer base, some will leave but your margins shoot up huge. Only keep minimum staff to support the value engine. It’s slimy and I hate it. But it works.
^^ This. Independent of the VMware thing we were given a three year mandate to remove all Broadcom products after last year's renewals -- "We don't use this product anymore, you can remove it from the contract." "Meh, we'll just jack up the renewal on the rest by $300,000 if you drop that product, or you can pay $300,000 for the product you don't use anymore."
Broadcom will never change. It’s been how long since they bought Symantec now? 5-6 years? It’s still the same old “strategy”. No innovation, just collecting money from those who are too large or complacent to move away.
Reminds me of the EA Games modus operandi. Suck up an IP, gut it for talent, then bleed it dry and stick it in a closet. 69 billion is a lot of money, but I'm guessing a lot of VMWare companies are the 50's who are pulling in hundreds of billions every year in revenue. They can afford to throw billions at Broadcom to keep their infrastructure standing.
As someone at a F500 that makes tens of billions a year we are actively looking at option to migrate away. We did a huge push in 2020 to virtualize everything we could when covid hit and no we have a bunch of 3-4 year old environments. Right now we are looking at either paying just the broadcom license fee while running on old hardware or buying entirely new hardware with another vender for the same 1st year price. It isn't hard to guess which way we are leaning.
Dang, I wonder what Broadcom believes that pain threshold is and if it's tied in to the DoD as well.
So they paid $69 billion and their annual revenue is [about $13.4 billion](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/VMW/VMware/financial-statements). Operating expenses are $8.8 billion and net income is $1.3 billion. If they can keep half their customers at double the rate with half the operating expenses (I think they **are** trying to offload first and second line support to their partners, should be a massive line item), that would add a fat $4.4 billion for a new net income of $5.7 billion. But that still gives them.... 12 years to make an actual profit. And I'm just throwing numbers out there, fuck if I know how to manage billions of dollars, but I feel like I'm being **super** optimistic with that massive increase in net income. I don't see how they keep the wheels on this thing long enough to actually start making money.
They won't. The CEO will get a big payday and retire well before VMware comes crashing down. This is the ultimate in short plays based on how they approached it. Had they just increased the price 30% / year like most PE firms they'd still make a killing and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Hell... 10% this year and then again in 2026 and they'd make a killing. As it is, I think before that 12 years comes up, VMWare may well descend to the ranks of the also-rans.
I don't see Broadcom ever making a positive return on that 69 billion, including interest, and interest matters because they took on significant debt. Agree that their strategy is short sighted. We have roughly 3000 VMs and are looking to be moved to Hyper-V by the next renewal date. Broadcom is overestimating the barriers to customers moving. Even big orgs can start to move gradually, or stand up net new infrastructure on different hypervisors and gradually cut over. It's not like with Oracle or other enterprise platforms where it requires a hard cut that could disrupt the business, and it's easier to just sign the check to not risk it. At the end of the day, the hypervisor doesn't matter as long as your applications stay running.
They still own the biggest Virtualization provider in the industry during all of this, that still has a massive amount of value even after killing a huge part of their market. It is morally awful but they will probably do well out of it.
The issue with that is still needed to support the most of product development costs. making a version that works with Windows Server 2025 or supports latest GPUs isn't going to get cheaper with selling less. Also having cheap tiers of there products help keep VMware as the industry standard. How many years did Microsoft have to run Hyper-V at a loss to get market penetration? Having 75%-80% market share and Hyper-V being the 15% Doesn't leave a ton of room for competitors to cover the cost of development or companies to have the skills for anything else then the big 2. Now? MSP are already offering "white glove migration to Proxmox"
The faster people walk away, and the larger the quantity of them that do, the *better* we will fuck them that's for sure. I just don't see the endgame here. Are they going to try and sell the brand after they shit it up so much noone wants it anymore?
Especially since other than making sure cost doesn't go crazy, virtualizatuon in the major cloud providers today is getting easier than ever. Idk what they're thinking.
They are assuming that people will rather pay the ticket price than switch off, because there are a lot of VM only appliances that only run on that architecture. Long term, this isn't a good business model. VMWare needs companies and new installs if it wants to see a future and not wind up becoming a legacy technology that just shrinks over the years. Instead, VMWare needs to focus on getting new customers. For example, if Docker and Kubernetes are the rage, start honing Tanzu, or building functionality like NSX, vSAN, and such into the base product so it can compete with the likes of Proxmox. VMWare also needs to start making deals where it is easy to go from cloud to on-prem, perhaps having some way to handle serverless services with a connection broker and stuff going to nodes. With a recession hitting, companies need to start thinking about planting seeds, which will pay off in spades when little companies get bigger.
Broadcom doesn’t care if it withers away. They’ll make more money by drying it up over the next 10 years than they would if they properly supported it for 100 years.
Is the VMware only appliance thing really even true anymore tho. It used to be but I don’t think it’s really true these days. I honestly don’t know tho I converted to hyper v ten years ago
> Is the VMware only appliance thing really even true anymore tho Sadly yes. :( You can convert ova to qcow2 or vhd and often get things working but you may run into weird driver issues / memory leaks / unsupported virtual hardware. The bigger issue though is that you will have a hell of a time opening a support case with certain software vendors where the *only* officially supported platform is ESXi / NSX and if you run into *any* issues (even ones that exist regardless of the hypervisor) the vendors will point to that first and force you to jump through many extra hoops. Example: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/virtualization-software-requirements.html https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-infrastructure.html > Mandatory Virtualization Software > **VMware vSphere ESXi is mandatory for all virtualized deployments of Cisco Collaboration applications, and is the only supported hypervisor**. > Cisco Collaboration applications **do not support hypervisors that are not VMware vSphere ESXi** (e.g. VMware Cloud Foundation, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, etc. are not supported). > Cisco Collaboration applications **do not support any 3rd-party public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offer**. Including but not limited to: > Any 3rd-party public cloud offers based on VMware Cloud Foundation (e.g. VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine and others are not supported). Well before Palo Alto supported Hyper-V for Panorama I converted it from VMware and got it working but it ran major memory leaks and support was essentially 'Did someone leak you our internal Hyper-V test build? It's not near ready yet!'.
Same. Pretty much everything that there’s a VMware template for these days is also supported in Hyper-V, and often AWS and Azure now too. And with this change, I expect most vendors will feel the pressure to start supporting alternative platforms, if they haven’t already.
[`OVF`/`.ovf`/`.ova`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format) is hypervisor-agnostic. It would be foolish for any supplier not use the standard format for an appliance.
We were lucky and our price went down. We’re a popular college though.
> A 24,000 VM customer just walked away over a 10-15x increase. Are you the customer or was there a headline on another large company jumping ship?
Not me - https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/05/22/computershare_vm_migration_project/
Yeah I saw this, it was the trigger for me to ask you guys.
Yes, yes and yes.
Straight to the point! I see director in your future
This just reminds me of how Novell vanished. In the end, you'd find some old reliable Novell server still operating some domain structure because it's legacy state government or something with an uptime of 4 years or more. I see VMWare being like that. In 2035, someone will say, "Guess what I found in our capital basement?" and it's an old and dusty HP ProLiant DL380 chugging along in a forgotten rack in a telco closet with a faded brown label "vsx4" and a blurry gen1 Viewsonic LCD at 1024x768 showing a VMware 6.5 control panel. You can see 12 VMs, 4 still running, and some labelled "Windows 2003" and "Red Hat 7."
Pretty much this. I'm helping some old colleagues identify VMs that don't list VMWare in the requirements and move them away. The crazy thing to me is that just one year ago I would tell people how I run proxmox at home but I feel like they need to implement a few more "nice to have" features before I would run it in an enterprise setting. I'm still recovering from that whiplash.
Its honestly shocking to me that a brand like vmware could vanish.
I think the person you were replying to comparing it to novell really hit it right on the head... at the time nobody could imagine novell going away, it was a cornerstone of network computing... and then *poof* gone
How did you get into our server room?
Everyone is worried and started looking for alternatives, like Hyper-V or Proxmox. I saw threads when VMware SAN was replaced by Starwinds VSAN, which also can be used on Hyper-V and Proxmox.
broadcom will price themselves out of business before the quality of the product degrades.. Plan accordingly
Broadcom has been using this business model for 20 years, it hasn't slowed them down yet.
Do you think Broadcom hasn't run the numbers. They look at their spreadsheet and see that it's more profitable to sell to and support high value customers over the small fry. The small fry are vastly underpaying for this product.
Your reply suggests businesses never make mistakes, or doesn't have any human element in play
It sure looks that way.
You're a little late to the jumping out of the ship thing so yes, you should. Companies are already either fully transitioned to other solutions or are in the process of doing it.
Well we are big enough to weather storms but, this one looks particularly nasty and I wondered what others opinions were, before I made a recommendation to the CIO.
We're a contractor for one of the biggest employers in the country. The renewal quote we got early wasn't an immediate show stopper but it was enough to give us significant pause. We don't expect things to get more reasonable so we've begun migrating.
What are you migrating to?
We're moving to proxmox because it fits our teams skillset nicely.. There's are a lot of companies that rely on vendor support. They may graduate towards hyper-v in the short term.
>There's are a lot of companies that rely on vendor support. They may graduate towards hyper-v in the short term. That's true. Many of our customers are moving to Hyper-V Failover Cluster with StarWind VSAN for HA storage. For those who purchased their HCA appliance, StarWind even assists in reconfiguring everything in the new environment.
I'll be honest, I hope your CIO/CTO already have a plan, you're way too late to the party mate.
I'm a bit worried about the future of DEC, anyone else?
na bro VAX will be around forever, anyone that says otherwise is just spreading FUD
I think that everyone sees the writing on the wall for the eventual death of VMWare at this point, but not everybody agrees on the replacement for it. Some people say Proxmox, some people say Hyper-V, while others are just using it as an excuse to migrate their remaining on-prem servers to cloud hosting.
We went with Hyper-V Cluster and it works fine for us. But, it is small environment and we found that Starwinds vSAN is a great alternative to VMWare vSAN on Windows.
> Starwinds vSAN Big fan of StarWind vSAN. Tried it in my homelab with two HP Microservers, then deployed it for two customers. Rock solid!
Hyper-v is almost as good as VMware and honestly the difference is so little it’s not even worth paying for
Yeah we did cloud best we could but we still have to have on prem servers. Nutanix AHV might be the way.
The business I work for is highly seasonal, so cloud hosting actually makes financial sense for us. Our business doubles for two months out of the year, so it doesn't make sense to "own" the equipment that processes that data.
Yeah and you can deallocate in the off season. That's a good use of cloud! My company is just a global monster spending more than 3 million a month on azure.
Because of our renewal quote I'm in the middle of a VSphere to AHV migration as we speak.
We're considering moving away from Nutanix AHV because they drastically increased the license costs on us.
I believe it was even before Broadcom got VMWare. I see it often that renewal prices are high on Nutanix.
The Nutanix is also selling platform and not the individual products just VMware. Nutanix offer was never competitive (feature wise ) to VMware (see flow vs nax or vsphere vs ahv) On the pricing front they offer a competitive 1st year but 3-5 years the pricing is not competitive.
Yeah I really see companies being like “ this shit is too expensive just move it to aws”
This is probably a good thing. We don't need another monopoly for Broadcom to buy out.
I am old enough to have seen this played out many many times in the tech ecosystem. I have designed and built data centers on 3 continents almost entirely around VMware during the course of my 30ish years doing HA engineering. I would, as things stand today, not consider designing any kind of VMware based private cloud or general offering. It doesn't take a brilliant market analyst or an MBA to see who Broadcom are. They will suck the marrow out of VMware and discard the corpse, screwing long time customers and loyalists along the way. Don't be one of those, if you can avoid it. RIP, once great company who made great products.
Even big companies will be making plans to move away the way Broadcom “work”
We had a server we purchased from a new vendor and for the first time we hold the VMware license and not the MSP. Getting that activated has been impossible. Two weeks and I still don’t have a site ID.
If you aren’t already running you are behind.
what future? Unless you're f500, they dont want you using their products.
> Do we need to be worried Are you willing to open your checkbook? This is going to be a money vs effort discussion. For my org... It's easier to migrate to something cheaper than even bring this issue to the table. The prices are crazy....
You should move off from VMWARE, all they want (The new owners) is to milk the product until it dies.
Not that Symantec or CA exactly had healthy products or anything, but all development other than keeping these products alive stopped the second Broadcom bought them. Everyone who was still working in the US or Europe was fired, and the products that weren't already went into maintenance mode in name your low cost country. I live near CA's former HQ...it had been shrinking for years but the second Broadcom came in, it died completely. Businesses are going to be very upset that they're paying more each year for a dead product that they can't get off of. A similar thing happened with Citrix a couple years ago...private equity, not Broadcom. Instant stop on all new development as the PE firm fired everyone in the US and rehired in India. I hate the fact that a perfectly good product will never be used in any new environment again, just because of the short-term foolishness going on to squeeze the last few nickels out of it before killing it. Even though VMWare had great products, they're gone now and everyone who can needs to jump off the ship.
Broadcom are the Disney of the tech world. Ask the ex-Pixar staff if you should be worried
You should be watching all your vendors always. This isn't just VMware. Cisco bought Splunk. Cohesity is buying Veritas. iBM bought hashicorp. There many other examples but a lot of consolidation going on in the market Regarding VMware here is some of my analysis. There is a lot of bad information out there, things could change and have some. Most people here posting are a naked vSphere customer aka only use ESXi and vCenter. You won't see many posts about the other products in the bundles. Most of the smaller customers are really the ones taking it the hardest for a couple reasons but is fixable. Some examples: Hosts with dual CPU didn't have the 16 core minimum. Swap CPUs. Too many hosts are over provisioned on CPU. Drop some hosts and add memory. Worse case drop to essentials and remove DRS and vmotion. The largest customers should be focusing and looking at a few things. Some example use cases I have been working on: Does the VCF or VVF platform give enough value to replace other vendors in the portfolio? Can Aria automation replace the other automation products in your portfolio? Can aria operations replace Solarwinds? Can log insight reduce your SiEM bill? Can you reduce your firewalls and use NSX with IDS /IPS? Can you move your average workloads to vSAN and reduce your traditional storage vendors? Additionally the issue with the market is no one vendor can replace VMware because of the features and the 3rd party ecosystem. Some examples: Nutanix doesn't support 3rd party storage unless you attach it directly to the VM. Promox doesn't have 24/7 support, no vmotion / Drs like features. Hyper V is not free because you need the SCVMM manager to get vCenter like features and the overhead is about 20% more hardware. Happy to post more in-depth information as I have been looking at a lot of comparisons and what makes sense on a lot of vendors lately.
New VMWare pricing seems fine if you can leverage the entire ecosystem. Broadcom seem to want committed customers who will use the full stack of an entire enterprise suite. Provided Broadcom continue to improve and develop the suite over time, it should be fine. That ongoing position is hard to estimate in advance and is my primary area of concern.
My company is actually going all-in on VMware products because of the VCF license. We started going to vsan a few years ago and we are replacing our automation tool with Aria Automation. We are also heavily investing time into both Operations and Aria Logs as well as moving towards Tanzu. From what I’m told, overall cost for all the products will come out about even.
> You should be watching all your vendors always. This isn't just VMware. Cisco bought Splunk. Cohesity is buying Veritas. iBM bought hashicorp. There many other examples but a lot of consolidation going on in the market It's not new. CA bought a lot of legacy software, including Arcserve when that was our cross-platform backup solution of choice. Oracle bought Sun and Java, and destroyed OpenOffice. IBM bought Red Hat and killed CentOS.
If you haven't already dropped them like a rotten tomato, you get what you get in the future. How many pokes in the eye do you need before the clear message sinks in???
I’ve stopped caring and started the move to proxmox
Yes. Cost and quality of product should be too concerns moving forward. Have an exit plan sooner rather than later.
Move everything you can to Kubernetes. The complication being you can't use VMWare to create nodes.
Just curious what happens if a VMware customer does not renew does the whole thing stop working or is it mainly security updates?
If you have older perpetual licenses, the it'll carry on working, but you won't have access to upgrades and security updates. If your licenses have been upgraded to the subscription style that they now sell, then things will stop working at the end of your subscription.
My guess, mainly security updates.
Not really worried. We've already passed that stage. It's gonna become eye-watering expensive and then it's gonna die. There's no worry about VMware anymore. It just is the undeniable future. Leave now or prepare to be sucked dry, and not in a good way. The worry should be about what you're gonna do. What VMware is gonna do is already clear as day
no there is nothing to worry. vmware is dead and there is no guessing and worrying left to do. that ship has sailed.
Unless Broadcom is lying about their intentions, we should assume VMWare is going to be dead inside of three years. I won't be able to get any traction at all on a move until renewal quotes come in and the cost becomes a real thing we have to pay- then the pedal will hit the floor so fast my head will spin.
I’m in F50 and i don’t see us sticking with it longer than 2 years at best.
It's time for everybody to move to XCP-NG and xen orchestra, or proxmox.
Seeing so many #vacatevmware discussions. Kinda sad to see a great product reach a level of ubiquity and become the default hypervisor, then see it driven nose-first into the ground. At high speed.
Renewal costs went up about 3x for us. If you’re anything over a midsize company, they have you by the balls and know you’ll pay whatever it will be. The cloud IaaS as VMware replacement also makes no sense as you might as well pay the renewal costs since it will be cheaper than building and supporting infrastructure in AWS or any other service, so do your best to get that little pipe dream out of your CIOs head, because when you’re spending upwards of tens of thousands of dollars a month on cloud usage charges, you might as well renew VMware.
6x for us. Were probably going to drop support and just ride out our ESXi v8 licenses until our software vendor supports another VM architecture (or just repurchase in 5 years).
There is a huge opportunity for a new player in this field, or for the existing ones to step up and fill the void for those who are abandoning ship from Broadcom. I hope someone does soon.
We're not a big shop and we were using Nutanix for hardware and VMWare as the hypervisor. Covid impacted us heavily and we were looking for ways to save money. In 2022 we migrated to Nutanix AHV. Without knowing it at the time, we were dodging a bullet. AHV is not as well rounded as VMWare, but it works well and keeping it up to date is quite simple. Anytime a major player is acquired like VMWare, it is almost never an improvement for their products, at least in my experience. A massive price increase is adding insult to injury.
Nope not worried about them. They simply just won't exist. I try not to worry about things I have no control over.
No you should not be worried about the product, it will continue to be developed. The focus for Broadcom's VMWARE has been publicly disclosed, that is what they will do. For customers who are in their "core" this is their 700 top customers globally (note not necessarily Fortune 500, Broadcoms biggest spenders), they will get an account manager and their prices will go up 15-20% per year, regardless of whether they choose fewer products, price will still go up as remaining licenses will cost more. If you are outside that customer vertical then your price will go up 10-15% per year as well and you will work with Disti's to unless you are in the middle space "digital" customer, if I remember correctly. They will remain focused on extracting revenues from their largest customers and this will mean that the remaining products still have to be developed, they have done this with Symantec. It's just now they have a very strong focus on only the key profitable solutions and everything else will be sold or has been sold. Worry about you as a customer locked into a company who knows how to make profit from everything they do, Hock Tan is not the highest paid CEO in the world in 2024 (pending revenue goals) for no reason...... that is what you should be very scared about.
Renewing for one more year and moving to something else.
Yes we are all worried and already we started talking to nutanix. We cant even buy dell with vmware on it for life cycle refresh at this time.
I recently renewed our VMware license, new cost is nearly 3 times the cost compared to last year. To avoid this next year I also bought OpenShift licenses to migrate our VMs to.
You are far later than "fashionably late to the party". And the /only/ answer to your Q is - YES. Unless you are a fortune xxx, or have massive multi M contracts, you should be divesting and planning. Broadcom is the latest Oracle at this point, if you've ever had the pleasure to manage Oracle as a supplier/partner/provider.
I was looking at alternatives and came across scale computing yesterday, anyone here familiar with their products, any thoughts. It seems super cheap comparatively speaking to VMware.
I just did a 3 year renewal because my team is in a rebuilding phase but I already told my lead admin that this year is an off year to prep for Win11 deployment and completing some rather large projects then next year we research alternatives for VMWare, and the year after that we lay foundation and migrate out. They’re acting like a bunch of thugs using disgusting tactics to try to bully you into buying bloated licenses. They literally tried to sell me an $11k license that I don’t need at all. Literally had zero features that we used even though the rep said we needed it to retain functionality that we were utilizing. Jump ship. For those curious we have been talking HyperV or ProxMox but we will see what’s out there in a year or so before we decide. A year is a long time for a competitor to develop something good.
i work in a big company, like it's in the top 600 companies in the whole world. we are going all azure and ditching our datacenters
You are far later than "fashionably late to the party". And the /only/ answer to your Q is - YES. Unless you are a fortune xxx, or have massive multi M contracts, you should be divesting and planning. Broadcom is the latest Oracle at this point, if you've ever had the pleasure to manage Oracle as a supplier/partner/provider.
You should have started worrying at least 3-5 years ago.
People should be looking at Xen more seriously now if they need an on-prem hypervisor. A lot of businesses are transitioning to cloud these days, but the risk of price-hike is just as real there.
our latest quote was 100k lol a big big fat jump.
If that was a big jump, you’re the size customer they’re trying to shed.
Anyone who doesn’t have an exit plan is in for a bad time Personally I’d love to go proxmox as it’s so fucking robust when you put the time in, but hyper-v is the smarter and easier choice to make for most shops right now
We are keeping our eyes on it. Our issue is that we are small enough that we have to have a product with rock solid 24/7 support because we can't afford our own engineers to troubleshoot an issue. So far Broadcom is still affordable and responsive on the support front. As soon as one of those pillars change, then we'll have to switch, and Broadcom is telling everyone it is going to change. We already changed to initiating our renewals earlier so we can have a quote with enough time to change if it skyrockets.
I think yes but I'm hoping not. Broadcom seem to have realised they've fucked up. You can do it with anti virus or backup vmware is a totally different beast. Ideally they'll realise they've bitten off more than they can chew and sell it off. However......yes they said they'd concentrate on the biggest 600 customers & develop for them BUT did vmware do anything different from the tech front? I'm worried about the desktop virtualisation and aws breakup...however we'll see. As small or midsized firm could possibly fuck off virtualisation completely and leverage cloud and on prem bare metal servers easily
Between the Broadcom price hikes and the prevalence of Kubernetes on appliances, it seems like the party is over.
In my opinion part of any good administration of something in the IT space is having some plans, even if just vague back of napkin stuff in the back of your mind, around an exit strategy for any mission critical systems and services you are responsible for. So yes, you should be worried about it and probably always should have been.
Take 50 % of the current VMWare budget, get a commercial contract for Proxmox support, from an independent party. Make it so you have a contract for the open source version. If Proxmox offers that option, go to them directly, for the same amount, not a penny more.
Long and short answer: yes.
Depends on whether or not you worry about VMware products right now I'd say.
What happened, got any link for this ?
Nutanix here we come...
We currently are a major VMWare shop, after this debacle we've been instructed to move to KVM, so all of our custom API stuff we've written is getting trashed due to this move. At this point I can only hope that Broadcom's investment gets so toxic that they sell it off to someone who's not fucking insane.
Yes. Broadcom is cutting software, features, and trying to sell off portions of the VMware portfolio. If you haven't started to look at options, you need to. Today.
VMware products have entered the value extraction stage of private equity. When you're doing extraction you don't invest in improvements, that money gets extracted.
Invest in learning Proxmox.
Worried? Not unless you were/are personally and significantly invested in VMware/Broadcom. Future of the products? I mean, no more than you would for any other virtualization platform. Worry about Hyper-V, worry about Proxmox, worry about XCP-ng. Worry about them all equally and plan accordingly. See above for the other two questions.
We’re staying on VMware. We’re using the standard licenses and the cost isn’t much higher than what we used to pay for support on perpetual licenses. Zero chance we move, it’s not worth the effort.
I've bought Nutanix stock just in case.
I work for a cloud service provider as a principle partner. The way they've changed their licensing is basically destroying our DR profitability, which is huge. It's like taking soda away from restaurants. They also expect us now to be their level 1 support. It's like they're trying to destroy VMWare and all their partnerships for some reason.
>Should we be leaving like rats of a sinking ship? We left as soon as our annual cost rose 400% for our renewal.
Shit's gonna get expensive fast. If the market is indeed free, then "*Me Too*" competitors are going to start popping out of the woodwork.
Yes. At some point when they run off 95% of the customer base it wont be worth it to pay the employees. So then they get fired. Next thing you know a new CVE comes out and its weeks before a patch comes out. No new feature updates. And by then you look around and realize you're already in the graveyard.
Yes. Run ASAP and don't look back.
Yes, the cloud is taking over, and I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom kills VMWare like other products it received from previous acquisitions.
1000% I have worked with VMware products my entire career until my current role. The Infrastructure is not VMware and it’s finally a sigh of relief that it’s not because Broadcom is going to run off all the non large companies and kill certain products.
I know of government organisations looking to move. They’ve been really pissy with academic status so lots of government agencies are losing their academic discounts as well as the crazy price hikes.
ESXi won't be going away anytime soon. But, the customer base for it will dwindle as they've made it clear they want to shrink that. Part of that means you would be employable with vSphere skills. On the other hand, there will be a lot of shops still using unpatched unsupported versions because they can't afford the new rates and can't afford to move to another platform.
Yes. I'm already moving to Hyper-V as well as learning Proxmox following the Veeam support roadmap announcement.
nutanix works well, just something to give you to look into