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- Hacker News
- Good. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.by zombot
- Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?by GlacierFox
- Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /sby windexh8er
- Honestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.by lmm
- Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensibleby simonjgreen
- VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?by fsuts
- From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"
>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"
Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
- Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
- It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.by remus
- I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.
I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.
by 9x39 - What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.by devchix
- When I was working at Tesco some 7 years ago, the goal was to move to AWS. Surprised they're still not even close.
Good on them for sticking it to Broadcom.
by figmert - I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!by nmstoker
- Not just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.
- Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
by Alien1Being - I’m sure they don’t care. They were pretty up front when they bought VMware what the play wasby lokar
- Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.by proxysna
- > A lot of work ahead.
Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.
One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.
Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.
by jcastro - I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.
It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.
There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).
[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]
Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
by rwmj - > Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
by nubinetwork - Running machines under basic Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machines). Veeam have started supporting it, but only on RedHat.by ndsipa_pomu
- OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.
OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.
Used to do those migration in a previous life.
by cloudie78 - Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.by digitalsin
- Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.by Flere-Imsaho
- I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.by Fordec
- I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.
- If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants.
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
by sokoloff - Looks like proxmox has well-fleshed-out documentation for migrating from vmware:
"Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well."
by m463 - I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.
Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.
I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
by sqircles - It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.by ajsnigrutin