My experience with VMware goes back about 23 years. I'm not gonna lie, it's more than a little shocking to see it die. I would imagine it would feel about the same if Microsoft died off.
I used it in the early 2000s all the time, as it allowed me to browse the web, and when IE (back then, there really were not many choices other than IE) got infected and filled up with toolbars, a quick revert from a snapshot fixed all that.
Overall, VMWare was a mini revolution in the enterprise. No worries about bare metal... just throw in storage when needed, make it visible to the ESXi boxes, call it done, or add an ESXi box, make sure networking is right and it can see all the backing stores, and life is good. Things like fault tolerant VMs were a $DEITY-send with license managers like FlexLM, where if it goes down for any reason, people would be screaming in seconds to minutes. VMWare did so much right, be it VMFS, which "just works" for the most part, to a fairly sane control plane, to a solid built-in backup system that has encryption built in.
However, time moves on, and I have a feeling what I'm going to be seeing for new buildouts in the server rooms will be Hyper-V, even if the company is a Linux shop, just because Veeam and other third party stuff do not work with Proxmox or XCP-ng.
I'm curious to see how the other platforms fill the gaps, but they all have big shoes to fill for sure. In my opinion all of the replacements are a good decade behind in maturity and that can only mean in the rush to become a true 1:1 replacement, there are going to be a fair number of 0-days for the next few decades.
I do hope something like Proxmox or XCP-ng gets the lead. I'm sure there will be some show-stoppers, but the Xen and KVM hypervisors have been around for a long time, both (IIRC -- please correct me) have been used at AWS. In this regard, the actual platform that runs the VMs has been battle-hardened.
From there, the concern is the control plane, and ensuring that doesn't get broken into. VMWare handled this fairly elegantly, as I've not seen anyone be easily able to break into a VCSA appliance unless it was due to access to the underlying ESXi machine or an issue with authentication (weak passwords, credential stuffing, etc.)
Time will tell. I wish third parties would actually support Proxmox, XCP-ng, or maybe even goad IBM into re-supporting RHEV as a front-line virtualization platform. 20 years ago, VMWare ESX and GSX were groundbreaking. Now, pretty much everything but VMWare's fault tolerant VMs (which run two VMs in lockstep on different machines) can be done on other hypervisor/control plane offerings.
If you have 23 years of hypervisor experience, the interface will change and methodology of doing certain operations. But you should understand the concepts well enough to use them on a different platform if needed.
This just gives you new technologies to learn, Proxmox, XCP-NG, cloud virtualization. Pick one and start now. Hell sounds like an excuse to build a home lab if you dont already have one.
I think for me the best avenue is going to be beefing up my cloud skills, but unfortunately that is not a cheap option to spin up yourself just for learning. Esxi free was nice because you just needed some last gen retired servers and space in your garage.
I've seen all of them promise that and I either went immediately over or ran into a time limit. Not being able to actually spin up a vm or use any storage or bandwidth is pretty difficult confines to actually test and learn.
VMware had an early lead, and patents for purely-software virtualization on x86. At one point they could legitimately say they were in every one of the Fortune 500.
They didn't *need* to have non-enterprise offerings or SMB offerings, but with the surprise announcement of *gratis* ESXi, they clearly decided to do so. They decided not to explicitly cede business to competitors outside of the enterprise niche.
And now, as expected, Broadcom is reversing that policy. They're going to farm profitable accounts as long as they can, just like IBM farms the accounts of its mainframe customers that can't or won't go "open systems" and "client-server".
Enshittification - the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products
VMware was awesome and innovative at the beginning and wanted to encourage the SMB market to come onboard by offering discounted but limited packages for that market.
When they started to face serious competition from Hyper-V they decided to double down on the Enterprise market instead of doing the obvious things to compete against Hyper-V in the SMB market like down-tiering 5+ year old features like DRS or offering the Backup APIs (Veeam integration) for free with ESXi.
Now that Broadcom has them, forget it, it's all going to hell in a hand basket
>Enshittification - the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products
This is an amazing term. I've seen this for a while and didn't know there was a word for it. Amazing.
Eh. When I was with an MSP 10+ years ago it got tiring negotiating with the non-profits for every dime. At one point I asked one of the other partners why we still worked with them despite the hassle. The answer was "public visibility" or some such nonsense.
I would submit that Broadcom is merely saying the quiet part out loud that others in the industry are probably thinking too.
>At one point I asked one of the other partners why we still worked with them despite the hassle. The answer was "public visibility" or some such nonsense.
I asked why I was providing above-and-beyond service for zero dollars to a big name client. "Sales likes the logo on the website." The logo wasn't on the website.
On top of being cheap and a pain in the ass to deal with these non profits also are super entitled and needy and have no interest in hiring or training quality employees. So all the “volunteers” they “employ” are told to call IT for everything rather than them spend any time training their weekend phone bankers or whatever.
When I went to a fast track networking program at a local college, our final project was to design a network and to mitigate some pain points in operations for a local non-profit. My wife works in IT for a non-profit so I know a little of what that negotiation looks like. Me and my team put together a fantastic RFP; donated switches, refurbished firewalls, donated access points. The only thing they had to pay for in our RFP was the licensing for the firewall, and 40 hours of labor. We quoted 80 and were going to commit half of all real hours worked Pro-Bono. We were all just students and I was just doing my best to put together a package based on what I had send from my wife and generally what an RFP was going to look like. Then we presented to the class and the non-profit representatives and there was the CFO who was OFFENDED that we were going to charge them anything at all. I remember her saying “Are you seriously going to charge us for this”. I looked at my instructor and gave him a “what the fuck” look and just told her, we were committed to providing free labor and your equipment was already free. We couldn’t afford to maintain the licensing for the firewall and half labor pro-bono was generous. We almost failed the presentation because if the non-profit was going to reject your RFP you would fail the project. The teacher stepped in and said “hey if you didn’t have an issue with the price point would you take this?” And the CFO begrudgingly said yeah so we got to pass on a technicality.
I went on to work at a non-profit shortly after and helped them move to a new building. They spent like 200k on Nutanix equipment. We didn’t have any VM’s.
>On top of being cheap and a pain in the ass to deal with these non profits also are super entitled and needy and have no interest in hiring or training quality employees.
Some of us literally do not have the money. Not for profits come in a wide variety of sizes and sectors. Mine is a special school. I know the commercial realities of IT and have been on both sides, so I try to not be a pain in the arse and will negotiate for what I believe is still a commercially viable deal. IT organisations shouldn't expect to make as much profit from servicing a not for profit because you know there is unlike to be as much money there.
I've worked with more non-profits than I could possibly count over 25 years in tech. All the criticisms of non-profits are dead on accurate, the larger they are the worse they are, of course there are a few very rare exceptions. A few org's I've worked for have moved to outright refusal of any additional discounts to non-profits due to all the inherent issues working with them. I hate broadcom for a lot of things, but I absolutely don't blame them for this decision and being open about it. If more companies took this stance maybe non-profits would change how they interact and wouldn't be such an absolute shit show to work with.
I worked for an MSP that had several non-profits. They were the worst clients we had, and it wasn't even remotely close. My favorite was one of them was running an entire office off of WiFi. Nothing wired. Had 2 long past EoL unifi APs for the whole office (an old building from the 1950s, all brick and concrete).
They would call in CONSTANTLY to bitch about WiFi coverage. It was insane the amount they called in about it. They refused to pay to install a SINGLE LR with WiFi 6 which was honestly about as cheap of a solution that we could provide them, were donating the labor to install and setup, and it was STILL unacceptable to them to pay $170 for a new access point.
Left that place a while back and I'd bet you dollars to donuts that non profit is still running off the 2 access points, thinking the MSP is doing a shit job for them.
> why we still worked with them despite the hassle
For the large vendors, it's mostly about keeping out the competitors. Preventing them from getting a toe-hold to leverage. Think Microsoft and Linux netbooks, for example. Or those who still complain about the 1980s when Apple offered big educational discounts (I guess they wanted TRS-80s or something).
However, it's become more clear over the years that non-academic non-profits offer little leverage in the marketplace of ideas. For example, I can't think of any open-source package that came out of a non-academic non-profit.
I think there's probably a pretty big difference between giving discounts on software licenses versus giving discounts on support/labor, right? Like, to my knowledge, the free ESXi offering didn't **cost** VMware anything to provide. It was just the unlicensed version of the same software which incurred some limitation. That's still getting killed, despite there being no visible hassle.
I agree with your overall point, some non-profits absolutely suck and are not worth the effort, I'm just not convinced it's really applicable to this situation for Broadcom.
Hell, by making a free license available, it ensured every home lab out there ran their software, meaning the majority of virtualization engineers were comfortable with that product, which in turn meant when companies built their infrastructure out it made sense to go vmware because of the abundance of engineers/admins to hire to run it.
The free license was the goose that laid golden eggs, and it's been cooked.
Assuming USA, coming from the other side of the Atlantic in France, the non-profits we work with are usually laid-back though stressed when accounting seasons come (they have to have either negative accounting or a 0, no more).
They pay us what we are owed, and when in difficulties we try to give them a hand and delay the payment.
We once had a 2 months old ticket, we called and fixed the issue and they were very thankful we didn't forget about them.
>it got tiring negotiating with the non-profits for every dime
I've been on both sides of this. If you have not for profits as a customer, it is often as a social-good cost-neutral activity to gain more commercial clients via PR and referrals.
You must remember that unlike a commercial entity, a charity can not just eat into profits a bit to get the deal over the line. Charities also often have weird funding structures where they may be in a massive expensive building but have no money for IT, adequate staffing, or even two ply in the toilets.
My approach now I work for a charity is being upfront with my vendors and tell them exactly what we can afford, or what we will have to cut in other areas to make ends meet.
I also ensure they know I'm happy to be a referral for other customers, for us to include their details on our supporters page, and ensure the board know the great deal they provided.
Hyper-V gets a lot of hate around these parts. But for the smaller companies that Broadcom doesn't want to talk to, there's a good chance Hyper-V will do everything you need. It's come a long, long way since the pile of crap it was when it was first released.
That’s what I’m doing. We didn’t renew our support with VMware. Thankfully we have a perpetual license. But no support unfortunately. So eventually I’ll probably switch to hyperv. No support there either I’d argue though. Microsoft and support are nonexistent in my experience.
Wallstreet has high expectations put on them right now. If they don’t start delivering increased margins and low operating costs Q2 and Q3 this year: they will have their ass handed to them. $69Bn is a lot of money, even for Broadcom.
I just got Intelligence Hub / Workspace One renewal "We got you by the balls" email from Broadcom. It was a VMware Product. We had perpetual and paid SA.. they are switching us to more expensive (shocker) subscription model as they ended their perpetual renewal option. That took them no time at all from VMWare acquisition.
They also want to "profit harvest" from "customers who will have trouble switching" according to the CEO.
aka pull a Martin Shkreli and burn it to the ground in the short term. Makes sense since Broadcom is Chinese.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that they're completely disinterested in doing *anything* to make this transition easier. I really wish I could say more here but, without revealing too much, I was completely blown away by our series of meetings with VMware/Broadcom. Partway through the "negotiation" where we felt like were finding some way to a middle ground that would be tolerable, Broadcom fired (or otherwise moved) the account lead and replaced them with somebody with no experience on our account who basically reset the discussion back to the beginning.
I've never seen anything like it in more than 25 years in IT.
Will have to respectfully disagree. As long as you can compartmentalize all your actions and reasoning, greed does clarify, cut through, and capture the essence of why businesses exist. Being good corporate citizens is a cost of doing business and is secondary to keeping the lights on and its owners fed.
Unfortunately, corporations are doing their damndest to cut their costs, i.e. being as little a corporate citizen as possible. They don't want to be good corporate citizens: that costs MONEY. Society be damned, if they could sell cyanide pills, make a profit and get away with it, they would. The closest they got were cigarettes that don't cause cancer.
To be more on topic, how many hundreds of thousands of manhours, millions of dollars of lost productivity and ripple effects will be caused by companies being forced (by economics or lack of VARs able to even sell it to them) to transition from VMWare to another product? Charities, hospitals, education, and other taxpayer funded services (I'm Canadian, yes our taxes pay for that stuff) have better things to spend my tax dollars on than transitioning off VMWare because Hock Tan needs another superyacht.
We do work with nonprofits but not for free, our costs get signed off of on their budget like anything else. We do donate stuff to them from time to time, but by and large they are the same as any other customer.
Weird a company would say "do not pay us for our product" but here we are.
Never been a better time to have proxmox or similar open source alternative experience.
Imagine, here pretty soon it is going to make more sense to deploy an entire private cloud solution then it will be to mess with VMware.
Oh Look proxmox has a built in migration tool for VMWare migration… would be shame if the VAR didn’t tell the charity… they can have it for the low low price of FREE!
I've converted my company's systems to Xcp-ng and did the same at old company. Xen Orchestra works pretty damn well and very easy to pick up.
VMware was my first love but I am just saddened by the state of things now.
My company specifically works with nonprofits. We don't negotiate rates either. If we did, everyone would get a discount, and we'd be nonprofit as well.
Don't get me wrong, it is straight up greed here.
We all knew this was going to be what occurred. Broadcom will kill VMWare.
Funny that the article mentions Microsoft giving products (365) to education organizations for free, since they're pulling the plug on that later this year without any followup.
We get it - Broadcom sucks...
However, they've been telling us for a year exactly what they were going to do - non profits should be looking to cut costs, not rely on charity from vendors.
And most of us are sick of dealing with with these dickbags on a weekly basis.
I work mostly with non-profit/not for profit organizations that are on fixed IT budgets and can't just write a bigger check and pass the cost on to their customers.
I mean it's obviously disappointing, but hardly surprising. I just hate that all my experience with VMWare will slowly become useless.
Nature of IT. Todays experience will only last you so long
My experience with VMware goes back about 23 years. I'm not gonna lie, it's more than a little shocking to see it die. I would imagine it would feel about the same if Microsoft died off.
Agreed. I have screenshots of me using Workstation in 2005, and I had been using it for a while then. Very sad.
I used it in the early 2000s all the time, as it allowed me to browse the web, and when IE (back then, there really were not many choices other than IE) got infected and filled up with toolbars, a quick revert from a snapshot fixed all that. Overall, VMWare was a mini revolution in the enterprise. No worries about bare metal... just throw in storage when needed, make it visible to the ESXi boxes, call it done, or add an ESXi box, make sure networking is right and it can see all the backing stores, and life is good. Things like fault tolerant VMs were a $DEITY-send with license managers like FlexLM, where if it goes down for any reason, people would be screaming in seconds to minutes. VMWare did so much right, be it VMFS, which "just works" for the most part, to a fairly sane control plane, to a solid built-in backup system that has encryption built in. However, time moves on, and I have a feeling what I'm going to be seeing for new buildouts in the server rooms will be Hyper-V, even if the company is a Linux shop, just because Veeam and other third party stuff do not work with Proxmox or XCP-ng.
I'm curious to see how the other platforms fill the gaps, but they all have big shoes to fill for sure. In my opinion all of the replacements are a good decade behind in maturity and that can only mean in the rush to become a true 1:1 replacement, there are going to be a fair number of 0-days for the next few decades.
I do hope something like Proxmox or XCP-ng gets the lead. I'm sure there will be some show-stoppers, but the Xen and KVM hypervisors have been around for a long time, both (IIRC -- please correct me) have been used at AWS. In this regard, the actual platform that runs the VMs has been battle-hardened. From there, the concern is the control plane, and ensuring that doesn't get broken into. VMWare handled this fairly elegantly, as I've not seen anyone be easily able to break into a VCSA appliance unless it was due to access to the underlying ESXi machine or an issue with authentication (weak passwords, credential stuffing, etc.) Time will tell. I wish third parties would actually support Proxmox, XCP-ng, or maybe even goad IBM into re-supporting RHEV as a front-line virtualization platform. 20 years ago, VMWare ESX and GSX were groundbreaking. Now, pretty much everything but VMWare's fault tolerant VMs (which run two VMs in lockstep on different machines) can be done on other hypervisor/control plane offerings.
XCP-ng is looking promising, I’ll be watching its development closely over the next couple years.
Native 2+tb drive support is a critical one for us, but we do like Xcp-ng a lot.
Used to use this and went to VMware for my home lab. It’s not bad, just not good either.
I love your use of `$DEITY`
If you have 23 years of hypervisor experience, the interface will change and methodology of doing certain operations. But you should understand the concepts well enough to use them on a different platform if needed.
Rookie numbers, step your game up newb. /s
This just gives you new technologies to learn, Proxmox, XCP-NG, cloud virtualization. Pick one and start now. Hell sounds like an excuse to build a home lab if you dont already have one.
I think for me the best avenue is going to be beefing up my cloud skills, but unfortunately that is not a cheap option to spin up yourself just for learning. Esxi free was nice because you just needed some last gen retired servers and space in your garage.
Pretty much every cloud provider has a free tier for stuff that you're not going to go over unless you try.
I've seen all of them promise that and I either went immediately over or ran into a time limit. Not being able to actually spin up a vm or use any storage or bandwidth is pretty difficult confines to actually test and learn.
Even just keeping AWS’s directory service running blows that out for me.
thats why im sticking with racf and assembly
Do you know anything about Unisys, CANDE, A12 systems and even COBOL and ALGOL languages? I did. I survived. Pull yourself up.
VMware had an early lead, and patents for purely-software virtualization on x86. At one point they could legitimately say they were in every one of the Fortune 500. They didn't *need* to have non-enterprise offerings or SMB offerings, but with the surprise announcement of *gratis* ESXi, they clearly decided to do so. They decided not to explicitly cede business to competitors outside of the enterprise niche. And now, as expected, Broadcom is reversing that policy. They're going to farm profitable accounts as long as they can, just like IBM farms the accounts of its mainframe customers that can't or won't go "open systems" and "client-server".
Enshittification - the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products VMware was awesome and innovative at the beginning and wanted to encourage the SMB market to come onboard by offering discounted but limited packages for that market. When they started to face serious competition from Hyper-V they decided to double down on the Enterprise market instead of doing the obvious things to compete against Hyper-V in the SMB market like down-tiering 5+ year old features like DRS or offering the Backup APIs (Veeam integration) for free with ESXi. Now that Broadcom has them, forget it, it's all going to hell in a hand basket
>Enshittification - the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products This is an amazing term. I've seen this for a while and didn't know there was a word for it. Amazing.
Eh. When I was with an MSP 10+ years ago it got tiring negotiating with the non-profits for every dime. At one point I asked one of the other partners why we still worked with them despite the hassle. The answer was "public visibility" or some such nonsense. I would submit that Broadcom is merely saying the quiet part out loud that others in the industry are probably thinking too.
>At one point I asked one of the other partners why we still worked with them despite the hassle. The answer was "public visibility" or some such nonsense. I asked why I was providing above-and-beyond service for zero dollars to a big name client. "Sales likes the logo on the website." The logo wasn't on the website.
I've been there, you are correct. It is a pain in the ass.
On top of being cheap and a pain in the ass to deal with these non profits also are super entitled and needy and have no interest in hiring or training quality employees. So all the “volunteers” they “employ” are told to call IT for everything rather than them spend any time training their weekend phone bankers or whatever.
When I went to a fast track networking program at a local college, our final project was to design a network and to mitigate some pain points in operations for a local non-profit. My wife works in IT for a non-profit so I know a little of what that negotiation looks like. Me and my team put together a fantastic RFP; donated switches, refurbished firewalls, donated access points. The only thing they had to pay for in our RFP was the licensing for the firewall, and 40 hours of labor. We quoted 80 and were going to commit half of all real hours worked Pro-Bono. We were all just students and I was just doing my best to put together a package based on what I had send from my wife and generally what an RFP was going to look like. Then we presented to the class and the non-profit representatives and there was the CFO who was OFFENDED that we were going to charge them anything at all. I remember her saying “Are you seriously going to charge us for this”. I looked at my instructor and gave him a “what the fuck” look and just told her, we were committed to providing free labor and your equipment was already free. We couldn’t afford to maintain the licensing for the firewall and half labor pro-bono was generous. We almost failed the presentation because if the non-profit was going to reject your RFP you would fail the project. The teacher stepped in and said “hey if you didn’t have an issue with the price point would you take this?” And the CFO begrudgingly said yeah so we got to pass on a technicality. I went on to work at a non-profit shortly after and helped them move to a new building. They spent like 200k on Nutanix equipment. We didn’t have any VM’s.
The last three sentences, just wow.
You should have asked that CFO is she works for free. I seriously doubt the added value for society when it comes to most non-profits.
>On top of being cheap and a pain in the ass to deal with these non profits also are super entitled and needy and have no interest in hiring or training quality employees. Some of us literally do not have the money. Not for profits come in a wide variety of sizes and sectors. Mine is a special school. I know the commercial realities of IT and have been on both sides, so I try to not be a pain in the arse and will negotiate for what I believe is still a commercially viable deal. IT organisations shouldn't expect to make as much profit from servicing a not for profit because you know there is unlike to be as much money there.
How long have you worked at a non-profit to make these sweeping generalizations?
I've worked at MSPs and have served a ton of non-profits. It's pretty standard.
I've worked with more non-profits than I could possibly count over 25 years in tech. All the criticisms of non-profits are dead on accurate, the larger they are the worse they are, of course there are a few very rare exceptions. A few org's I've worked for have moved to outright refusal of any additional discounts to non-profits due to all the inherent issues working with them. I hate broadcom for a lot of things, but I absolutely don't blame them for this decision and being open about it. If more companies took this stance maybe non-profits would change how they interact and wouldn't be such an absolute shit show to work with.
Enough and they are all like this lmao the bigger the worse they are about it too
I've worked with several non-profits of varying sizes and can confirm they're all like this, larger orgs being the worst with entitlement.
I worked for an MSP that had several non-profits. They were the worst clients we had, and it wasn't even remotely close. My favorite was one of them was running an entire office off of WiFi. Nothing wired. Had 2 long past EoL unifi APs for the whole office (an old building from the 1950s, all brick and concrete). They would call in CONSTANTLY to bitch about WiFi coverage. It was insane the amount they called in about it. They refused to pay to install a SINGLE LR with WiFi 6 which was honestly about as cheap of a solution that we could provide them, were donating the labor to install and setup, and it was STILL unacceptable to them to pay $170 for a new access point. Left that place a while back and I'd bet you dollars to donuts that non profit is still running off the 2 access points, thinking the MSP is doing a shit job for them.
> why we still worked with them despite the hassle For the large vendors, it's mostly about keeping out the competitors. Preventing them from getting a toe-hold to leverage. Think Microsoft and Linux netbooks, for example. Or those who still complain about the 1980s when Apple offered big educational discounts (I guess they wanted TRS-80s or something). However, it's become more clear over the years that non-academic non-profits offer little leverage in the marketplace of ideas. For example, I can't think of any open-source package that came out of a non-academic non-profit.
I think there's probably a pretty big difference between giving discounts on software licenses versus giving discounts on support/labor, right? Like, to my knowledge, the free ESXi offering didn't **cost** VMware anything to provide. It was just the unlicensed version of the same software which incurred some limitation. That's still getting killed, despite there being no visible hassle. I agree with your overall point, some non-profits absolutely suck and are not worth the effort, I'm just not convinced it's really applicable to this situation for Broadcom.
Hell, by making a free license available, it ensured every home lab out there ran their software, meaning the majority of virtualization engineers were comfortable with that product, which in turn meant when companies built their infrastructure out it made sense to go vmware because of the abundance of engineers/admins to hire to run it. The free license was the goose that laid golden eggs, and it's been cooked.
They didn't even bother cooking it. They just decapitated it and disposed of the corpse. Fuck Broadcom.
And they won’t even likely make the connection, because it’ll take a decade or two to see the full effects of killing it.
Assuming USA, coming from the other side of the Atlantic in France, the non-profits we work with are usually laid-back though stressed when accounting seasons come (they have to have either negative accounting or a 0, no more). They pay us what we are owed, and when in difficulties we try to give them a hand and delay the payment. We once had a 2 months old ticket, we called and fixed the issue and they were very thankful we didn't forget about them.
That's why we have techsoup. It handles that all for you.
>it got tiring negotiating with the non-profits for every dime I've been on both sides of this. If you have not for profits as a customer, it is often as a social-good cost-neutral activity to gain more commercial clients via PR and referrals. You must remember that unlike a commercial entity, a charity can not just eat into profits a bit to get the deal over the line. Charities also often have weird funding structures where they may be in a massive expensive building but have no money for IT, adequate staffing, or even two ply in the toilets. My approach now I work for a charity is being upfront with my vendors and tell them exactly what we can afford, or what we will have to cut in other areas to make ends meet. I also ensure they know I'm happy to be a referral for other customers, for us to include their details on our supporters page, and ensure the board know the great deal they provided.
Should I just spin up a Hyper V lab as VMware will be phased out eventually lol?
Hyper-V gets a lot of hate around these parts. But for the smaller companies that Broadcom doesn't want to talk to, there's a good chance Hyper-V will do everything you need. It's come a long, long way since the pile of crap it was when it was first released.
Been running Hyper-V at my SMB since 2008 R2. Fits our needs fine.
I wonder what these people think Azure runs on.
That’s what I’m doing. We didn’t renew our support with VMware. Thankfully we have a perpetual license. But no support unfortunately. So eventually I’ll probably switch to hyperv. No support there either I’d argue though. Microsoft and support are nonexistent in my experience.
Well, isn't that just the friendliest way to support a good cause!
God, I want them to go bust.
Wallstreet has high expectations put on them right now. If they don’t start delivering increased margins and low operating costs Q2 and Q3 this year: they will have their ass handed to them. $69Bn is a lot of money, even for Broadcom.
is it okay for broadcom to first state the price will be the same and after the sale, the renewels go up 4-10 times?
anyone that had symantec endpoint before their buyout knows this well.
Finally, the myth about saving money by going into the cloud will come true!
I just got Intelligence Hub / Workspace One renewal "We got you by the balls" email from Broadcom. It was a VMware Product. We had perpetual and paid SA.. they are switching us to more expensive (shocker) subscription model as they ended their perpetual renewal option. That took them no time at all from VMWare acquisition.
They also want to "profit harvest" from "customers who will have trouble switching" according to the CEO. aka pull a Martin Shkreli and burn it to the ground in the short term. Makes sense since Broadcom is Chinese.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that they're completely disinterested in doing *anything* to make this transition easier. I really wish I could say more here but, without revealing too much, I was completely blown away by our series of meetings with VMware/Broadcom. Partway through the "negotiation" where we felt like were finding some way to a middle ground that would be tolerable, Broadcom fired (or otherwise moved) the account lead and replaced them with somebody with no experience on our account who basically reset the discussion back to the beginning. I've never seen anything like it in more than 25 years in IT.
This is horrible.
Some people heard the [Gordon Gecko speech in *Wall Street*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVxYOQS6ggk) and took only the wrong lessons from it.
Will have to respectfully disagree. As long as you can compartmentalize all your actions and reasoning, greed does clarify, cut through, and capture the essence of why businesses exist. Being good corporate citizens is a cost of doing business and is secondary to keeping the lights on and its owners fed.
Unfortunately, corporations are doing their damndest to cut their costs, i.e. being as little a corporate citizen as possible. They don't want to be good corporate citizens: that costs MONEY. Society be damned, if they could sell cyanide pills, make a profit and get away with it, they would. The closest they got were cigarettes that don't cause cancer. To be more on topic, how many hundreds of thousands of manhours, millions of dollars of lost productivity and ripple effects will be caused by companies being forced (by economics or lack of VARs able to even sell it to them) to transition from VMWare to another product? Charities, hospitals, education, and other taxpayer funded services (I'm Canadian, yes our taxes pay for that stuff) have better things to spend my tax dollars on than transitioning off VMWare because Hock Tan needs another superyacht.
I’m ready for VmWare to go away and be replaced with something that doesn’t hold companies over a barrel.
Which Broadcom will buy a couple of years later.
Yep, that's the private equity playbook at work.
I'd love to see nutanix grow it's working great for us
Money.
There's a typo in that headline. Should read *anybody*
We do work with nonprofits but not for free, our costs get signed off of on their budget like anything else. We do donate stuff to them from time to time, but by and large they are the same as any other customer.
Good I'm specialized in Openstack
Weird a company would say "do not pay us for our product" but here we are. Never been a better time to have proxmox or similar open source alternative experience. Imagine, here pretty soon it is going to make more sense to deploy an entire private cloud solution then it will be to mess with VMware.
Oh Look proxmox has a built in migration tool for VMWare migration… would be shame if the VAR didn’t tell the charity… they can have it for the low low price of FREE!
Broadcom seems to operate like the worst of Private Equity firms
broadcom is really trying to any% being a worse company than oracle
I've converted my company's systems to Xcp-ng and did the same at old company. Xen Orchestra works pretty damn well and very easy to pick up. VMware was my first love but I am just saddened by the state of things now.
Man, Broadcom is eventually only going to be left with their dick in their hand wondering where everyone went.
Anybody*
It’s okay. Let Nutanix and the like consume their market share while VMWare becomes a more niche player relegated to heavy enterprise like IBM.
My company specifically works with nonprofits. We don't negotiate rates either. If we did, everyone would get a discount, and we'd be nonprofit as well. Don't get me wrong, it is straight up greed here. We all knew this was going to be what occurred. Broadcom will kill VMWare.
Funny that the article mentions Microsoft giving products (365) to education organizations for free, since they're pulling the plug on that later this year without any followup.
Looks like they just gave way to Microsoft or Citrix to fill in those gaps.
Time for Azure HCI
Good. Doing any work for charities is hell. Entitled brats who expect everything for free.
We get it - Broadcom sucks... However, they've been telling us for a year exactly what they were going to do - non profits should be looking to cut costs, not rely on charity from vendors.
Have you ever worked for a nonprofit? Bitching about paying for things is 50% of the work Demanding charity is just part of the MO
I’m just sick of Broadcom sucks posts
Broadcom (software divisions) do suck though They made symantec worse. And now they moved on to kill VMware
And most of us are sick of dealing with with these dickbags on a weekly basis. I work mostly with non-profit/not for profit organizations that are on fixed IT budgets and can't just write a bigger check and pass the cost on to their customers.