back to article Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users as rivals smell an opportunity

Broadcom and Google have announced a license portability scheme for biz customers to run VMware workloads on Google Cloud. Broadcom is also trying to reassure VMware partners and users that all the changes are for the best, as rivals circle to scoop up any defectors. The license portability scheme is the latest development …

  1. sarusa Silver badge
    Devil

    And other lies

    'Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users'

    There's really nothing they can say at this point that's not a lie. People know what wankers Broadcom are and what their business model is. If you've unwillingly become one of their customers with this you're now prey in their sights.

  2. jeff_w87

    Have you seen the quotes for VCF???

    We're starting to see some of our fellow labs receive quotes for their VCF deployments (since they can't buy individual pieces anymore) and the prices are eye watering to say the least. A 4 node cluster (high core count Epyc processors) coming in at north of $250k per year. Time to look elsewhere for your virtualization needs....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Have you seen the quotes for VCF???

      Yup ours is more than our last 3 Year ELA renewal with Horizon. So about twice as much over $500k for just VVF. 3 Year last February was $450k with 300 horizon. So we are planning our exit since we have 2 years.

    2. Znuff

      Re: Have you seen the quotes for VCF???

      We're a very small shop...

      And our initial estimate is about 20k/year with the subscription. This is just for a 4 nodes with single socket Epyc CPUs...

      1. wayneinuk

        Re: Have you seen the quotes for VCF???

        We are a small shop as well, we have tended to deploy groups of VMware Essentials running hardware like Xeon Silver & now AMD Epyc, kind of specifications being dual CPU, 256GB RAM, 8 TB of NVMe local storage all of which has worked well for us given the customer base we focus on i.e. mostly Linux hosting.

        What other solutions are you looking at? We are exploring Proxmox, XCP-NG, KVM and Virtuozzo.

        I'm just interested on views of others at this important junction.

        Cheers

  3. Mikel

    Software innovation = license portability

    This show is so over. Once again: The purpose of commercial software is to get you hooked on features and then take your data and business processes hostage. From that point forward you work for them.

    >claiming license portability as one such innovation.

    There you go. The innovation is in the way they milk you for more money. To them the purpose of your business is to generate revenue to pay their Board. It's social engineering, not software engineering.

    You can have virtualization on unlimited cores, clusters, nodes with any amount of RAM and storage without paying anything at all. Other people worked on virtualization software together in team spirit and shared it because extorting licensing fees for efforts incidental to improving their business process isn't part of their business model. And you can buy support for it at reasonable rates too.

    Throwback time: https://linuxgenuineadvantage.org/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Software innovation = license portability

      > The purpose of commercial software is to get you hooked on features and then take your data and business processes hostage.

      Oracle is pretty much the epitome of this.

      I've said before that nowadays their products feel like little more than an arbitrary means to an end for their true business- locking customers in, then screwing them over for every penny they can threaten out of them.

  4. picturethis
    Mushroom

    Just need one more piece...

    before moving to Promox completely.

    In a way, I'm glad their (Broadcom's) intentions were shown early. Just rip off the band-aid and let's move on..

    VMWare is now persona non grata in the IT world as far as any of the shops I've been discussing this with.

    Nutanix is getting a lot of air time in these circles as well, but in the past I've had some issues with their hardware/certifications that they provide when I inquired a little bit deeper.

    I do feel some empathy for the VMWare partner/consultant participants, I suspect there will be a negative impact on opportunities for them. I'm sure some will do okay, but quite a few deployed ESXi test beds for their professional training/learning - we'll have to see how that works out for them.

  5. abufrejoval

    Rebirth of mainframe licensing, IBM should sue them

    IBM came up with this way of continually "licensing" the use of what you owned already, when AMDahl and others created 360 clones.

    Personal Computers where the result of them squeezing to the point where pain had even IT-managers jump.

    I bought my first VMware in 1999, because I just loved how they circumvented Intel stopping short of full VMs by exploiting the SMM of the 80386SL/80486SL: they were the underdog and Intel so furious they actually sponsored Xen to piss into VMware's patent pot after immediately pulling the full virtualization stops.

    And then they went was far has having an Intel guy running the company and setting it up for sale into the ground. Is it *that* personal?

    Too bad Qumranet's KVM is owned by IBM now.

    And that's the company that also rather keeps Transitive's QuickTransit in their poison lockers than have humanity benefit from a great idea.

  6. david1024

    Titanic?

    Am I the only one that feels VMware's spokesman is leading the band on the aft deck of the Titanic?

    Everyone I have talked to is migrating off. No real winner/alternative yet... but several contenders. You have to listen when folks tell you who they are and even a rattle of non-continuity like this makes all manner of folks move while they can still plan it.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We are a small ISV and use VMware for our SaaS platform, we're profitable and doing well and already paying £2k/month to VMware but our bill will now rise to £9k/month and that's before we have to pay for the DR site which under the current licensing model, we only pay very little for as it doesn't run any customer VMs. The new model means we have to pay for all the cores in DR too if we run the basics like DNS, SMTP, monitoring system etc - which everybody does as you need to monitor and know what's happening. So they are going to ask us for about £16k/month which makes it unaffordable.

    We can reduce this by committing to 3 year term - but the discount is about 35% which brings it down about £10,500 per month, so still more than 5x the cost last year. Plus we need to buy licenses from a cloud partner that hasn't previously sold licenses - businesses which currently sell their own cloud products. They've been told by VMware to white label, so they are going to have to put a markup on the licenses making them even more expensive. So Boadcom are saying to customers like us, clear off and use something else - that's the reassuring message we're getting.

    OK so we get additional software but we don't use or need it. And if we want the edge firewall or AVI load balancer - both things we would use, they are still extra cost, the same cost per core as the main product. Makes Cisco look cheap !

    So VMware is now unaffordable for thousands of companies like us. We were willing to pay more, this sort of thing happens now and again but we're not willing to be horse whipped into paying for Broadcom's overpayment and corporate greed.

    We're switching to XCP-NG, we have a team building a test system right now and it's already running about 100 cores of load, integrating well with DellEMC storage iSCSI and with Cisco. It's not as good, absolutely not, VMware is a brilliant product, but Broadcom is a shit of a company and we're not playing their game.

    You also need to look at the fact there are now only 6 or 7 Pinnacle partners in the UK, there will only be two aggregators so there are some very skilled people about to loose their jobs too which is never good.

  8. DennisMFaucher

    ...and Nutanix

    Nutanix is offering a year's free licenses and migration services

  9. Phil Kingston

    They seem to have sacked everyone here. It's causing multiple upgrade projects across some pretty large infrastructure to have all sorts of issues.

    IBM might lose their "biggest douchebags in tech" crown.

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