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.