Broadcom throws VMware customers on perpetual licenses a lifeline

Broadcom has blinked, and made a couple of changes to support VMware customers who don't want to move to its new software bundle subscriptions. In a Monday post, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan restated his belief that VMware's portfolio was too complex, and too poorly integrated, for the virtualization giant to represent true …

[Kurgan]

Chinese hypervisors?

Someone in the west is really going to use Chinese hypervisors? A very bad idea IMHO. Even worse than using Vmware at current prices.

I really hope that we'll see more market share for open solutions like Proxmox VE.

[Phil Kingston]

Re: Chinese hypervisors?

Wait till you hear what else is Chinese

[IGotOut]

Re: Chinese hypervisors?

No, but China, Russia, North Korea and many, many more will dump Broadcom. And that's a VERY big potential market

[Robert Halloran]

VMWare has been the default virtualization system for years, but given Broadcom's efforts to squeeze their enterprise customers, the rise of multiple alternatives like Proxmox & Nutanix, the push for containerization and the move to external cloud hosting, Broadcom may be finding their move is driving off those major customers in job lots and warp speed.

[Korev]

Yeah, it'll set those customers migration in vMotion...

[Anonymous Coward]

“The other change is providing some ongoing security patches for VMware customers who persist with their perpetual licenses instead of shifting to Broadcom's subs.”

‘Persist’ ?? What a cock-womble !?!

[J. Cook]

I think one of the things that will hinder a large scale migration to ProxMox in the US is the dearth of resellers for enterprise support; while [RedactedCo] is a little strange in how we procure things; getting enterprise level support directly from the developer is a little complicated.

That, and along with the lack of compatibility with how some of our third party integrations with VMware operate, have put us in a pretty tight spot, and we are not happy about it. (neither are the third parties that I've talked to, frankly.)

[Mr.Nobody]

Agreed on the integrations part, as well as some significant recovery aspect changes.

Our storage solution works incredibly well with VMware. There is a built in plug to backup and restore VMs from snapshots that are so simple to use that most people understand it after a reading a one page how-to with screenshots.

Proxmox is pretty good performance wise vs VMware. I have done a whole lot of testing on a cluster with the same hardware as VMware, and it's the same or better with some tweaking.

The big issue is around the backup integration and DR. We have over 1000 VMs in a few locations, and DR for them is replicating the storage to another site, mounting the datastores, and running a script that finds vmx files and imports them into vcenter. When I ask people in the Proxmox commnunity on how to do something similar, the answer is always something kludgefy, or do a standard backup and restore (for 1000 VMs).

Hopefully this announcement gives us more time to figure out a path forward for a few more years.

[Darkk]

Site to site cluster replication is on the road map for ProxMox. For now there is a way to do it using ZFS replication. There is a how to write up on ProxMox doc site.

[Dimmer]

Smoke

Hey guys, has anyone actually heard from a vendor if this is true?

Having a bit of a trust issue with Broadcom.

[Tommy G1]

This should incur jail time

There should be some path to jailing people for coming out with statements like "how best to prepare them [our customers] for success" while brazenly screwing said customers.

[Jess--]

Re: This should incur jail time

They never said who's success.

[Grunchy]

Commodity Equipment

“The cloud” isn’t exactly a scam, but it’s definitely no foundation to build a business upon. The cloud host has too much power to restrict or remove service at any second.

What I like about Linux and Proxmox is that once the system is working, I don’t have to let anybody make any changes anymore: I don’t have to respond to Microsoft Apple Google Amazon whims. I can lock down my solution and let it earn money without some “landlord” coming to demand more and more. What they are really after is to spy on my business, steal all my trade secrets, then run me out of business and steal all my customers and trade relations. And pay them for the privilege!!

Instead I switched to Proxmox and Virt-Manager and run “obsolete” systems and solutions. I will never do any business with Microsoft Apple Google Amazon ever again. Nothing against M.A.G.A., I just don’t trust those people, and thank goodness there are alternatives…

[Anonymous Coward]

Existing Customers Only

VMware has become another of those technologies that is used by existing customers only. As with mainframes, or big unix, or big storage arrays, no growing start-up is going to think "I know what my business needs now, to become dependent on expensive old-hat technologies from vendors that have run out of road".

So the vendors of these installed-base-only technologies have only one path to growth: do a Larry. Which they are all doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too little, too late....

There are many competing hypervisors; many that have been around for over a decade, that, until recently, didn't have a chance to thrive and people now have virtualization options. Regarding Hock Tan's recently announced appeasements, they fail to address much of the damage to Partners, Cloud Providers, MSPs and Customers over the past several months. This article and, a few weeks ago about VMware throwing a "lifeline" to smaller cloud providers, it is clear that it isn't done out of the goodness of their heart; but rather as defence from regulatory scrutiny, and is too little, too late.