back to article VMware by Broadcom has a licensing portability win with Microsoft

VMware by Broadcom has won Microsoft's support for its license portability plan. The two tech giants late last week announced that subscribers to the VMware Cloud Foundation suite (VCF) will be able to use their entitlements on Microsoft's Azure VMware Solution. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has said license portability is a key …

  1. Khaptain Silver badge

    No keys

    We are one of the No Licence Information available companies on the portal. It's a complete shitstorm.

    My thoughts about Broadcom are forever stained, nothing will ever encourage me to recommend them for anything. This was a multi billion buyout and no one appears to have thought about ensuring the handover for the PAYING customers.

    Anger management is necessary for this one.

    All I want to know is how much it will cost to move our systems to something else , if it is possible without to many headaches. Nothing would make me happier than to end any and all contracts with this bunch of thieves.

    1. NoneSuch Silver badge
      Go

      Re: No keys

      "All I want to know is how much it will cost to move our systems to something else"

      Spent the weekend rebuilding my home lab ditching ESXi and installing ProxMox. Doubt it will replace my ESX work systems, still a bit dodgy in places, but hear that XPG-NG is a solid Enterprise replacement. Trying that next weekend. :)

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: No keys

        Second the Proxmox recommendation. It's definitely a promising tool and I have been trying to spin up to speed on it too, having previously used Fusion and VMWare Workstation almost exclusively.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: XPG-NG is a solid Enterprise replacement

        It's not, really. XCP-ng is what XenServer 7 was, and it has inherited most of its annoyances (like the 2Tb limit for virtual disks, as it it was still 2013) and bugs (such as the all too common common coalesce errors when creating snapshots). A list of issues and limits which made XenServer an inferior choice over ESXi when XS 7 was still a current product eight years ago. And XCP-ng hasn't really progressed much from that state.

        Aside from that, Xen is a zombie platform which has been abandoned by all major players except Citrix a long time ago (Amazon left in 2017 for KVM), and Citrix only sticks with it so they can milk their legacy product XenServer for a while longer, Broadcom-style. There hasn't been any major development or new major version of Xen for more than a decade. Xen has no future.

        Setting on Xen for any deployment in 2024 is pure madness.

        For open source virtualization, KVM is where all the action is, and has been for many years. And because it's part of the standard Linux kernel it's very well supported and will have a long future ahead of it.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quelle suprise!

    One anti-competitive license pushing mobster agrees deal with new member of the anti-competitive license pushing mob. Next someone is going to tell me that water is wet!!?

    Why are the competition authorities refusing to get on top of this behaviour? For both MS and VMWare there is a clear case of companies with dominant positions in their markets (OS licenses and on-prem hypervisors respectively) using their positions to limit customer choice.

    The very definition of anti-competitive behaviour.

    Have to laugh slightly though given all the effort MS went to back in the day to (try to) shaft VMware by not supporting Windows systems on VMware because they had no hypervisor themselves (pre Hyper-V)

    1. Khaptain Silver badge

      Re: Quelle suprise!

      "Why are the competition authorities refusing to get on top of this behaviour? For both MS and VMWare there is a clear case of companies with dominant positions in their markets (OS licenses and on-prem hypervisors respectively) using their positions to limit customer choice."

      You mean Broadcom ? ( not VMWare)

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    So, Redmond has extended its greasy hand to Broadcom

    A match made in corporate heaven. Why am I not surprised ? Broadcom is starting to notice that its near-termination of VMWare is not going down well, and Borkzilla certainly has the might to pressure Broadcom's board into understanding Redmond's best interests.

    In hindsight, this was inevitable. If Broadcom hadn't agreed, Borkzilla would have just bought it and be done with it.

  4. Rgen

    Not sure what i think. One license mess going to the most complicate licensing company in the world.

  5. Jerome

    ... yes; And if someone could also find the price of VMWare Fusion for 1 user/Mac, if you very occasionally do some work with it?

    I have tried and all I could find was a "Get in touch with our sales team" link.

    Although I had previous paid for licenses, I will not take the risk of using any of their product if I am at risk of owing them a lot of money because I opened a document in Word for Windows on my Mac.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Meh. I'm going to keep using it like I always have - with a pirate key.

  6. redstone70

    That's assuming you can stand using the Azure VMware Cloud Solution. Any VMware admin worth his or her salt will pull their hair out with AVS. Their stupid restrictions dumb the product down to being almost useless and troubleshooting a problem is a mind-numbing experience because you have to contact support for everything instead of fixing it yourself. They were 10 months behind on patching before they finally updated my environment with the latest security patches. There is no ESXi command line, no vCenter command line, common features in vCenter are grayed out or completely missing because they do not give you administrator access. It is a crippled account called cloudadmin. I think Microsoft's marketing strategy is to make you hate AVS so much that you'll gladly migrate all your virtualized servers to native Azure.

  7. Cloudy Day

    Imagine…..

    What inferences Microsoft will draw if Broadcom's get away with what they are trying to impose on their customers!! You will no doubt shortly be seeing your EA prices go up by a factor of 10. Because Microsoft will be of the opinion that if Broadcom got away with it, then so can they…

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