A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware one year ago, on November 22, 2023. Has it been a success? On the financial scoreboard, Broadcom says the deal looks like a winner. Revenue is on the rise already – a sign that customers are buying into its strategy of no longer selling standalone support services to holders of …
I wonder, how many new customers they have signed and how does this compare to previous business? Seems that would be the better measure of how the business is going. Especially considering all the increased profits comes from cutting costs and jacking up prices. From what I understand, they are putting the screws to their customers hard.
However, the migrations are coming. They don't happen over night and can take many months, if not years, to plan and implement, but they are coming. In fact, our vendor, Logicalis, just this week asked for a timeframe to complete a migration off VMWare for all the services they run for us. That is not quite a small mom and pop shop running in the back of someone's office. Apparently, the tools to do such migrations have all seen a massive uptick in development and usability lately. I imagine this is why Broadcom has been so forward in bleeding the current customers as much as they can.
Let's talk about the real problem here; there are practically no rivals. Keep in mind that this is at the enterprise level. If you are small to medium then you should really consider Proxmox. If you are Enterprise then the only apparent life-for-like option is Nutanix and they seem to be too stupid to realize that adopting the use of external storage would open the whole world to them. Of course there are those that think that moving to the cloud is the right answer but those people don't work at companies where the disruption to the business to do this means that it will take years.
The actual lift and shift options are basically one option at the enterprise level. Boo.
Citrix licensing is garbage today, forcing you into the Cloud.
Proxmox is too fragile. Good product, but weird issues even on Enterprise grade hardware. Needs a lot of work. Support costs $$.
XCP-NG is too restrictive for hardware and $$$$ support.
Yet, I ditched VMWare and replaced it with Hyper-V. Not as good as ESX, but a damn site cheaper and does everything I want. The clustered feature is nice in case of host failures. ESX is going the way of Cisco, adding all sorts of complex features I neither want to need (not to mention mandatory CEIP enrollments), yet I have to buy advanced ESXi licenses because the one feature I do need is paywalled.
For the record, I hate Microsoft. Hate their marketing BS, hate their forced 'upgrade' bloat and detest their attitude towards their customers. Yet, it's the only affordable game in town unless you want to employ two or three additional full time people to maintain any other solution. Or continue to pay VMware $$$$$
If only RH hadn't dropped RHEV/RHV they'd be making a killing right now. Better features than Hyper-V, almost parallel with VMWare for basic clustered virtualisation.
These days you could probably achieve similar with OpenShift however I've never used it in anger so can't comment.
Not really true. People touting Vmware as untouchable with silver bullet solutions are in denial. Hyper-V is very strong contender, including S2D and related services as etorage and network stacks. Likewise VMware isn't all that magical, I had some time with it pas couple months, and as a team we've already experienced plenty of weird behavior, illogical design decisions, and outright bugs and instabilities. No product is perfect, and certainly not that much better that it would warrant a 10x price hike. As for other contenders, Proxmox is just a face, whole opensource stack is pretty mighy with entrants such as KVM, FreeNAS, and so on. With right tools and knowledge they can provide great value. I haven't yet seen the new tools like Azure Local, but competition isn't standing still.
Hyper-V is a viable option for a lot of people. Sure it doesn't have all the features that VMWare has, but do you actually need those extra features? Some will certainly, but I suspect a lot don't.
The gap has closed a bit with Server 2025. I wouldn't be putting that in production just yet, but certainly start evaluating it with a plan to deploy it sometime next year.
Ah yes, HP's offering from the article.
It's a great comment in the original piece about people having long memories. I for one got burned in HPE's Itanium "we're not supporting it suckers...well, maybe we're not that hasty....ok mr judge, we '''''''''''''will'''''''''''' support these boxes, promise". mess. It'll be a cold day in hell before I pivot that way.
See also: Google Graveyard.
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From information I've gathered from similar organisations, the Broadcom licensing change has increased costs up to 1300%, mostly around orgs with smaller VMWare footprint than my lot. The thing is that it's those smaller footprint orgs that are being gouged that are more easily able to migrate so Broadcom may be only getting a very short term boost here.
A classical story of acquiring a cash cow and milk the existing locked-in customers utterly dry.
Expect the switching costs to be maximize with the fees just below that. I expect that in a few years, every existing customer will realize that getting off VMware cold turkey would have been cheaper than staying.
Just ask Oracle customers.
What switching costs?
Admittedly I've not used VMWare for a while, but the migration process used to be: take the disk image, convert it to whatever format your new VM system uses, make sure it's got a similar hardware config, and hit 'start'.
I'm sure there's companies who will charge your through the nose to do it for you, but it's generally easier than migrating from one physical server to another.
Yes and no, things like networking and storage can vary and if you are migrating to new hardware then you need to ensure compatibility (moving from Intel to AMD for example). Generally there are patches for most things. And most teams won't be so trusting and will want to certify their apps on new hypervisor so that is more resource consuming that doing the actual migration.
Other thing to consider is if you want to time you migration with app & OS fresh cycles else you could end up going ESX -> Refreshed ESX -> New hypervisor. Most app teams don't have that much bandwidth. So if you have 24 months or something to do the migration then you have a chance to plan and pace yourself.
Depends how far down the rabbit hole you are - if you have all your servers running on vRealize Operations Manager (vROps), vSAN, and/or VXRail then getting off of that will be extremely difficult as you'll have to take one or two hosts out of your cluster (probably losing your N+1 if you have a small cluster so your redundancy is gone for the duration) or purchase new hardware, build out your new environment with the same functionality in it (and if that means buying traditional shared storage instead then you'll have to do that too) on the sequestered host(s), migrate over 1 host's worth of VMs (probably with downtime for at least a few minutes per VM), then remove a host from the VMWare cluster & rebuild & add to the new cluster and repeat.
Could take hours/days per host depending on how large they are, how much storage they have on board (if using software defined storage like vSAN) as that will need to drain, and how many VMs are on them (I.E. how large are the VMs)
First: VMware has hands down the best virtualization platform. Features; ease of install, ease of use; support from 3rd parties. The others are playing catch up but can achieve parity since ESXi is stagnating. I'm not expecting anything groundbreaking in the near future, for me ESXi is feature complete. Maybe more polish, automation and such. Or maybe they're trying to shoehorn some useless AI bunk in vSphere 9 release?
My employer has 100k employees and presence in all continents except Antarctica. Most of you have used their products.
I have no idea how much VMware ilcenses costs to the company and I have no visibility to number of hosts, VM's and such globally. I'm just a cog doing work for a couple sites with few dozen hosts with those sweet but costly Enterprise Plus licenses the global HQ purchase wholesale from Broadcom and distributes to the sites around the world.
Now a new missive has been circulating about moving to Azure Stack HCI save money. As we're already all-in on MS software assurance this can *probably* save money, but implementing this globally will take years since many sites operate on hardware refresh cycles and a proof-of-concept at some medium size site will need to be done first.
It's a shame to move from a leading tech to second-rate stuff, and hopefully Broadcom will come to their senses and ease the squeeze on clients so that a good product will not die and go to waste.
I finished moving a three node VMware cluster with iSCSI SAN to Proxmox recently. Loads of single ESXis moved across already.
If you have slots, slap in a wodge of SSDs and do Ceph. We have a spare box to kick off the process. Your cluster should be n+1 so blat one of the ESXis and add it to the spare to make a two node Proxmox and Ceph cluster. Be very careful! Migrate some VMs over until you can release another ESXi, continue until you have a n+2 cluster. Now very carefully remove the spare node and get on with life.
The SAN can be used for backups or binned for being a gas guzzler 8)
Single boxes: Get your spare migration box. Mount the VMware volumes on it and migrate the VMs, fiddle with VirtIO and so on. Then wipe the VMware box and make a two node Proxmox cluster. You can live migrate the VMs back to the first box. You get "Storage vMotion" for free with Proxmox \o/
Fuck VMware and Broadcom after being a fan for about 25 years.
"It's a shame to move from a leading tech to second-rate stuff"
Are you sure we are talking about the same VMware?
vCentre SSL certs are only just about something you don't have to fix biennially any more. Who can forget the laugh of making the wrong choice between ESX and ESXi and having to migrate? The vSphere client being a pile of steaming shite and finally becoming quick and reliable and then being replaced with ... the Flash thing. Then the current effort was written from the ground up. A current vCentre is a monstrous beast.
I could go on at some length after being an ex fan for 25 odd years.
While trying to get into BIOS boot menu under current VMware Workstation, I lost the focus and invoked "help website" as in F1/Help key.
Remember this used to be and still is a very expensive end user/commercial software. I have 8 "404 not found" tabs here. Yes, they managed to delete the freaking help page.
You can figure the issue from their side using 1994 "analytics" technology. You know, thousands of 404 errors on the same page logged.
They managed to get a compatibility break into the Workstation updater too, either side of 17.6, where you can't do it automatically because of the switchover to Broadcom.
The only 'upside' is at least it has a message to tell you it won't work before you try on an earlier release.
Workstation and Fusion are free: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/
Just navigate down the tree:
https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/
Thanks Broadcom (never believed I would say that)
One stumbling block you can find when trying to move to a different hypervisor is lack of vendor support.
Cisco only supports UC products on ESXi, some other vendors only support ESXi and Hyper-V.
It will take time for vendors to validate and support other hypervisors but I suspect some are waiting to see which one(s) are going to popular as they don't want to support too many platforms.
This has left organisations nervous about backing the wrong horse too. This means some have opted to pay up to Broadcom in the short term.
Cisco barely support UC at all.
For many of my customers, the fact that Veeam supports nearly everything, including Proxmox is the assurance they need that their data is safe. It may seem a bit odd that a backup product guides their thinking but, hey: that's "enterprise".
If your phones are still a sort of grey colour and look as though they were designed by Tonka then it might be time to move on, usually to something even more awful. Why on earth would you wand crystal clear voice when you can have crap quality in glorious technicolour, and rubbish Teams integration with horrific latency, that everyone accepts as the new normal. Grumble etc
"Cisco only supports UC products on ESXi"
And that is why we are getting off Cisco for UC. Cisco doesn't support overallocated of vCPU or RAM (if do that sort of thing). They also don't support vMotion. TBH, I don't see much benefit aside from saving some hardware costs. Cisco are moving UC off ESX to Nutanix with a longer term via of having a custom hypervisor based on KVM.
What a nasty, cynical, greedy way to run a company. Is Jabba the Hut the CEO by any chance? I feel really bad for all the staff broadcom laid off. VMWare may have had its ups and downs, but they did work hard to make a good product, and support it. They earned their market share, and without the staff to maintain it, it's all downhill from here.
Hopefully over time as more customers that can move away do; the newer companies that form will steer clear. Broadcom are well and truly another Oracle. Nobody would ever migrate to any of their products. They have reached the peak customer base they will ever see unless they buy more companies (RIP Sun!), and from here it will be a decline. Our company was considering VMWare for a few projects until last year. No way in hell will we go near it now.
Same deal with Unity trying the same business model and increasing prices threefold. We aren't married to them, we will migrate.
If the first year had been such a success why did Broadcom bring back Enterprise plus ? I'll find out soon, but I wonder how much cheaper that is.
I suspect very few VMware customers use all the software stack. And VSAN ? Who uses that ? That was one of the key factors in us not buying Nutanix when we ditched VMware, it only supports local storage - or recommends only local storage.
It's a continued scam. Our perpetual contract is up, so we asked for budget numbers earlier this year from the VAR to find out what we should expect. We were told $101.25 for VVF. Come September (before the embiggend VVF VSAN and E+ coming back announcement), they told us to expect it at around $120 for VVF after discounts.
We go all excited after the E+ announcement because that's all we need. Finally got pricing on E+. $120 a core, and there will be no discounts.
I think they may have surpassed Oracle as most awful company.
broadcom SAYS people haven't left VMware but they conveniently left out 2 important facts:
1. it takes time to research, propose and implement an alternative VM
2. Contracts have to run out the clock for many bigger companies
I wonder what % of VMWare customers have alternatives in progress but are waiting til current VMWare contracts end? I'm guessing >75% since broadcom has basically torpedoed the HMS VMware then started machine gunning the sailors in the water.
"I wonder what % of VMWare customers have alternatives in progress but are waiting til current VMWare contracts end? I"
When you have 20,000 VM spread across 180 clusters globally do you don't wait for the contract to end to start migration unless you have happen to have access to unlimited resources. As several people have pointed out a lot of enterprise contracts are ending 2027/28 so that only leave 36 to 48 months to complete migration.
I've said this a million times but get your frigging apps off Windows & Linux and into SaaS / CaaS / Cloud Native even if you host on prem. And nobody in their right mind is going to use Tanzu for hosting cloud apps.
Anyway, as we all realise in real world that things don't move that fast so we are stuck with moving to a new hypervisor in the meantime. As somebody else mentioned Nutanix is too expensive for storage and Proxmox is fine for SMB but sorry, not enterprise grade. I actually like Hyper-V if you staying x86 on prem but for those looking at running CaaS and x86 side by side on prem take a look at OSV. The console if fairly decent (though I assume everyone is automated this days), its migration tool is fairly decent (point it at your vSphere instances and it does the rest) though you need to do some pre-work if you have complicated networking and you also happen get unlimited RHEL licenses. It sits on top of Openshift so you do have that overhead but if you deploying CaaS on OpenShift already then it worth looking at.
The boxes are where people sat to be seen, often because they'd sponsored the opera and wanted everyone to know.
The actual view from there is almost always rubbish, you don't sit there if you actually want to watch the show. Many UK theatres use them for crew these days as they can't sell them.
And sometimes you'd see more from a box than you wanted to - a letter from "Letters Live" read by Stephen Fry about a "deplorable incident" at the BBC proms
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