Ingram Micro to 'stop doing business' with Broadcom, downgrade to 'limited engagement' on VMware Tech distribution behemoth Ingram Micro will stop doing business with Broadcom and its VMware range in many territories next year. In a statement sent to The Register, an Ingram spokesperson told us: "We were unable to reach an agreement with Broadcom that would help our customers deliver the best technology outcomes now and …
How are those migrations to alternatives going? I heard a lot of plans, but so far I only heard of Beeks' "Most of the VMs now run under OpenNebula". So are other companies migrating too, or just telling about plans, or just paying the Broadcam bill?
I can imagine technical people experienced in VMware want to stay on VMware as its their expertise.
Technical people generally don't make the decisions, its the bean counters that do. Technical people will just retrain.
And the enterprises with hundreds of clusters spread around 10s or 100s of locations its not an overnight migration. Most will have renewed long term contracts to 2026/2027 (something Broadcom no longer offers and is a big reason why people are moving away from) so migrations will be multiyear and take a while to plan and execute.
Mixed into this is the push to modernise apps away from Windows / Linux to either on-prem / co-lo / hyperscaler cloud native / CaaS / SaaS /PaaS or whatever, certainly not IaaS if possible.
We migrated all our internal systems and most hosted customers off VMware. Many of our SMB clients are getting rid of on premises servers as they migrate to cloud hosted applications. The ones that remain have a choice when they come to do a refresh or when their VMware support ends. We will sell them new licences if they want to stay on it or we can help them migrate. Our default position now is VMWare last. Until the Broadcom acquisition we were one of VMWares strongest evangelists in our region, but they turned that bridge by their complete disdain for long time partners. Unfortunately exactly the same thing is also playing out with Citrix.
We all know there are plenty of enterprise ready alternatives to VMware. The only reason VMware still has "any" business, is because the applications still running on it, are technically / politically, too hard to move to public cloud.
Most Public, or Private Cloud Solutions offering a Hypervisor today are using Linux KVM under the covers. Native Linux KVM is used at scale, in mission critical, enterprise environments, everywhere. Most, if not all, 4G and 5G networks globally run on OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/ a great, infinite scale, Linux KVM alternative to VMware (with native GUI, vSAN, NSX, vMotion, etc)). All of these networks will move to Kubernetes for 6G and use KubeVirt. A containerized Linux KVM - https://kubevirt.io/ (another great, intent based, alternative to VMware).
If Orgs want a smaller, simpler, alternative GUI for a Linux KVM cluster, install cockpit ( https://cockpit-project.org/ ).
All of these alternatives are free (or fully supported by your vendor of preference). Best of all .... The underlying code is maintained under the Linux Kernel (i.e. not going anywhere)
My 2c's - Why are people still using VMware in 2024, because they don't want to RTFM https://linux-kvm.org/page/Documents ;)
Admittedly not a power user however we have a fair few stand alone ESXI boxen.
A number of these had a ProxMox box installed alongside when the news started that Broadcom were sniffing about. Migration was initially painful and we ran side by side with the VMs on both platforms and moved to Proxmox gradually over almost a year now.
Halfway through Proxmox gained the ability to mount VMware data stores and that was a game changer for us.
Not much left on VMWare now and it seems easier to manage once you get your head round it. And having a useable backup system off the get go is a huge advantage and takes the cost of Veeam away too.
YMMV but I see this as a good move for us that should have been done earlier.
Reliability wise. No change. Performance wise, I feel its possibly a bit quicker but its subjective.
My boss and I have both been familiarizing ourselves with Proxmox for a bit over a year now. Luckily it should be a fairly easy transition for us from vCenter, as we only have a few dozen VMs to migrate. I've got a small 4 machine cluster in my home lab running quite a few services, and at work, I successfully moved one less-critical Windows Server VM from vCenter to a Proxmox test box, even before Proxmox recently added an automated way to do so. I think we are fairly well prepared, and only need the bean-counters to sign off on purchasing the hardware needed to build a small Proxmox cluster.
I've no idea the difficulties a larger organization might face, but for us, Proxmox seems the perfect solution to enable us to show Broadcom the door.
bets that the following hardnose calculation has been dun by the uber capatilists....
profits from dealing with ingram micro at the inflated price....
minus....
the additional infrastructure we need to support the ingram et al's of this world....
must tbe same or greater than the profit we get out of just supporting the top £2k customers
makes perfect sense from a purely capatalist eye
not to me as im not a capitalist
a capitalist would say ..... working fine, The void will be filled by alternative capitalists, allbeit never as profitable as the uber capitalists at the top of the pile
Its an old old argument, and an idealogical one
i for one am firmly in the camp off "capitalism will eat itself", but will take a while, unless it can continue to strip mine the enviroment it desperately needs for continous growth/innovation
hence the urgent need to strip mine resources off world that has only just begun
interesting times
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
