‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix Dominic Johnston is fed up with VMware. A couple of years back, that wasn’t the case. Johnston, an IT manager at Australian civil construction and mining contractor Golding, used VMware Cloud on AWS to host some workloads and for disaster recovery. After Broadcom acquired VMware, Johnston noticed “a couple of support failings …
Of the virtualization world. Soon to close all locations (er, I mean accounts). The last time I saw such a vile shitshow was when HP effectively killed off its own bread and butter by firing the engineers and killing off successful product lines that had major customers lined up every year.
We left Nutanix a long time ago. The additional resources needed to support their architecture was 15-25% of the hosts capacity. Their tech support was excellent, but we ended up calling them a little too often for my liking. Patching gone wrong, numerous SATADOM failures during upgrades, that sort of thing. Their gear was OK, but nothing special.
We've moved to Hyper-V. Not a great product, but it'll do. As a secondary slap to their face, we're no longer buying any hardware with Broadcom cards. Not giving them any more of our money. Supporting idiocy and greed is not in the cards.
"Ironically, shortly after the migration was complete, he got a call from a VMware account manager who introduced themselves as his new point of contact - unaware that Johnston had already planned to end Golding's relationship with the Broadcom business unit."
Ironically? In Johnston's place "happily" might have been the least of it. It would have been a call I'd really have enjoyed. Draw it out nicely. Explain what I'd need from VMware. Reject each of his offerings with lengthy explanations. And even if he did come up with some offer, drop the bombshell that he was too late. Finally explain how easy it was to complete the transfer.
Life doesn't present too many opportunities like that.
I worked for a company last year and they openly mocked my virtualisation experience as much of it was with Hyper-V (I work in the public sector a lot and Microsoft offer much more favourable licensing to public sector bodies so it makes sense if you don't need all the features VMware offers). By the end of my 6 month contract, with Broadcom taking the piss on renewal costs and also appalling support from Cisco on their Hyperflex hardware they were seriously starting to look at Hyper-V as an option, as well as a new (at the time) hyperconverged option from Dell that sadly I can't remember the name of at the moment - it was Power something I think but that hardly narrows it down in Dell world.
Broadcom seem to think VMware is like Oracle and they'll get away with it, but moving VMs to a new platform is a lot easier than migrating databases, even if it's still a PITA.
I use Hyper-V here.
It works just fine. The features I need are snapshots and backups, the ability to run Windows, Debian, and FreeBSD VMs and all of those are supported out of the box, PCI-E passthrough to get a GPU onto one of the VMs, and direct assignment of storage devices to one of the other VMs that serves as my storage pool.
>Johnston told us he is “pretty infuriated” with Broadcom for making changes that brought no obvious benefit
The obvious benefit is bending customers over the table and making some of the investors and shareholders slightly more pleased. I don't know how people still haven't realized that they as the customer are no longer the main concern for virtually _any_ company, let alone someone in such a prime "butcher the pig" position as VMware.
Yeah, absolutely none of this was for customers' benefit, and it's silly to even grasp for straws looking for any customer benefit here. This was 100% explicitly Broadcom doing pig butchering from the start (with customers being the pigs for those who still don't get it).
This was also 100% foreseeable and forseen (plenty of us here who predicted how it played out).
I am not against anyone for political reason, but with US government politicize ALL business ( sanction this,punish that, embargo on this, blahblah) and all major public company solely to serve stock price w/o ANY regard for customer ( Oracle, Broadcom, .....................), maybe we can slowly build the eco system in France/Germany and ensure both government strictly follow best business practice ( if you sell civilian products, the government has the most liberal policy), we can either move companies from US to France/Germany or build everything there, I know it is hard and FR/DE lacks engineers, but US reputation is decimated and will never recover, i see once in a century opportunity to have US based vendors eventually replaced, maybe in 20 years?
I see bleak future for ANY tech companies based in the US ( Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)
Realistically, what you want are open source solutions that are not dependent upon the whims of manufacturers or governments. Note, we should not expect this to be free: development, maintenance, documentation, support should all be things we should be prepared to pay for in one way or another.
In an ideal case sovereign wealth funds invest in the development of open software and hardware (e.g. Germany), for features/robustness of soft and hardware that's critical to a nation's infrastructure.
The analogy of global shared infrastructure (e.g. sealanes, airspace) comes somewhat close, it needs investment, and not investing means not being able to have a say.
I don't know about sovereign but there are several EU initiatives in that direction (one being mentioned in El Reg today around search engines). I agree an injection of money to scale these up to enterprise level would be welcome.
Realistically, what you want are open source solutions that are not dependent upon the whims of manufacturers or governments.
You have about as much realistic chance of that as you have of world peace or a cure for all cancers.
development, maintenance, documentation, support should all be things we should be prepared to pay for in one way or another.
Absolutely, but the only people with the money to pay for it, or the power to force such payments (from tax, for example), are the manufacturers and governments. They are always going to be in the loop.
Unfortunately that makes it too easy to swap backends, and avoid lock-in, so vendors are unlikely to accept it. They always 'extend' the standard with some extra vendor-specific operations to make it difficult to change supplier. Storage manufacturers have been doing that for years, look at SNIA and its attempts at standard disk protocols like SMI-S.
Largely yes, especially when one vendor offers a single feature that a specific company wants -- that's where it starts, and then they're stuck, and start pressuring others.
When the gov. gets involved, demanding compliance with a given standard, then that company has an issue: they have to move from their chosen feature to being compliant with a standard. It's not impossible and still allows for some vendor control, but there's a significant weight back toward the portable, multi-company standard.
Just weighing in. :-) No definite solutions here.
Another reason for doing this is the USA's CLOUD act, allowing them to grab data from servers outside the USA. FinTecs, governments, and anyone who cares about GDPR would love to have a fully european cloud provider at scale. Obviously there are some, but have you heard of them?
Desperate enough to have hired a new CEO that broke their privacy promise, as reported a few weeks back on El Reg. I won't shed too many tears over their predicament, though I do appreciate that a number of privacy-respecting browsers derive from Mozilla code, with the naughty bits removed.
Ideally the first step would be to get rid of copyright and patenting as it relates to software. For patenting, ,require that the software be so unique as to be in a class of its own, with little to no relation to existing platforms. Think Quantum computing OS = yes, anything less revolutionary than that = no. Set the copyright terms for operating systems and software to a maximum of 5 years with 0 possibility of renewal or evergreening.
For some meaning of superior. One size doesn't fit all, but some executives are unable to undestand it - because it means more investments, and thereby less profits.
There are several reasons to use external storage within a virtualization solutions, because of costs and flexiblity.
we've just completed our migration from ESX running on Nutanix to straight Nutanix and are about to start moving native Azure workloads to Nutanix NC2 in Azure. bye bye BroadCON bye bye. and of course Nutanix support is utterly FAB lots of vendors could learn loads from Nutanix on how to support and value customers!
I remember 10-15 years ago VMware tried to force through a licensing model change based on memory in the host servers which also lead to eye watering cost increases
that lead to a mass exodus of customers to Microsoft Hyper-V and 6 months or so later the removed the new licensing based on memory, but the damage was done
so they are again trying to bend their customers over again to royally Roger them, that would make me steer well clear and never go near them again
and it was fine when I was there (for a techy). However, salesey people I know who stayed on say it's a dreadful* place to work now. Most I know have now left and are much happier.
* TBH, after hearing them talk, dreadful really doesn't describe it. Unrelentingly awful?
Nutanix does not currently have the market share to make that approach viable. Broadcom's takeover of VMware is creating fragmentation in the virtualization marketplace, and, while Nutanix is definitely benefiting, so are a host of other players, as mentioned in the article.
Agreed big tech cloud services are simply a huge waste of money and also hurt local workforces for pretty much everyone who lives outside of Seattle and the bay area. And even then most of the people born there don't have a chance of any employment with these firms. The opportunities mostly go to outsiders wiling to uproot and relocate their whole lives.
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