VMware to lose 35 percent of workloads in three years – some to its friends at ‘proper clouds’ More than a third of workloads currently running under VMware will run on another platform by 2028, with its own trusted hosting partners pushing some customers to make the move. So says Gartner research VP Julia Palmer. On Wednesday at the analyst firm’s Symposium event in Australia, Palmer pointed out that the Broadcom …
They were never interested in the customers nor the technology. However, as a semiconductor manufacturer, they were VERY interested in acquiring the 10,000 virtualisation patents. It's defensive patenting - virtualisation is a direct threat to their core business - now, whichever way the wind blows, they profit (especially when you consider they are a company with a history of aggressive patent litigation).
They don't care about customers moaning about price rises and saying they'll never use the technology again. They don't care that they're driving the company into the ground. Every single penny they extract from customers at this stage is just a free bonus, the buyout was never about the technology (and especially it wasn't about keeping the customer base happy). They now own the patents widely used in the world of virtualisation and cloud computing. Job done.
Anyone not looking at alternatives with a solid plan to move before their contract runs out needs psychiatric help. It's a dead product.
CA made its billions on techno-necromancy. They'll keep adjusting the annual maintenance fees or subscription higher and higher. Who cares if there's one customer left if they're willing to pay the equivalent of a small country's GDP to use the product?
If you are simply jumping from VMWare to some other proprietary VM or cloud that sounds like just setting yourself up for a repeat of the same problem in future with someone else. Suppose you jump from VMWare to Nutanix, and Broadcom buys Nutanix? Or you jump from VMWare to someone's proprietary cloud and someone there decides that they have even more vendor lock-in than VMWare and you aren't escaping from them no matter how much they jack up the price?
El Reg quoted:
"before urging users to exercise extreme caution before considering OpenStack or KubeVirt as few organizations have the skills to support those platforms".
If you don't have the skills to use something that you have determined could be your solution, then develop your skills. Life is not a fantasy story where a character comes with certain magical "skills" and that's it. How did you get the skills you have now? You learned them. Well, learn some new ones.
I was going to make the same point. It is truly amazing how organisations will lock themselves into situations which are not only expensive but where the expense is out of their control rather than make an investment in retraining. They need to take a fresh look at capex vs opex issues. Vendors have successfully trained customers to me capex-averse and are now exploiting the situation.
I don't disagree in theory. I was however in the last four years, the (technical) owner of a platform for a B2B2C manufacturer of a commodity product in a specific industry in the UK. I'd hazard almost all here own ~10-15 of the items in question and they're reasonably painfully expensive. It's a small industry so I don't want to clarify too much but I'd guess there are ~10 manufacturers of that scale in the UK with countless resellers.
It's easy to state you need to "develop your in-house skills" but the industry in question had two viable UK providers of what can reasonably be approximated to be an ERP. In order to operate either of these (particularly in the weird incestuous way this industry operates) you need a skilled person in your specific ""ERP"". You could arguably convert someone from one to another but I'd estimate you'd need at least an intensive year to get to the point the specialist could stand on their own two feet, in which time you'd (as a company) be running without safety net or ability to move direction. Given the amount of industry knowledge you'd need as well as an understanding of IT (the two don't really go together) just to *start* the process of becoming an expert, you'd need to find a unicorn who was sufficiently motivated to box themselves in to a single role for the rest of their working lives, and then spend ~3yrs to get them to start to figure it out themselves.
We found the best way was to find a really, really competent and young order processing bod with an IT interest and try to convince them that this was a long-term career choice.
Simple fact was, if you lost "yours", there really were only ~20 or so people in the UK that were capable of being that person at any given time, and most of them were spoken for and/or elsewhere geographically. The value in them having the depth of knowledge having done it for years was immeasurable. Comedically and counter-intuitively, the salaries they brought were (as expected in the industry) pitiful versus the value they brought to the business.
It's not always as simple as just "growing your own"!
That's an interesting anecdote about a niche system, but in this case we are talking about virtualisation, something that is more or less a commodity at this point and is used widely throughout the IT industry. Any new virtualisation skills that you learn in the process of dumping VMWare and moving to something else should be widely applicable at many other companies and visa versa.
With the large cost increase arising from the Broadcom takeover of VMWare, it is time to consider the alternative of actually having trained staff that can manage OpenStack.
Training costs money BUT it can save far more money even over a short term let alone the long term (consider future price increases from Broadcom).
Staying with Broadcom (or another firm that Broadcom could purchase in future) will cost far more than having a trained staff that are competent with OpenStack.
Nearing the end of a long project to lift-and-shift a client from on-prem VMware to AWS. It was a perfect storm of their datacentre lease being up for renewal, their hardware approaching EoL, and Broadcom being twats. Plus some shiny incentives from AWS.
It won't be more expensive to run in the short-medium term, and before the AWS incentives run out in a few years they've now got a real business case to modernise/retire some of their awful legacy software which costs a comparative fortune both in terms of resource and licensing.
If anything Broadcom has helped kick-start an actual IT Strategy with this organisation, rather than the status-quo mish-mash of disjointed tactical approaches.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire then.... I hope that you have an exit plan and will use it as soon as the AWS system goes live.
AWS is a giant bot factory. My own company's website gets attacked every day and most of those attacks that don't come from India or China come from an AWS owned IP address. AWS do SFA about stopping the attacks despite being provided with huge amounts of data.
If I was to want to select a cloud provider, AWS would be at the bottom of the list.
I've got all of AWS networks blocked (-j DROP) by iptables rules on my web server. Similarly with tencent, huawei, digitalocean cloud services. I only care about human butts on chairs using web browsers, so nothing of value is lost. ANY network hosting bots (e.g. distributed botnets) can fuck right off too, including entire /8's assigned to ISPs in shithole countries where numerous bots are coming from.
Enjoy trying to workout the AWS bill, trying to determine just what exactly you are getting billed for and the various packages that could reduce your bill. Although don’t expect the AWS billing consultants to tell you: you are using the wrong platform for your needs, they will only tell you the “cost saving” options that will more deeply embed you in AWS…
Azure is the same! Its like trying to understand ADOBE licensing with knobs on! So easy to lose stuff down the back of the sofa and you'll find you've had a random server running for the past 5 years when everyone thought the service had been decommed! Can't wait for the majority of our stuff to move back out of Azure after the bonkers move to Azure 9 years ago!
for training business grads on how to kill a company. It will go up there alongside Gerald Ratner in the stupidity tables.
If Broadcomm had done nothing then vmware would have a future and be profitable, but it is now a toxic brand (like Tesla is to a lot of people)
They will be down to 20% of the customers soon but the income will be the same at 5x price. There goes market share but expenses will be down. Not good for the product line but the question is do they get their money back before customers reach 0.
VMware had some really well-refined technology that just works (for the most part).
Things like vDS (distributed switch), VMFS (shared filesystem overlay on top of raw block devices/LUNs) and vSAN (distributed hyper-converged storage), DRS and vDPM (cluster resource-scheduling and reactive host power management), SRM for complete site replication, Fault Tolerance, stateless hosts with Auto Deploy etc are all superb technologies in their own right. And none of those are as easily replicable using open source or alternative on-prem platforms as they are to add to a vSphere cluster. oVirt/RHEV, ProxmoxVE, QEMU/KVM can be configured to offer vaguely comparable half-baked equivalent paradigms but not as easily or as scalable as with vCenter/vSphere.
From a CTO's perspective, the most important thing was that VMware is easy to hire for. RHEV/oVirt... not so much. That's where AWS and Azure can hoover up Broadcom's VMware business as there's no shortage of candidates wanting to play with cloud.
Where vCenter fell behind is lack of first-party support for things like Terraform, prometheus/OpenMetrics, version control for Host Profiles and callbacks for guest customisation answers etc
I stopped using vSphere at work about 8 years ago but have been running a vSphere homelab cluster (paying for a VMUG Advantage EvalExperience license, now deprecated) to keep my eye in but I am now in the process of moving that to Proxmox. What a mess Broadcom have made of things.
All true, however there are a very large number of sites that don't use these VMWare features, they just bought VMWare as it was the safe, nobody got fired for buying VMWare, option.
Not sure RHEV/oVirt skill are so problematic as they are all KVM and this is a pretty common skill, any half decent Linux admin can work with this. If I was a VMWare admin I would be learning those right now.
Bigger sites, I'd be looking at Nutanix and cloud, as in the next few years you will be in milking territory for Broadcom.
Cloud Hosted Versus On Premises – Complete Cost Comparison
“In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, businesses face a pivotal decision: whether to host their infrastructure in the cloud or maintain it on-premises. Cloud-hosted solutions offer scalability, flexibility, and reduced upfront costs, while on-premises setups promise control, security, and long-term cost predictability. Both models have their merits, and the choice often hinges on an organisation’s size, regulatory environment, and operational priorities.”
One of our clients currently has a set of vSphere environments that my $work hosts in a couple of our Data Centres in the UK (primary + secondary site). The hardware was bought and paid for by the client, and we then host and manage the services for them. Hardware is maybe 4 years old currently, and has available capacity still.
The client has been pushing a Cloud First approach for a few years now, including moving some functions to SaaS offerings etc.
They've now decided that they no longer want us hosting, and to move all the VMs to the Cloud!!
One of our guys did some basic costings to move to cloud, which was fed back to the client (and they ignored it so far), it amounted to a little over £1m per year of additional costs, above what they currently pay us (but excluding the hardware costs).
You could easily pay for a full (or rolling) hardware refresh program every few years and keep it in the DCs, and still save millions over a few years!!! No business case at all, at least not with the money side.
Worse yet, this is an offshoot of the DoH, so this is ultimately tax payers money! (Hence the AC).
we were running ESX on 2 Nutanix clusters as well as other stuff in Azure. Both our clusters were near EOL and our VMWare license was up so we have migrated to Nutanix AHV and Nutanix NC2. We now only have a couple of hosts running a tiny workload on ESX that we can't migrate to Nutanix and will be moving it to Azure. When we asked Broadcon for a quote for the 2 hosts just tide us over they out right REFUSED! all they offered was for us to renew our previous license which included for the 2 Nutanix cluster that have been decommed!!! Feck the Feck off!
Roughly 1000 VMs spread over 8 clusters. Over half migrated to Proxmox, and on target to finish by end of the year. Instead of tripling the price, the pricing is less than vmware was prior to Broadcom.
I am surprised that Proxmox wasn't even mentioned as one of the top 4 contenders given that I know more people migrating to it than all of the mention alternatives combined.
