IBM Cloud stops signing and seeking new customers for its VMware service

IBM has announced it will stop marketing its VMware on IBM Cloud service to new customers. In a notice posted on Tuesday, Big Blue explains “Effective 31 October 2025, IBM Cloud will no longer sell VMware on IBM Cloud offerings to customers who do not have at least one active VMware Workload running on IBM Cloud before that …

[Pascal Monett]

"VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

Well done, Broadcom board. That was a brilliant use of your capital.

So, what stellar excuse do you have now for your shareholders ? Because if I were one of those, I'd be thinking of keelhauling you guys.

[Richard 12]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

My guess would be everyone else is gone in 5-7 years, leaving but a bitter memory.

Network effects and "last one standing pays the bill" means that absolutely everyone is now deciding "when" to migrate, not "if".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

You need to do the full equation: they lose 35% of workloads but increase the price by 300%.

Broadcom's share price is up 110% over the last 12 months (935% over the last 5 years).

I think the shareholders are OK (for now) :-(

[Old Man Ted]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

I often wonder how one can have a sum greater than 100%.

I was taught when I was schooled in the 1950's % stood for parts per hundred.The great unwashed insist on having greater than 100units per hundred then please refrain from referring to this as a %., even if the transatlantic breathen insist in the this oxymoron. Sorry for being pardantict.

[anonymous boring coward]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

Riiight...

So, this is how it works:

* You can INCREASE anything (that's scalable) by 100%, 1000% or whatever.

* You can never DECREASE anything by more than 100%. So Trump, the confirmed idiot, can't decrease prices by 1000%.

* You can UTILISE anything up to 100% (so in sports, you can never perform above 100%).

[katrinab]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

You can decrease prices by more than 100%. Negative prices do exist, sometimes - where instead of you paying to buy something, they pay you to take it off their hands. It is very rare, but it does happen.

[Lymden Lodge]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

WTI oil a number of years ago was negative for a few weeks....so "I'll pay you to take it away!" (lack of storage)

[katrinab]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

At the very start of the pandemic lockdown. Mostly because airlines didn’t have planes to put their pre-purchased oil into.

[JWLong]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

That's because it's all bullshit and,

Figures don't lie, but liars do figure!.

I trust corporate accounting about as far as I can throw a hand full of feathers or an elephant.

[Random as if !]

Re: "VMwware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

But..but ..you can throw one of them 3140% furthered than the other, so your comparison sucks!

[Snake]

Re: share price is up 110%

A very perfect showing of everything that is wrong with today's business ethics: it is OK to burn your customers as long as you believe you can make your *stockholders* happy.

And where's the media, calling out this moral corruption?

[crickets]

[katrinab]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

That approach works until it doesn't. See for example WH Smith.

The thing is, moving from VMWare to a different virtualisation platform is relatively easy compared to some other IT migrations. Obviously not completely painless, but very doable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

Perhaps they should ask Tesco if they have any lawyers they can recommend ??

[Cloudy Day]

Re: "VMware will lose 35 percent of the workloads it manages [in 3] years"

But the they have raised the amount of licence revenue by 600% across the 65 % of customers that stay on VMware…

….and that’s why you will never be a board member..,,

[An_Old_Dog]

Closed-Source Virtualisation Platforms these Days

... are so damned risky, totally apart from the technology.

The technology is there, and it works.

The risk is that the companies providing them - Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et. al. - randomly get wild hairs up their respective asses, change the licensing, the supported features, support policies, and/or support levels (outsourcing to inexperienced staff, cutting support positions, or changing personnel policies [WFH/RTO, causing experienced staff to leave]).

[Ken G]

It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

If the IBM we still vaguely remember, the one that invented virtualisation, gave Intel and Microsoft their first big break, even the one that owns Red Hat, announced this, we'd all think they were about to release (and maybe open source) a product that would blow VMWare out of the water. *sigh* A man can dream.

[Gene Cash]

Re: It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

IBM: Once, we dared. Now, we simply reminisce.

[MyffyW]

Re: It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

Indeed. The noise you hear is the water circling the outlet, gurgling down the pipe and carrying the last of our 1980s hopes and dreams off into the overcapacity storm drain of diminished expectations.

[JWLong]

Re: It's IBM, let's pretend that "old" IBM did this, what would you think?

You poor fool, I have empathy for you.

The only thing Indian Business Machines

is capable of inventing today is brown matter that goes down a 4 inch sewer pipe!

[Anonymous Coward]

We migrating a reasonable sized environment (about 20,000 VM and 5,000 apps) to OpenShift and OSV, with probably about 25% modernising to CaaS and 75% staying on VM. We looked at Tanzu when it first came out and to be honest it was pretty poor back then and from what I hear it hasn't improved much. OpenShift for K8 hosting is OK, management tools and automation still needs to mature and we are still having to get RedHat to provide updates once or twice a month or so but the good news is they are fairly quick with fixes and probably better than going open sourced. Redhat do a cheap OSV license but that doesn't give you CaaS and a full CaaS environment with OSV wouldn't be much price difference to Broadcom if Broadcom didn't try and sell you everything including the kitchen sink.

OSV works, nothing special and definitely lacking a lot of features of VMWare and not much eco-environment. Also hiring quality, experienced people has been slow going which is slowing migration down.

Overall it is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, if you want on-prem CaaS capability then its definitely worth looking at OpenShift and you get the added benefit of VM hosting in a single environment. If all you want is VM hosting then its overkill and there are better pure VM hosting out there.

[anonymous boring coward]

This is what happens when you put a sociopath CEO in charge. Sociopaths don't understand how normal people think. This has been proven in studies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat

Perhaps they should get Redhat's virtualisation up to scratch. If they can and it will take Vmware VMs without effort ... might make a good platform for containers and vm. Imagine if migration is safe and easy. Maybe it is? If so IBM should be running Ads on TV.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Redhat

MTV works OK for bread and butter VMs. Migration speed isn't the fastest but its reliable. We've done a couple of thousand migrations of W2K12, 16, 19, SLES, RHE, Win10 and Win11, SQL and other apps. Had network and hardware outages during migration, slow links and other issues. Had to restart migration a few times but probably failed with less than a handful of migrations. But that is with through testing and with a pre migration prep work and post migration customisation. That is with cold migration with the VM power off, we are working with Redhat to get better reliability of warm migration which should speed up process and also working with storage providers to convert VMDK disk images on the NAS without having to send the files via vCentre to OpenShift.

[Snake]

Blames Broadcom’s licensing changes that haven’t caused other hyperscalers to pull the pin

"Yet"