T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out Telco giant T-Mobile appears to be transitioning away from VMware and fighting a court battle for support it says Broadcom is bound to provide, according to court documents seen by The Register. The dispute relates to a deal T-Mobile struck with VMware in August 2023, which saw the telco acquire perpetual licenses and two years …
Judge orders broadcom to provide engineers to handle the transition to another co's software. And Judge allows until Aug 31st. After that broadcom is on the hook for 10M/month they are late delivering a product that is acceptable solely in the opinion of T-Mo.
But really if T-Mo had only 2 support calls during the year, idk, I might go naked on support, keep using my perp licenses and gtfo vmware as quick as I could.
I suspect Broadcom and previously VMware didn’t ship product documentation, it was all on their support portal, which requires a current subscription to access…
Thus whilst T-Mobile in-house staff could most probably keep the systems running, they will need to access the documentation to do so…
Most organisations won't allow apps that aren't supported which is why things like free or open source are difficult to implement.
In cases like financial institutions and possibly key infrastructure like telfos, it would be against regulations especially something that could bring down the whole service.
Then at trial make one of the demands that we get source for what we are using. Maintain it yourself. For the kind of numbers the bastards are asking, you could likely maintain it yourself. And not unreasonable I think. VM sold them a perpetual, which has ramifications if broadcom decides to end of life the product, which they effectively did when they refused to sell maint extensions.
Management might think perpetual licenses last until the heat death of the universe. In practice I think not. The product was tested on a set of base platform artefacts, particular OS and version, CPU, network cards etc. at some point a bit earlier than management might expect, all the platform goes end of support, so migration to the next certified platform needs to happen.
But then Office 2021, 2024 etc MS are taking the mick. What actually changed between those in core functions, other than one drive window dressing and making the UI worse?
The support calls are just half the story. The more critical part is the vulnerabilities patches. In regulated industries you can't afford to run outdated software. Also cyber attack insurance coverage could be problematic. Especially in high profile cases like this the attackers knowing you are running old unpatched version of vSphere
But does anyone understand what Broadcom's play is here? Is playing Grand Moff Tarkin and squeezing all these VMware customers through their fingers gonna make their investment in VMware pay off?
Are there still enough companies bent over and spread that Broadcom is better off than if they kept things pretty much the same as before the acquisition?
Apparently, Broadcom bought VMware for a hefty sum just to kill it off.
I can't understand that line of reasoning, especially since I do not see that Broadcom had any virtual machine product before that.
That's probably why I'm not CEO of a trillion-dollar company.
If I decided to spend $69 billion on acquiring a company, I'd want to get a ROI that's worth it, and not destroy the product I just spent a fortune on.
My guess is that Broadcom bought VMWare on a wave of C-suite ecstasy - the usual FOMO pressure as other tech companies spend billions, the fantasy of doing deals in the big league, wining and dining with investment banks and advisers, prattling on about synergies and strategic rationale. In short, they bought their own bullshit because building Broadcom organically through better products and services is a LOT more work than just splashing your own investors cash. Having woken up and the hangover worn off, they think "Jeez, we paid how much for this product?" Cue meetings with more advisers who (rightly or wrongly) tell the Broadcom clowns-in-chief that VMWare is a sunset product with a finite life (because, well because) but the good news is that for big corporates the cost of switching is high and take a long time, so Broadcom's best option is to treat VMWare as a cash cow, squeezing the customers until the pips squeak. In short, make as much money as you can as quickly as you can before (a) Broadcom investors cotton on that the directors are a bunch of talent free weasels, and (b) most customers have bitten the bullet and dumped the product.
I suppose the question to ask is whether corporate buyers who get stung will be vengeful against other Broadcom products, and VMWare adventure costs them dearly. I hope so.
Hock Tan is far to astute just to buy something on a whim. He identified a market dominated by a single player and decided it could be monetised. Thus far, the increased revenues seem to have justified the decisions and Broadcom only needs to keep VMWare for another couple of years to cover the costs of acquistion.
No, I don't like it but many customers only have themselves to blame for not following a "two-supplier" strategy more actively.
Broadcom wants to be like NVIDIA and sees the money rushing to AI chips.
They need a lot of money to invest in their AI chip business, and the source for that cashflow is the monetization of VMWare.
They don't care about virtualization, Hock Tan wants to be Jensen.
I could think of three reasons that Broadcom might have been interested in a purchase of VMWare...
First - Monetization
It would not have been the first time that Broadcom bought a tech company that already had a loyal customer base, then reducing the product portfolio of the acquired company to a few high-priced packages and then increasing software subscription prices. See e.g. here:-
https://www.macquariecloudservices.com/blog/broadcom-acquisition-of-vmware-and-its-impact/
Second - Diversification
It would allow Broadcom to expand outwards from being solely reliant upon hardware [chip] sales - for which there is very little on-going maintenance and thus for which the market and income can be more volatile/less predictable. See e.g. here:-
https://www.channelinsider.com/infrastructure/virtualization/broadcom-vmware-acquisition-changes-explained/
Third - an Integration Wedge
If we consider that Broadcom might have been looking to expand their footprint in the corporate data center then maybe it's possible that Broadcom thought that owning both physical chips and the virtual machines that run directly on them would enable the development of highly integrated all-in-one systems. Of course, the chips that Broadcom fabricate are not as powerful as e.g. AMD or Intel, so perhaps their plans included some kind of enhancement or extension to the virtualisation concept to improve clustering of the underlying hardware?
Based on their track record alone, my gut tells me that the most likely driver would have been the first - monetization - a drive to acquire a readily-available and mature income stream. See also here:-
https://www.channelinsider.com/infrastructure/virtualization/broadcom-vmware-acquisition-changes-explained/
Then they got greedy.
@Charlie Clark: I'm guessing you're much like me and many of the other regulars, we've been around the block a few times. Surely like me you've seen otherwise very intelligent, very senior people at well resourced organisations make poor and even catastrophic decisions, so Tan may be astute, that's no barrier to epic car-crash corporate activity. I've personally seen a nice, smart CEO run a £3.5bn business into the ground on the back of one poor decision; I've been involved in £750m being thrown away by a blue chip utility trying an international expansion in a market it didn't understand; I've worked for a business that went from £200m market cap to zero market cap because the CEO and a few mates chose to modestly inflate the sales figures for a couple of quarters (and they got a spell of porridge for their troubles).
@ Charlie & Sproggit: It certainly looks like crude monetisation, but why do it in a way that appears to be destined to kill off the golden goose? They could have been far more subtle and gradual about it, and done well they might even have kept the scale and market share. Instead they've pissed everybody off, and opened the door wide to competitors and alternative solutions such that it's the talk of all relevant enterprise tech sites, "how to build VMWare out of your stack".
Who knows? Those who know won't tell, and will be handsomely rewarded, wined and dined, but we're outside in the rain, pressing our noses on the window of the Michelin starred restaurant, wondering why we weren't invited.
It's illegal but to me, the CEO of broadcom is [allegedly] driving their shareprice into the ground so he can stage a buyout at a MUCH lower rate.
They're denying PAID support contracts any sort of support. Taking payments for hardware, then telling customers to f---k off when they ask for their SoCs etc. and telling them to "sue us" if they're unhappy....lawsuits also lower share prices.
All deliberately tanking Broadcom, so a 'shell' company can stage a debt leveraged buyout. Which would be very very illegal.
100%
CEOs are particularly vulnerable to believing they are the smartest person in every room, because many of them truly believe that the richer you are the smarter you must be to have achieved that wealth. So as they move through their career reaching CEO and becoming far richer they believe that is solely due to how they are smarter than everyone else.
They may receive advice that something is a really bad move and it can be obvious to nearly everyone as it was in this case paying that much for VMware, but if he falls victim to this he'll think he knows best and everyone else is wrong.
Tinfoil hat time!
VMWare was owned by Dell up until 2021. It came along with the purchase of EMC in 2016. My guess is they didn't really want VMWare but it was a hostage situation in the purchase so it had to come along. As soon as the handcuffs regarding spinning off subsidiary products were lifted they started shopping around for a buyer for VMWare. Dell has relied on Broadcom for mezzanine adapters, and back of blade switches for a while. Broadcom was a good target to see if interest existed since there was already a business relationship. During the negotiation I bet Broadcom balked at the initial price, so reduced royalty fees for licensing other Broadcom tech came into play. Broadcom gets a new software tech to wring out, Dell gets a better deal for licensed hardware they sell, and the customer is screwed over. Shareholders are happy.
@Pascal — I can’t really follow that line of reasoning. This (older but still relevant) video lays out their logic quite clearly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP31wnZKm5s
From “digits to dollars,” the pattern is hard to ignore: Broadcom increasingly looks like a publicly traded private equity fund masquerading as a semiconductor company.
You could argue the same for Oracle—less a pure Software/Cloud company and more a publicly traded private equity fund focused on acquiring, consolidating, and maximizing long-term cash flows from enterprise assets.
The C-suite and upper management who made the decision intend to have cashed out and gone before the collapse.
They have no reason to care whether Broadcom even exists in ten years, because they'll have banked their bonuses, sold their shares and left long before.
The incentives have six months, one year, perhaps three year time horizons.
Make the big splash now, bank the bonus check at the end of the quarter, sell the shares the moment they vest, move to another company to do the same - and forget about the dry husk.
If the share price has collapsed, well, the bonus shares are still free money, and worst case the options to buy at $1 don't have to be exercised. No actual downside to early failure.
Retire on the spoils when the trail of corpses is too long.
Meanwhile the staff who made VMware exist lose their livelihoods and homes.
In publicly traded companies it's very difficult to force the upper management to care about the long term.
Probably mis-remembering, but wasn’t Broadcom looking to incorporate VM IP into edge devices when “edge computing” was the next big thing until AI showed up? That along with Adobe proving that you can strong arm your customers into subscriptions might describe how we got here.
But does anyone understand what Broadcom's play is here?
Have you had your head buried in the sand for the last 40 years. Its not only Broadcom, its been industry standard for as long as I have been working in IT. Broadcom is just the latest in a never ending list of takeovers working out against customer interest.
Yes one reason I've owned Apple as long even as it kept rising and becoming a larger and larger percentage of my portfolio is its aversion to large acquisitions that was a core belief of Steve Jobs. The largest they've ever done is buying Beats for $3 billion a couple decades ago. As money started piling up and their cash position exceeded $100 billion when tax laws encouraged leaving money overseas instead of bringing it home there were constant rumors about Apple targets.
Apple was looking to enter streaming so of course people started rumors they might buy Netflix - because why spend a small number of billions building your own streaming business from the ground up over some years when you can shortcut and paying a couple hundred billion right now and be a big player? Sun is an internet pioneer with a depressed price, Apple could buy them to leverage itself into the enterprise space, etc. etc. Dumb ideas everywhere.
If they ever broke from this and made a double (or worse triple) digit billions acquisition I'd probably sell 90% of my position the next day, because such large acquisitions almost never work out in the end. I saw an article that tracked large acquisitions (over $5 or $10 billion can't remember) in the tech world and 90% turned out to be a losing proposition.
"But does anyone understand what Broadcom's play is here?"
Check out this story and the comments as well:-
https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/06/17/tesco-is-sprinting-to-quit-vmware-and-broadcom-despite-rapid-migration-risks/5256133
Apparently Broadcom have decided to focus on the top 5-600 customers on the assumption that they are too big to migrate quickly/easily and so will take the financial pain, and they don't care about the rest. Tesco and T-Mobile are obviously big enough to unleash the lawyers on Broadcom where many won't.
It's an extremely high-risk, low-reward strategy.
The top 5-600 companies do indeed have the largest estates, greatest difficulty in migrating, and the deepest pockets.
They also have the most airtight existing contracts and by far the biggest lawyers.
Seems like once things have deteriorated to the point where a customer and provider are lobbing suits and injunctions and other legal bombs at each other, any hopes for positive support outcomes are probably minimal.
Imagine the poor customer vmware admin and beleaguered tech support engineer trying to have a productive conversation over some misbehaving piece of esxi or whatever in the customer estate, when both have possibly been instructed by their higher-ups to give nothing away and treat the other party as adversarial.
I've no insight into T-Mobile's operations, but if they haven't been exploring options prior to this, even as a JIC contingency, then they're simply not paying attention; it's not like Broadcom haven't been up to this sort of thing before, and any customers have to know something like this is a possibility.
T-Mobile almost certainly prepared back in 2024, it is just that 300,000 cores probably equivalent to 50,000-100,000 VMs, assume each with 100GB (note this is average, some could be 2TB), that is about 10,000TB data need to be migrated at something like 100-200Mb/s pipe, don't forget they have to do all kinds of test, DR, change control, to migrate that much data w/o causing outage is a massive undertake, companies like BOA, Chase probably chose not to fight because they want to focus on "how do I quickly get out of VMware in 3-4 years"
"$24 million for extended support covering six products, a sum it said would cover over 20 staff needed to support T-Mobile"
I would think that, for $24 million, they could hire another 20 additional staff and still come out way ahead.
Unless they're paying those staffers $1 million per year ?
Somehow, I doubt that.
You see, your honor, thousands upon thousands of businesses have had no problems to pay their monthly "protection" to the Godfather, just this little store here chose to litigate...
The name Broadcom probably was moved from the list of trusted providers into the risk handling list of most of its customers.
Well, given the 80:20 rule, I expect few of those customers to be highly profitable to Broadcom.
I wonder if there is a sweet spot in the new Broadcom pricing model which means businesses of a certain size (think Goldilocks “just right”) that actual do benefit from the new subscription bundles and pricing.
Sure, there probably is is a sweet spot for the companies Broadcom has taken hostage.
I'm talking about customers for new deals. How many potential customers are still willing to buy for example new enterprise software from Broadcom despite their "customer-friendly" behavior?
If they can't keep T-Mobile, and Tesco, what's the point?
Clearly some of their biggest customers are migrating away, and taking their money with them.
303K cores! If that's not a big customer, I don't know what is.
I do want Broadcom to fail, they've taken a respected company and destroyed it more or less overnight.
What does that mean? If my current support contracted expired on the 31st July @ 23:59, then I can renew on the 31st July.
Indeed, I have worked at places that left it to the last day.
If I was to renew support AFTER the existing one expired, then that would be a different kettle of fish,
"Is it a straight drop in replacement for Vmware "
KVM is just a type 2 hypervisor layer, think of it like Hyper-V for Windows desktop.
What it doesn't have is any management layer, the ability to create clusters, manage storage, networking, monitoring, reporting, etc. You know, the bits that actually make VMWare useful.
So each vendor has their value add, Proxmox, Nutanix, OpenShift, etc That would provide a comparable solution and would meet regulatory requirements. Most solutions now use K8 to manage the environment and thus can offer container and VM hosting on the same platform, effectively treating VM as a container. They all offer tools to assist migration though vary in their quality.
Good news for apps is that KVM is fairly universal across the platforms so compatibility should be fairly between the solutions and VMWare. We do come across vendors who haven't embraced KVM virtualisation but normally its more like some extra revenue for certification.
OpenStack technical trainer here:
If you think of VMWare as virtualization only solution, like we still are in 2006, then sure, KVM is a cromulent option.
But nowadays, VMWare, ZenServer et al are used to make Private Clouds, or the fleets running on them use a few advanced functions beyond virtualization, with all that implies. Very few workloads are virtualization only, not touching any of the advanced or the cloud-dy functions .
The linux equivalent would be OpenStack, with all the load that implies.
There is another aspect in this too, and it is Application support. Many ISVs certify their platforms/apps on specific OSs/Distros running on Specific Hypervisors.
So, for instance, your ISV may say: Only Windows Server 2022 or 2025 only, RHEL 10, or Suse 16, on top of VMWare, Openstack or azure.
And there you are, for those workloads, you can forget about all the other solutions (obscure or not) that homelabbers love to peddle. Big corpos can pressure smaller ISVs to support their preferred solution, but the big ISVs will most likely put a few options on offer, and that's it.
In those cases, large intitutions (like T-Mobile, the focus of the article) have 100s or even 1000s of ISVs some more crititcal than others, and they need to reach commonality of solutions, or personel requirements ballon (the legacy VMWare group, the Openstack group, the xenserve group, the proxmox group, the azure group, the nutanix group, the....) along with all the other support functions (negotiations and keeping track of support contracts for each technology). A veritable nightmare. So, unlike homelabbers, Big corpos will probably go to a one or two vendor solution for their internal clouds.
Since VMWare was the leader, and for many lustres a model citizen, pretty muche every single ISV offered them as a supported option, therfore, it was the easier default.
Just about everything aside from VMWare is KVM based, OpenStack, Nutanix, Proxmox, OSV and the vast majority are using K8 for management. Technically there isn't much difference between them. However there are vendor (Cisco, SAP) whose products work just fine on KVN but want to push their own virtual solution.
We are in the middle of migrating over 5,000 apps off VMWare and there are probably less then a dozen that we will be shift to physicals. Out of 5,000 we have manage to decom about 20%, and then about 30% mostly written inhouse are migrating to cloud or SaaS. Leaving about 50% staying on Windows / Linux. The migration has been a great opportunity to clear out a load of legacy apps that should have gone years ago, but now with a stick of being left with a multiple million dollar bill for staying on ESX its amazing how suddenly they have a viable ESX exit solution.
This doesn't mean that we haven't spent 10's of millions in certifying on an alternate solution ourselves or paying vendors to do it, just saying its possible.
and here we are in 2026 and KVM-based stacks still can't compete with where Vmware was 16 years ago with version 4.1 in some cases anyway
https://web.archive.org/web/20110221002303/http://www.vmware.com:80/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html
See the laundry list of new features that came out with that build, 4.x was the last version of vSphere I was really excited about, everything since has been meh mostly just security updates and new hardware support.
For me personally, a solid VMFS replacement would be nice, GFS2 exists, though it seems outside of HPE VM Essentials nobody is willing to risk fully supporting it (as far as I can tell anyway). I didn't realize this myself till I looked into it much deeper late last year. When El Reg posted about a new Xen Server today or yesterday I checked their docs again, and there is no real change.
vSphere APIs for performance monitoring with 3rd party tools(I use LogicMonitor), unsure if KVM-based systems have anything remotely resembling that(or the degree of depth that the data that is provided). While I don't need the feature myself I did poke around to try to see if there was any KVM-based solutions that provided equivalent to vSphere's "fault tolerance" feature but came up empty(other than some discussion from Red Hat I think speculating whether or not they need it, and that was many years ago).
The fact that T-mobile only made 2 support calls is testament to how rock solid the vSphere platform has been. When I was using it for work maybe I reached out to support 4-5 times over a decade(small installation). I stayed behind the curve in versions, with a conservative configuration and shit just never broke. To be clear the ONLY things I cared about from VMware was ESX/ESXi (preferred ESX), vCenter, and VMware Workstation(and VMware GSX/Server two+ decades ago). Never gave a shit about the 90+ other products they tried to sell since ~2012.
I still run ESXi 6.7+vcenter 6.7 in my personal colo on old gear, will look to replace it with something else when I refresh hardware again maybe around 2030.
Have been using VMware since before v1.0 was released on Linux back in 1999. I misplaced my "VMware for Linux 1.0.2" CD maybe 15 years ago, was a nice bit of history for me anyway. I did keep several of my vmware downloads, I don't know why I'll never use them again but I can't bring myself to delete them(and they only consume 2GB of disk space, so it wouldn't save me anything)
From ~6MB for vmware 2.0.3 (before they renamed it to "workstation") to almost 400MB for VMware workstation 17.
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 5.9M Jan 12 2001 VMware-2.0.3-799.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 6.3M Jun 22 2001 VMware-2.0.4-1142.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35M Aug 23 2008 VMware-mui-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35M Sep 6 2008 VMware-mui-1.0.7-108231.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 103M Aug 23 2008 VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 103M Sep 6 2008 VMware-server-1.0.7-108231.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 540M Dec 19 2008 VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.i386.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 467M May 3 2009 VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 483M Oct 29 2009 VMware-server-2.0.2-203138.i386.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.1M Jun 3 2009 VMware-server-console-1.0.8-126538.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 9.3M Nov 4 2001 VMwareWorkstation-3.0.0-1455.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 11M Jul 6 2002 VMware-workstation-3.1.1-1790.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 12M Dec 10 2002 VMware-workstation-3.2.0-2230.tar.gz
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 21M Jul 13 2003 VMware-workstation-4.0.0-4460.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42M Mar 16 2006 VMware-workstation-4.5.2-8848.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41M Apr 10 2006 VMware-workstation-4.5.3-19414.tar.gz
> Broadcom later proposed to charge $24 million for extended support covering six products, a sum it said would cover over 20 staff needed to support T-Mobile.
This is BS, with CI/CD one man could cover this per one day per month. This case illustrates the dangers of allowing your company be held hostage to a software vendor and the difficulty in extracting yourself from it. As in they might abuse the power to extort revenue out of you. Given T-Mobile's size, couldn't they have written their own VM in-house.
I've been a T-Mo customer since it was Jamie Lee Curtis hawking VoiceStream. In 2006 I switched to an unlimited Voice/Text/Interweb deal that they guaranteed no price change. It is now 2026, and I'm still paying the same price. And with inflation, really paying less. I keep thinking they will up the price, but even with the latest thing where if you paid by CC most got I think it was a fiver a month increase, I'm still the same price. So kudos to T-Mo for honoring their promise to me at least.
These moves to subscription only should be outlawed.
But I did find one line very interesting, "Broadcom continued to provide support but also sought damages on grounds that the injunction meant it missed out on a new deal with T-Mobile."
Are they admitting extortion? They have to discontinue support to force someone into new contract terms?
"Broadcom argues that customers who move to VCF subscriptions emerge with a more efficient infrastructure that can help to improve overall business performance, and points to strong revenue growth for VMware as evidence its strategy is appreciated and working"
Appreciated and working... for their bastard CEO. Hock Tan is one of the worst human beings ever to have a C-suite title.
VMware wants whales paying their protection fee... I mean, subscription fees...and they have a few that either have decided they cannot move away or simply have the money to pay and are willing to do so. They've lost more large companies than they kept (I work for one that is actively moving away), but Huckster Tan doesn't care because the whales left are paying that sweet, sweet subscription cash, and lots of it.
I switched from Verizon to T-Mobile about 5 years ago and to the present day it takes approximately 30 seconds (over 1 minute during peak times) to login to pay my bill. As in press login button, watch the spinner spin, and then able to navigate my account waiting 10 seconds for the subsection to load.
First thing i noticed was how slow and incoherent their back office infrastructure behaved via web customer portal. They tried to push everyone to their app, Life, but that seems to have its own issues. I don't think they've invested in any IT anything in a very long time.
The actual cellular service is stellar! Great coverage and blazing fast speeds that rival my fiber home connection. Everything else is bottom tier horrible. I get emails and texts 3 days after my bill due date telling me to add money to my balance. This has been occurring for about 2 years now. It's a good barometer of their internal struggles. 2FA only allows Google Authenticator or SMS. Neither are ideal. The whole website seems stuck in 2010.
Long story short I think they need a complete overhaul of their internal systems. The spent all their money on 5G build-out to beat rivals but neglected their internal systems.
Broadcom "who wants to become a customer of any of our multi-million dollar products?"
also broadcom: fuck off t-mobile, we MAY have signed binding support agreements, but we're not supporting our product, even though you paid 100s of millions for support.
And it not just VMWARE....Broadcom has started opening denying support for HARDWARE such as SoCs despite people having paid support agreements.
One large customer with over $300 million in product was literally told "sue us, but we're not providing any advice whatsoever"
People saying they should go unsupported or hire ex-VMWare support staff or whatever. What's going to happen when the next ESX security hits, and thanks to AI they are are coming in ever increasing numbers, especially for those staying on older versions of VMWare. You going to writing your own fixes ? And as shitty as Broadcom is, there are plenty of security patches being released.
No enterprise is going to risk going unsupported from the vendor for critical infrastructure.
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They are cutting their own throat. Their move has created a lot of pressure for alternatives to improve quickly. We've been migrating to Proxmox, 8.x to 9.x was significant, adding in backup and dcmanager I see a lot of potential if it just keeps getting better. I doubt they are the only ones. As money starts to flow for support on these other virtualization products, the pace of improvement should increase for the ones who don't get greedy and hire the right people.
They basically are killing the proverbial goose. Most of the smaller players are not wedded to all the fancy knobs and switches of VMware, they will be moving off in droves. There will be a snowball effect, within 3 years everyone will have alternative solutions in their environments, and there will be a cascade turning VMware into a very small niche market.
