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VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses
- itsTyrion 3y agoFucking SaaS madness, I hate it. You’ll own nothing and be happy!
- ChrisdoshAaron 3y ago[dead]
- bombcar 3y agoHas the free ESXi survived the turmoil?
- coldbrewed 3y agoIt's probably not the first thing on the chopping block as there's plenty of revenue to be squeezed from vSphere; over the next 2-5 years I don't see a world where the free ESXi will be left unmonetized/uncrippled.
- whalesalad 3y agoFree esxi is pretty crippled at this point, esp for high core counts. Proxmox is the way to go!
- fredski42 3y agoWhat about Nutanix?
- SteveNuts 3y agoNutanix has a Community Edition which works well, but has some fairly strict requirements due to the overhead of their controller VMs and such https://www.nutanix.com/products/community-edition https://www.nutanix.com/products/community-edition
- FireBeyond 3y agoI know(? it's been a while) that Nutanix focuses on HCI, so maybe less of an issue, but for me, even at home, all my storage backing is iSCSI over 10G. Nutanix CE purposefully doesn't support 10gbps NICs.
- justinclift 3y agoJust took a look at their website, and they don't even allow people to download their "Community Edition" without first providing an email address (with some basic validation of it), first and last name, phone number, job title, and company name. Fuck that. They can go and fuck themselves sideways instead. :(
- whalesalad 3y agoI would not choose it for a greenfield project unless I knew that they had a particular module for more enterprise-grade stuff like doing hardcore/proprietary interconnects.
- fuzzylightbulb 3y agoAcropolis is free but severely limits your choices when it comes to hardware and expansion down the line. I always felt like you were putting yourself over a barrel to consolidate both hypervisor and physical infrastructure to a single vendor.
- waynesonfire 3y agoWhat about xcp-ng?
- whalesalad 3y agoI intensely disliked xcp-ng when I tried it a few years back. It's more of a move fast and break things indie type of project. Proxmox feels more stable and trustworthy.
- waynesonfire 3y agoI went w/ bhyve; I like to have full control over the system.
- justinclift 3y agoDoes Proxmox have a free version available, or is it only available for purchase? Asking because although their website says its OSS it's super unclear what to download for homelab use. If they're seriously wanting people to pay $$$ even to run it on old homelab gear, that's not going to work (for me). ;)
- apple4ever 3y agoYes it's totally free. They have a subscription for enterprise (which isn't all that expensive really). But I have run it in production (for a bit to demonstrate use) and in my homelab for free.
- meepmorp 3y ago> Here is a list of products impacted by the new licensing policy: VMware Cloud Foundation VMware vSphere VMware vSAN VMware NSX VMware HCX VMware Site Recovery Manager VMware vCloud Suite VMware Aria Suite VMware Aria Universal VMware Aria Automation VMware Aria Operations VMware Aria Operations for Logs VMware Aria Operations for Networks
- delfinom 3y ago> VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments. Yea, a one-time cost wasn't predictable enough, instead a subscription number that will be changed each year on a whim is predictable. Got it.
- thedougd 3y agoIf you're running VMware and CA (mainframe), Broadcom owns you at this point.
- toyg 3y agoDoublespeak at its finest - unless one is to interpret "predictable investments" as investments by Broadcom, which will indeed become easier once all customers are turned into digital serfs-- sorry, subscribers.
- coldbrewed 3y agoMy heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?
- thedougd 3y agoOpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking. The challenge is that companies architect their services and applications around what they have, and they may be very operationally dependent on specific features of vCenter and how they've configured those features.
- NBJack 3y agoYeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great! Otherwise, prepare to invest in other ways. I'm not going to say VMware has a super intuitive system, but I've gotten surprisingly far at times without a lot of deep knowledge. Well, until the *nix-like kernel in the hypervisor misbehaves....
- znpy 3y agoIf you have any significant workload on vmware you likely already have an expert on payroll.
- Klasiaster 3y agoThe setup is not too complicated with something like https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack
- r0ckarong 3y ago[flagged]
- sdflhasjd 3y agoThis isn't enshittification. This is a sustainable business bought by a greedy business to then squeeze dry their customers.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI think we could call this e13n in the sense that a current product offering, with some degree of stickiness, is being made worse for the benefit of the seller.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gosub100 3y agoI wonder at what point does SaaS become a national security risk in the event of a solar event, (biggest-ever) cyber attack, terrorist attack, or some other calamity that takes down the internet for an extended period? Having virtualization software like vmware as-a-service would cause 2nd-order effects if it couldn't phone-home to renew activation.
- kodama-lens 3y agoThis might be a serious issue for my current client since their entire stack is build on VMware and I was helping to build a massive project that would lift their current setup to a full self service private cloud setup. They were already worried by he acquisition but this... With the current budget cuts puts the entire project at risk. I would feel bad for them but today I was informed by my PO that the budget cuts also affect my contract so it will not be extended. The only bitter taste is that the project was meant to improve the infrastructure for citizen services. Kind of have a bad feeling for how this will turn out
- freedomben 3y agoI'm used to corporate marketing speak, but damn this is impresively corporate orwellian. This is real copy/paste from TFA, not some parody that I wrote. > Q: Why is this good for partners? > A: The industry has already widely embraced subscription and SaaS, and many partners in our ecosystem have already developed success practices in this area. Subscription and SaaS models provide an opportunity for partners to engage more strategically with customers and deliver higher-value services that drive customer success. It also helps accelerate their own transition to a business model focused on annual recurring revenue.
- rychco 3y agoThis is so hilariously out of touch that I would have believed it was satire without context. This is viral copy-paste quality material.
- geodel 3y agoSorry, I don't think it is out of touch? I see this kind of thing all the time everywhere.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoEven with the corporate speak, I don't think I've ever seen that naked of a response that was essentially "we want more money" Isn't windows 11 forcing an annual prescription? That will be the real test.
- firebat45 3y ago>Isn't windows 11 forcing an annual prescription? Freudian slip ftw
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- geodel 3y agoI mean it does look like a shifter of paradigms that businesses are demanding. What's not to like here.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoThe enshitification continues
- natbennett 3y agoYou know, I always used to think that e.g. Amazon talking about “customer obsession” was stupid. Of course a business is focused on its customers? That’s where the money comes from? Then I got to see the conversation about subscriptions at VMware. The storyline was always “wouldn’t it be great for us if we switched to subscriptions? Look how good all the math gets!” The customer barely appeared as a background character. Especially entertaining when it came to things like PWS. After the acquisition VMware shut it down — because it didn’t have any real customers — and then in the push to subscriptions the new folks in charge of TAS were like “Great idea everyone! What if we provided Cloud Foundry… as a Service!” The engineers who had been around long enough to see the whole cycle tried to explain but I don’t think it got through.
- ljm 3y agoI read The Messy Middle some time ago, which mostly documents the process of Behance's CEO joining Adobe post-acquisition and then switching their entire suite of products over to their new subscription-based model, Creative Cloud, and sunsetting their perpetual license model. This is described in the book as a fantastic achievement for Adobe but one that was quite difficult to get off the ground. On reflection I do not share that assessment and while it may have been personally successful for the CEO/author of the book, it was done entirely at the expense of the customer and their experience. I would in fact consider renting software that takes up storage on your own hardware to be anti-consumer.
- chii 3y ago> it was done entirely at the expense of the customer and their experience. this is what it means to be a monopoly. Adobe may not be one by the legal definition, but it certainly is a monopolistic suit of products, as their "customer" does not have a way to switch, regardless of other competing software. I personally think that the current legal idea of a monopoly is too narrow. I say the definition should be focused on the customer's cost of switching - and if it's higher than some reasonable threshold, the provider of said service/product must be considered a monopoly.
- al_borland 3y ago
- pappeyrome 3y agoBroadcom will feast on revenue from Govt IT departments. Well done /sarcasm
- nunez 3y agoTo be clear, Broadcom is just speeding up something that VMware has been trying to do for a while.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoAh, I see that Broadcom is working on speedrunning the "lose all your customers" game. Not what I would do if I dropped eye watering sums of money to purchase those customers, but you do you, Broadcom.
- peeters 3y agoThis has always been Broadcom's MO. They buy a company, determine which of that company's 150/250/500 customers overlap with their core 500 customers, bundle the acquired product(s) with everything they already sell those customers, and then jack up the price on the entire portfolio. Anybody not on the refined core customer list either gets explicitly cut, or is spun off into a second-tier digital sales program where they are ignored until they leave on their own.
- axus 3y agoI was periodically buying a software product they acquired, very small volumes. The sales process and support did improve a bit. It was a low bar, though.
- ceroxylon 3y agoAVGO is up 93% YTD, 4% on the day, the investors don't seem to be too afraid of the move, for some baffling reason.
- bigstrat2003 3y agoI wouldn't really put too much weight on the wisdom of people speculating on stocks, personally.
- phpisthebest 3y agoBecause they know no one is going to be swapping HV out that fast. Most likely people will wait for a hardware refresh to make a change, if they change at all to that will be 2 to 7 years the increased rates and we have no idea what the increase rates will actually be, if it less than 2x most company will just eat it, that would still be cheaper than switching for many 2-4x, you will see an aggressive change in the next 12-36 mos by many customers over 4x any you might see the aggressive pull out people are are expecting by this announcement.
- throwaway5959 3y agoThis might be a shorter timeline to destroy a company than a Musk.
- schaefer 3y agoOh, you don’t sell a product? I guess I won’t but it then. Thanks.
- mig39 3y agoClassic enshittification.
- yedava 3y agoI wonder what will happen to the Spring ecosystem. Will Broadcom close it off and try to monetize it?
- roboyoshi 3y agoTotally forgot that Pivotal was acquired by vmware - that makes the whole thing even worse. AFAIK Spring is huge in the java ecosystem, but it's also mainly open-source, right? So maybe the community will take care of it.
- LadyCailin 3y agoThis “everything is a subscription” thing just cannot be sustainable. I mean, sure, some companies with a huge moat can probably sustain this well enough, but eventually consumers and businesses will simply run out of money, and then can’t buy anything anymore. Not to mention that it means that no one can make investments anymore, and can only piss away money every month. I have no clue how to stop this from happening though either from a regulatory perspective or a free market perspective.
- fifteen1506 3y agoI don't know how managers aren't paying for RedHat products excitedly. It's the only business which competes with itself and where an acquisition by a private equity firm will, by the application of the typical strategies, destroy it's own customer base in days. Not like open-source won, more like proprietary eats itself.
- stbenjam 3y agoThey are, but Red Hat is driving people to kubevirt which I’m not sure is ready for all vsphere customers. But it totally makes sense for anyone wanting to make the container journey eventually.
- el-dude-arino 3y agoWe're entering a post-growth economy in the near future, so the only way for companies to have reliable revenue streams is to create subscription services. Get ready because y'all are about to be rundled to death.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoYeah, just pirate and crack everything at some point.
- system2 3y agoGood luck doing it in a corporate environment. One visit from BSA and you will get wrecked. IT departments will take the major blow from this because we are the ones sitting down with CEOs and trying to explain the costs. Now a major cost increase about a subject they can't even comprehend.
- HHad3 3y agoThis is unfortunate. The writing was on the wall already with vSphere+, but I can't really commit to a subscription for VM infrastructure. Broadcom would be able to hold the whole company hostage with price increases. I’m not sure yet where we'll end up, but the small cluster of 8 machines of ours will not run vSphere in 2025.
- xbar 3y agoTheir pricing model seems designed to make you leave. I wish you well.
- schlauerfox 3y agoI'm not sure I have clarity on this, but if your service and support agreement expires, do perpetual licenses get locked out of esxi patching? It's unclear based on what they're saying. Update VIBs were always available even to foundation and essentials, but companies like HPE paywall locked bios updates and certain support installer a few years ago and even legally went after people for distributing them. We usually use use the commands from https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ to run updates. We use vmware 6.7 and 7 extensively for small business along with Veeam to make recovery and snapshotting better.
- fxtentacle 3y agoSoon we will have reached the point where software piracy is the only way not to build your company on digital quicksand. I sincerely hope we never get there because it would ruin the commercial software market, which did produce amazing tools in the past. But by now, it certainly looks like major participants are boosting their last remaining quarters (before the company implodes) by scorching the earth they walk on. First Unity, now VMWare. I really have no idea why a CEO might think it to be a good long-term strategy to throw the majority of your past customers under a bus.
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s could be a great day for Open Source software. Maybe we need to adapt Open Source so that cloud providers who use it have to pay for continued development instead of just using it for free or putting a control panel on top of something and calling it their own product, but that’s the solution we came up with the first time proprietary software vendors started trying to lock the universe down into perpetual upgrade nonsense. Perhaps it’s time to revisit Open Source licenses with a fresh, sharp pencil and an eye towards making all these systems compete with cooperative, collective-interest development again. We definitely need to find models that don’t cut the investment valuation so hard, as that’s been a huge problem for the Open Source companies. Down markets and cost saving periods are when Open Source has seen massive adoption, as companies look to save money… Maybe I’m wrong but it’s been on my mind a lot lately.
- doctorwho42 3y agoBe the change you want to see :) As someone who uses software but rarely writes anything more than automation scripts, I personally look for self-hosting and community minded software companies to have my company throw money at (cause I am high enough to influence purchasing decisions for my group). Favorite software that a share with everyone who mentions workflow diagrams is draw.io, https://www.drawio.com/about https://www.drawio.com/about , let's you have a local copy - format is open source - and it just works how my engineering mind wants it to work
- natbennett 3y ago
- living_room_pc 3y agodead man walking! 1. switch to subscription model <- we are here 2. jack prices to maximize profit among the proportion of customer that can pay higher prices. 3. smaller startups migrate to other cheaper tools 4. cheaper tools slowly become mainstream 5. vmware is irrelevant and dead. ~ 7-10 years, maybe less. The problem with this strategy here, is that unlike Photoshop (sorry gimp) there _is_ alternatives.
- dissident_coder 3y ago[flagged]
- jraph 3y agoI hope this will contribute to strengthening open source solutions.
- bigbuppo 3y agoStandard business model. Buy a company, lay off everyone, do no new development, move to a subscription model, keep shifting the decimal point every year or two, and by the time you're down to two customers, who cares because you're raking in a million dollars a minute. A big hearty fuck you to all the regulators that allowed this to go through. You are derelict and negligent in your obligations to protect the public.
- mbrumlow 3y agombrumlow transitions to qemu, end of a sale to VMware.
- Zuiii 3y agoThe whole point behind VMware products was that they offered full control to orgs that want it. That's what made some large orgs choose them over aws or google cloud even when the later are more cost effective. It's fascinating to see VMware (Broadcom?) fumble their only real uvp like this. On the plus side, there is now a nice big clearing for new competitors to pop up. I hope open source uses this chance to catch up and offer something good to compete with nsx-t Datacenter or, at the very least, the SDN component of it. We have decent open source solutions for vms but no real open source solutions for software-defined networking or software-defined data centers. At least not any that I know of. Either way, I think this is very good news overall. VMware was far too strong.
- system2 3y agoQuestion: What is the best alternative for VMWare Vsphere? I am so sick of this subscription game. They will lose me as a customer and anyone who will ask my suggestion in the future for virtualization. Their license upgrade model was already frustrating and now there is not even a year break from the license hell. At least I could get the license and upgrade the hosts for a few years before upgrading to the next version (ie: Vsphere 6 to 7 to 8). It will be a pain to migrate and restructure but I won't accept subscriptions as the core of my business solution. Broadcom go to hell.
- guh 3y ago[flagged]
- incomingpain 3y agoOh weird, I just transitioned away from vmware. I can never recommend vmware to anyone ever again? For the longest time I have been a vmware-only for baremetal. Hyper-V is ok and does the job. Virtualbox was ruined by oracle. Oh well. Many many other virtualization platforms to choose from. Is it time I learn Kubernetes?