10 ms·

It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

185 points by kaboro 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago
> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing. (Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone - so happy I'm not a PMM who has to wine and dine them at RSA or Re:Inforce. The moment RSA and these holdover 90s blog cartels like Register and DarkReading die, discourse in the space can become so much better. Practitioner lead conferences like Bsides and practitioner blogs are superior to these kinds of rags that are written in conjunction with vendors)
- nottorp 2y ago
  You hate they're speaking as (very snarky) humans? Corporate speak is better?
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.
    - hnbear 2y ago
      They lost the fun snark and just went pissy and needlessly edgelordy 10 years ago. It’s not the great site it was in the 90s anymore when it was fair, balanced and fun, along with having accurate news.
      - buggeryorkshire 2y ago
        Yep. They're not a must read like they were then, and like Computer Weekly were in the 90s, but I'm still glad they're around to provide slight balance to all the regurgitated press releases. Mike McGee was a legend.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Mind that i said 'corporate speak' as referring to the tone of the articles. Not referring to who they do or don't take money from...
  - gr4vityWall 2y ago
    Non-snarky humans are better than both.
- gruturo 2y ago
  > Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone I find the snark refreshing compared to all the corporate drones using their carefully worded lawsuit-proof, passive-voice, non-committal, lawyer-vetted style. You must work in a very, very sane environment - for most of us this is literally a breath of fresh air.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    As I mentioned below: They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. They are just writing in some weird pissy tone. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors. I'd like snark, but I'd rather hear that from an actual practitioner, not one of the several tech "journalists" we'd wine and dine when I was still working for vendors.
    - gremlinunderway 2y ago
      Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same way too. Going super hardcore on "professionalism" makes it easier to sell objectivity whereas in the background you are also clearly picking and choosing to decide to take money from vendors. It's just one aesthetic over another. The corporate-style is made to win over those naive to think their slick editing and wordsmithing means that they're objective about their reporting ("so professional! Real journalists!"). The snarky/edgy style is made to win over those naive enough to think that because they're "rebels" then they must be objective unlike those corporate stuck-up types. It's Windows vs Mac for journalism, thats all.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        > Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same You ain't bursting my bubble. I've wined and dined DarkReading, SDxCentral, etc. At least they aren't being mean while selling access. This is why I said read practioners personal blogs and stuff, not these kinds of corporate journals.
- hylaride 2y ago
  To be fair, the tone is supposed to be that way. It was designed as a UK-tabloid style IT news source, which have informal and opinionated tones (I don't know if it was originally done in jest or not). The fact that it publishes in a low-brow, combative style in an industry that is (historically, anyways) mostly educated is part of the "joke", especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies (mostly relying on the same companies for advertising) - which is why the tagline is "biting the hand that feeds IT". It's easy to forget that most tech news sources were overwhelmingly uncritical to even bad tech. For those of us who had to actually deal with it, it was refreshing to know other people hated <insert vender product here>. For a good while in the 1990s (before it could stand on its own) it was a site written by people who actually worked with products from the tech companies (with their sales people) and could comment if they were going downhill or got screwed by pricing changes. Is it possibly outdated and tiring now? Sure (it stopped being a daily news source for me around 2010), but it helps to understand the history and why it is or was popular.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    The issue is these old school blogs aren't some random dudes eating ramen who love technology for the sake of technology anymore. They are now owned by press wire publishers and corporate conference owners, and as companies have increasingly moved away from both these options, the tone has become increasingly uneven. Look at how much RSA flamed Palo Alto Networks for deciding to quit RSA and how Register never uses snark in the articles it writes with CEOs, leadership, or companies who invite Register to their conferences. It's basically an attempt at extortion, not the truth. The practitioners who are technical don't write for these rags. And most of the Register's (and at all their parent companies publications) are non-technical journalists for whom this is a dayjob which they'll inevitably leave to become a Comm Marketer at a Vendor like the dozens I've worked with. > especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies So does The Register. I've literally wined and dined their writers at RSA years ago.
    - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
- karmarepellent 2y ago
  > Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. What is a good move? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future. This consolidation just increases their dependence on Nutanix, does it not?
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Consolidation is a good move, because it minimizes your overhead from a team management and procurement management basis. Infra is a cost center at the end of the day. > I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future Can you justify spending 2x your hypervisor budget when that same pot of money could be used to hire more engineers who make the product the company is selling?
    - karmarepellent 2y ago
      You are absolutely right that consolidation minimizes overhead. I work in an IT department who relies on VMware and I certainly do not look forward to the prospect of updating all our tooling to work with multiple hypervisors. It works quite well as it is. And it certainly makes sense in the short term to spend the money on the product instead of on infrastructre. I just wonder about the long term in the context of how we do business. Because on the one hand you have management pushing topics like "risk management" where I have to take responsibility for the most trivial of things in day-to-day operations. And then there is the hypervisor issue where "risk management" goes out of the window and we happily rely on a single hypervisor that could (from one day to the next, more or less) upend all our business.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        Yep. It is a conundrum, and why a lot of my peers in F500s lead hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud migrations. This way you can auto-scale if needed within your cloud providers (which are easier to migrate from than on-prem due to better DevEx) or return back to on-prem if needed from a cost saving or infra standpoint. That said, these are questions that are very organization dependent.
- JeremyNT 2y ago
  > But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. It can be all of the above though. I work in higher education and Proxmox is the only option we are seriously considering right now.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Fair point. I was thinking solely from a Upper Market perspective. Higher Ed is in a weird place where budgets are small but the personnel are fairly adept, so depending on the size you guys could actually be a good fit for deploying and managing a FOSS offering like Proxmox.
    - JeremyNT 2y ago
      You're right on the money. The magic of VMWare before is that it did enough for a low enough cost that it made sense for all sorts of orgs, even those that were quite cost sensitive. But higher ed is weird for the reasons you mention. To elaborate a bit: before commercialization, universities were a huge part of the early internet, and they invested heavily in datacenters and connectivity at a time when "the cloud" didn't exist. They also have weird cost models and paying for power/cooling is sometimes done in a way that IT doesn't even account for that burden at all. So to a large degree, shutting down on-prem stuff to move to "the cloud" has never made financial sense for unis, and they've always had to adapt to whatever datacenter tech has been required over the long decades. That means they're staffed with people who never forgot how to run workloads directly on the metal, and aren't afraid to build it themselves rather than just move to a vendor. When it comes to the VMWare / Broadcom situation, "once bitten, twice shy" is going to be in the back of their minds - they know they'll be around for decades to come, and nobody wants to have to migrate early due to another rug pull.
hhh 2y ago
Is Kubevirt stable enough for me to unplug a host and have the VMs fail over to another?
- withinboredom 2y ago
  I believe kubevirt just delegates to the under-hypervisor (whatever it is). That being said, default kubernetes waits at least 5 minutes before considering a down host as actually down.
helsinkiandrew 2y ago
> Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.” If you hike your prices by 10-15x, you only need 6-10% of customers to stay to maintain your revenue, reduce costs and massively increase profit margins!
- pmx 2y ago
  This massively increases risk too, right? Pinning all your revenue on a much smaller customer base means losing one or two of them has a huge impact!
  - dbspin 2y ago
    Also pretty much guarantees flight of your former customer base to close compliments - who then have improved revenue to bring their products closer in alignment to yours. You'd better have a hell of a moat to follow this strategy.
    - smallnamespace 2y ago
      Tiny nitpick: complement means a good in an adjacent part of the supply chain (e.g. batteries and EVs are complements), you might have meant 'competitors'.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - dbspin 2y ago
        From the point of view of a customer, a complementary service would be a product that fits the same niche and is reasonably substitutable.
        Youden 2y ago
        English is a living language so it's impossible to say definitively that you're "wrong" but I don't think anyone else is able to understand what you're trying to communicate through your use of this word. According to the Cambridge dictionary, there are a couple of variants depending on your dialect: - "to make something else seem better or more attractive when combining with it" - e.g. "Strawberries and cream complement each other perfectly." - "to help make something or someone more complete or effective" - e.g. "She used photographs to complement the text of the news story. " The only way I can make any sense of your words is to assume you're trying to argue that two competing but interchangeable services "complement" each other when used simultaneously because that might allow a customer to mitigate risk in a similar fashion to a multi-cloud setup. That's a pretty big jump to make from what you've actually said though and would really need further explanation for anyone to understand.
avidphantasm 2y ago
I admit to not understanding or caring about the full scope of Computershare’s business (side note: that’s a dumbass name), but having been forced to suffer their software when working for a former company, it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs, in addition to a bunch of Nutanix VMs.
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  It was a very reasonable name in 1978 when they started, as they provide stock and share services for companies via computers - something uncommon in that time.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- trebligdivad 2y ago
  A lot might be staff 'desktops' - some companies run thinclients and run the desktops in VMs. Easier to reinstall them when staff screwup.
- re-thc 2y ago
  > it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs Their whole business is based on computer sharing. There's a lot of microservices to make it happen.
  - meepmorp 2y ago
    Their business is providing stock transfer and related services to corporations, not computer sharing.
spydum 2y ago
I just hope Nutanix can keep their act together, they've been given a gift.
- elygre 2y ago
  As someone looking at nutanix: what are the issues?
  - sofixa 2y ago
    They still force you into a specific hardware organisation (hyperconverged, disks are on the compute nodes and storage is distributed) which doesn't make sense for everyone's workloads. Also, at least a few years ago(hope it's not still the case), a lot of their services were a bunch of open source poorly stitched together with bash, and their poor abstraction over it was leaking heavily. Their APIs were also very poor (I mean, VMware's are objectively complete shit, but at least they cover almost everything; Nutanix had major gaps in API coverage). Oh, and they're very expensive.
    - radiojosh 2y ago
      Yeah, the company I work for has millions of dollars tied up in Pure storage arrays. We evaluated Nutanix and I just stopped listening after they said they don't support external storage. Huge missed opportunity for them.
    - grubbs 2y ago
      I believe it's all Supermicro hardware. We looked into it as well (higher ed) and it was just way too expensive for their NX servers with Intel Silver CPUs. I've heard stories that it's usually low cost to enter, but when you want more CPU/storage it's ungodly expensive. Even the initial quote for three hosts was ridiculous for the CPUs offered.
      - sofixa 2y ago
        > Even the initial quote for three hosts was ridiculous for the CPUs offered. And storage, a few years ago they were trying to convince us that their cache is soo good, you should use spinning disks with some SSD cache. Of course they wouldn't provide any concrete numbers, and even with hybrid storage and subpar CPUs, they were a decent chunk more expensive than traditional servers with better CPUs and a dedicated full flash SAN. Add to that the subpar (even in their demos!) software with lacking APIs, and it just seemed extremely weird to see them getting business.
underseacables 2y ago
I wonder if this is why GEM suddenly stopped working! All of a sudden, I couldn't access my stock option platform for a previous employer through ComputerShare. The platform was suddenly shut down in April.
rado 2y ago
The P.S. links to an interesting article about the Broadcom site UX peculiarities: https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/ https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/
fred_is_fred 2y ago
Broadcom couldn’t care less about Computershare. Many others will pay and they will milk this until it’s dead.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
"Nutanix, he said, is now his champion for databases, all 128,000 of them, after delivering 1,000 percent better performance than another unnamed rival and pulling off tricks like recovering a forty-terabyte database in eight minutes." ... yeah. I like El Reg, but... come on. ONE THOUSAND MEGAPERCENT vs unnamed rival. Nutanix has an in-house cassandra fork I believe, I wonder if they are weasel wording some linear scaling.
quibuss 2y ago
Good for proxmox.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Read TFA. Customers are going to Nutanix, Citrix, etc. NOT Proxmox.
- mlrtime 2y ago
  I will stay this is still good for Proxmox in the long run.... Maybe not for this article's use case. Just the fact that less people will know or care about vmware and just start playing with proxmox and not ESX.
9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
I don't think I've ever seen to this degree such a misguided focus on short-term profit at the expense of driving away ALL future customers. At this point, who ever would even consider VMware for a new project or business? Vmware will exist only as long as their current customers exist. Being a VMware salesperson has to be a brutal job right now.
- rekoil 2y ago
  And you can bet that many of them are currently looking at removing or severely reducing their VMware dependance, maybe even decommissioning projects that are deemed unfeasible to move to another platform.
- mhuffman 2y ago
  Yes. A 15% price hike is a little high, but could be expected in bigger businesses from time to time, a 15X price hike is something that the entire C-Suite now has to discuss. And what 15X new features are coming with it now?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nunez 2y ago
There are lots of details missing. VMware had a crazy amount of product and support SKUs. It is possible that they were vastly underpaying relative to what they should have been licensed for. Also, 24k VMs is a lot but core count is what matters. They could have been running that compute with insane overprovisioning, and Broadcom generally wants customers with REALLY HIGH core counts. Finally, the new SKUs that Broadcom are pushing consolidate lots of products together that would have previously been purchased separately. If they were _only_ vSphere customers, the hike might have come from now needing to be NSX and vSAN customers against their will. All that said, lots of customers definitely had similar experiences; it's all over /r/vmware. Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > There are lots of details missing It's a submarine article from Nutanix .NEXT who seemed to have done a media buy with The Register. I've always detested that kind of underhanded vendor tactic, and am honestly happy that giants like ZScaler and Palo Alto Networks are moving away from the conferences+trade rag GTM and moving towards either direct sales or more targeted usergroups+conferences (eg. BSides). > Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here Yep! Niklesh did the same thing to turn around PANW, and imo VMWare kinda needs it. The products are good, but it seemed like a lot of shenanigans were happening at the AE level. I've heard down the grapevine that there's a significant shift towards cloud security now, which I think is something VMWare really needed to do - they had the right products, but became addicted to on-prem cash cows. Either become a PANW or become a Rackspace.
  - jotsick 2y ago
    [dead]
mindcrash 2y ago
And Nutanix is working incredibly great (although that is not a big surprise considering it is "just" KVM with heavy modifications), I recently finished a small consulting gig at a SMB making the jump from VMWare to Nutanix. It would not surprise me that soon Broadcom will realize they purchased a dead company, because according to my contacts at Nutanix the OP is not an edge case and small and large companies are migrating from VMWare to Nutanix and/or other solutions such as OpenStack in droves.

185 points by kaboro 2y ago

> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing. (Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone - so happy I'm not a PMM who has to wine and dine them at RSA or Re:Inforce. The moment RSA and these holdover 90s blog cartels like Register and DarkReading die, discourse in the space can become so much better. Practitioner lead conferences like Bsides and practitioner blogs are superior to these kinds of rags that are written in conjunction with vendors)

nottorp 2y ago
You hate they're speaking as (very snarky) humans? Corporate speak is better?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors.
  - hnbear 2y ago
    They lost the fun snark and just went pissy and needlessly edgelordy 10 years ago. It’s not the great site it was in the 90s anymore when it was fair, balanced and fun, along with having accurate news.
    - buggeryorkshire 2y ago
      Yep. They're not a must read like they were then, and like Computer Weekly were in the 90s, but I'm still glad they're around to provide slight balance to all the regurgitated press releases. Mike McGee was a legend.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Mind that i said 'corporate speak' as referring to the tone of the articles. Not referring to who they do or don't take money from...
- gr4vityWall 2y ago
  Non-snarky humans are better than both.
gruturo 2y ago
> Also I hate hate HATE The Register's tone I find the snark refreshing compared to all the corporate drones using their carefully worded lawsuit-proof, passive-voice, non-committal, lawyer-vetted style. You must work in a very, very sane environment - for most of us this is literally a breath of fresh air.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  As I mentioned below: They are not snarky and they very gladly work with corporates as well. They are just writing in some weird pissy tone. Look at all the sponsored content they have from ZTE, as well as all the Nutanix specific articles because of Nutanix .NEXT Snark is fine if you are evenhanded by being snarky about everyone, but it ain't great if you're clearly picking and choosing and deciding to take money from vendors. I'd like snark, but I'd rather hear that from an actual practitioner, not one of the several tech "journalists" we'd wine and dine when I was still working for vendors.
  - gremlinunderway 2y ago
    Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same way too. Going super hardcore on "professionalism" makes it easier to sell objectivity whereas in the background you are also clearly picking and choosing to decide to take money from vendors. It's just one aesthetic over another. The corporate-style is made to win over those naive to think their slick editing and wordsmithing means that they're objective about their reporting ("so professional! Real journalists!"). The snarky/edgy style is made to win over those naive enough to think that because they're "rebels" then they must be objective unlike those corporate stuck-up types. It's Windows vs Mac for journalism, thats all.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > Hate to burst your bubble, but even the super tight-laced "serious" journalism, especially in tech, all works the same You ain't bursting my bubble. I've wined and dined DarkReading, SDxCentral, etc. At least they aren't being mean while selling access. This is why I said read practioners personal blogs and stuff, not these kinds of corporate journals.
hylaride 2y ago
To be fair, the tone is supposed to be that way. It was designed as a UK-tabloid style IT news source, which have informal and opinionated tones (I don't know if it was originally done in jest or not). The fact that it publishes in a low-brow, combative style in an industry that is (historically, anyways) mostly educated is part of the "joke", especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies (mostly relying on the same companies for advertising) - which is why the tagline is "biting the hand that feeds IT". It's easy to forget that most tech news sources were overwhelmingly uncritical to even bad tech. For those of us who had to actually deal with it, it was refreshing to know other people hated <insert vender product here>. For a good while in the 1990s (before it could stand on its own) it was a site written by people who actually worked with products from the tech companies (with their sales people) and could comment if they were going downhill or got screwed by pricing changes. Is it possibly outdated and tiring now? Sure (it stopped being a daily news source for me around 2010), but it helps to understand the history and why it is or was popular.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  The issue is these old school blogs aren't some random dudes eating ramen who love technology for the sake of technology anymore. They are now owned by press wire publishers and corporate conference owners, and as companies have increasingly moved away from both these options, the tone has become increasingly uneven. Look at how much RSA flamed Palo Alto Networks for deciding to quit RSA and how Register never uses snark in the articles it writes with CEOs, leadership, or companies who invite Register to their conferences. It's basically an attempt at extortion, not the truth. The practitioners who are technical don't write for these rags. And most of the Register's (and at all their parent companies publications) are non-technical journalists for whom this is a dayjob which they'll inevitably leave to become a Comm Marketer at a Vendor like the dozens I've worked with. > especially has most other tech press at the time it was created in the 1990s had conflict of interest relationships with tech companies So does The Register. I've literally wined and dined their writers at RSA years ago.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
karmarepellent 2y ago
> Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. What is a good move? Maybe I misunderstand what you are saying, but I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future. This consolidation just increases their dependence on Nutanix, does it not?
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Consolidation is a good move, because it minimizes your overhead from a team management and procurement management basis. Infra is a cost center at the end of the day. > I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future Can you justify spending 2x your hypervisor budget when that same pot of money could be used to hire more engineers who make the product the company is selling?
  - karmarepellent 2y ago
    You are absolutely right that consolidation minimizes overhead. I work in an IT department who relies on VMware and I certainly do not look forward to the prospect of updating all our tooling to work with multiple hypervisors. It works quite well as it is. And it certainly makes sense in the short term to spend the money on the product instead of on infrastructre. I just wonder about the long term in the context of how we do business. Because on the one hand you have management pushing topics like "risk management" where I have to take responsibility for the most trivial of things in day-to-day operations. And then there is the hypervisor issue where "risk management" goes out of the window and we happily rely on a single hypervisor that could (from one day to the next, more or less) upend all our business.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Yep. It is a conundrum, and why a lot of my peers in F500s lead hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud migrations. This way you can auto-scale if needed within your cloud providers (which are easier to migrate from than on-prem due to better DevEx) or return back to on-prem if needed from a cost saving or infra standpoint. That said, these are questions that are very organization dependent.
JeremyNT 2y ago
> But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. It can be all of the above though. I work in higher education and Proxmox is the only option we are seriously considering right now.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Fair point. I was thinking solely from a Upper Market perspective. Higher Ed is in a weird place where budgets are small but the personnel are fairly adept, so depending on the size you guys could actually be a good fit for deploying and managing a FOSS offering like Proxmox.
  - JeremyNT 2y ago
    You're right on the money. The magic of VMWare before is that it did enough for a low enough cost that it made sense for all sorts of orgs, even those that were quite cost sensitive. But higher ed is weird for the reasons you mention. To elaborate a bit: before commercialization, universities were a huge part of the early internet, and they invested heavily in datacenters and connectivity at a time when "the cloud" didn't exist. They also have weird cost models and paying for power/cooling is sometimes done in a way that IT doesn't even account for that burden at all. So to a large degree, shutting down on-prem stuff to move to "the cloud" has never made financial sense for unis, and they've always had to adapt to whatever datacenter tech has been required over the long decades. That means they're staffed with people who never forgot how to run workloads directly on the metal, and aren't afraid to build it themselves rather than just move to a vendor. When it comes to the VMWare / Broadcom situation, "once bitten, twice shy" is going to be in the back of their minds - they know they'll be around for decades to come, and nobody wants to have to migrate early due to another rug pull.

hhh 2y ago

Is Kubevirt stable enough for me to unplug a host and have the VMs fail over to another?

withinboredom 2y ago
I believe kubevirt just delegates to the under-hypervisor (whatever it is). That being said, default kubernetes waits at least 5 minutes before considering a down host as actually down.

helsinkiandrew 2y ago

> Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.” If you hike your prices by 10-15x, you only need 6-10% of customers to stay to maintain your revenue, reduce costs and massively increase profit margins!

pmx 2y ago
This massively increases risk too, right? Pinning all your revenue on a much smaller customer base means losing one or two of them has a huge impact!
- dbspin 2y ago
  Also pretty much guarantees flight of your former customer base to close compliments - who then have improved revenue to bring their products closer in alignment to yours. You'd better have a hell of a moat to follow this strategy.
  - smallnamespace 2y ago
    Tiny nitpick: complement means a good in an adjacent part of the supply chain (e.g. batteries and EVs are complements), you might have meant 'competitors'.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - dbspin 2y ago
      From the point of view of a customer, a complementary service would be a product that fits the same niche and is reasonably substitutable.
      - Youden 2y ago
        English is a living language so it's impossible to say definitively that you're "wrong" but I don't think anyone else is able to understand what you're trying to communicate through your use of this word. According to the Cambridge dictionary, there are a couple of variants depending on your dialect: - "to make something else seem better or more attractive when combining with it" - e.g. "Strawberries and cream complement each other perfectly." - "to help make something or someone more complete or effective" - e.g. "She used photographs to complement the text of the news story. " The only way I can make any sense of your words is to assume you're trying to argue that two competing but interchangeable services "complement" each other when used simultaneously because that might allow a customer to mitigate risk in a similar fashion to a multi-cloud setup. That's a pretty big jump to make from what you've actually said though and would really need further explanation for anyone to understand.

avidphantasm 2y ago

I admit to not understanding or caring about the full scope of Computershare’s business (side note: that’s a dumbass name), but having been forced to suffer their software when working for a former company, it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs, in addition to a bunch of Nutanix VMs.

averageRoyalty 2y ago
It was a very reasonable name in 1978 when they started, as they provide stock and share services for companies via computers - something uncommon in that time.
- deleted 2y ago
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trebligdivad 2y ago
A lot might be staff 'desktops' - some companies run thinclients and run the desktops in VMs. Easier to reinstall them when staff screwup.
re-thc 2y ago
> it boggles my mind that they need 24,000 VMWare VMs Their whole business is based on computer sharing. There's a lot of microservices to make it happen.
- meepmorp 2y ago
  Their business is providing stock transfer and related services to corporations, not computer sharing.

spydum 2y ago

I just hope Nutanix can keep their act together, they've been given a gift.

elygre 2y ago
As someone looking at nutanix: what are the issues?
- sofixa 2y ago
  They still force you into a specific hardware organisation (hyperconverged, disks are on the compute nodes and storage is distributed) which doesn't make sense for everyone's workloads. Also, at least a few years ago(hope it's not still the case), a lot of their services were a bunch of open source poorly stitched together with bash, and their poor abstraction over it was leaking heavily. Their APIs were also very poor (I mean, VMware's are objectively complete shit, but at least they cover almost everything; Nutanix had major gaps in API coverage). Oh, and they're very expensive.
  - radiojosh 2y ago
    Yeah, the company I work for has millions of dollars tied up in Pure storage arrays. We evaluated Nutanix and I just stopped listening after they said they don't support external storage. Huge missed opportunity for them.
  - grubbs 2y ago
    I believe it's all Supermicro hardware. We looked into it as well (higher ed) and it was just way too expensive for their NX servers with Intel Silver CPUs. I've heard stories that it's usually low cost to enter, but when you want more CPU/storage it's ungodly expensive. Even the initial quote for three hosts was ridiculous for the CPUs offered.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > Even the initial quote for three hosts was ridiculous for the CPUs offered. And storage, a few years ago they were trying to convince us that their cache is soo good, you should use spinning disks with some SSD cache. Of course they wouldn't provide any concrete numbers, and even with hybrid storage and subpar CPUs, they were a decent chunk more expensive than traditional servers with better CPUs and a dedicated full flash SAN. Add to that the subpar (even in their demos!) software with lacking APIs, and it just seemed extremely weird to see them getting business.

underseacables 2y ago

I wonder if this is why GEM suddenly stopped working! All of a sudden, I couldn't access my stock option platform for a previous employer through ComputerShare. The platform was suddenly shut down in April.

rado 2y ago

The P.S. links to an interesting article about the Broadcom site UX peculiarities: https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/ https://matduggan.com/the-worst-website-in-the-entire-world/

fred_is_fred 2y ago

Broadcom couldn’t care less about Computershare. Many others will pay and they will milk this until it’s dead.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

"Nutanix, he said, is now his champion for databases, all 128,000 of them, after delivering 1,000 percent better performance than another unnamed rival and pulling off tricks like recovering a forty-terabyte database in eight minutes." ... yeah. I like El Reg, but... come on. ONE THOUSAND MEGAPERCENT vs unnamed rival. Nutanix has an in-house cassandra fork I believe, I wonder if they are weasel wording some linear scaling.

quibuss 2y ago

Good for proxmox.

alephnerd 2y ago
Read TFA. Customers are going to Nutanix, Citrix, etc. NOT Proxmox.
mlrtime 2y ago
I will stay this is still good for Proxmox in the long run.... Maybe not for this article's use case. Just the fact that less people will know or care about vmware and just start playing with proxmox and not ESX.

9cb14c1ec0 2y ago

I don't think I've ever seen to this degree such a misguided focus on short-term profit at the expense of driving away ALL future customers. At this point, who ever would even consider VMware for a new project or business? Vmware will exist only as long as their current customers exist. Being a VMware salesperson has to be a brutal job right now.

rekoil 2y ago
And you can bet that many of them are currently looking at removing or severely reducing their VMware dependance, maybe even decommissioning projects that are deemed unfeasible to move to another platform.
mhuffman 2y ago
Yes. A 15% price hike is a little high, but could be expected in bigger businesses from time to time, a 15X price hike is something that the entire C-Suite now has to discuss. And what 15X new features are coming with it now?

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nunez 2y ago

There are lots of details missing. VMware had a crazy amount of product and support SKUs. It is possible that they were vastly underpaying relative to what they should have been licensed for. Also, 24k VMs is a lot but core count is what matters. They could have been running that compute with insane overprovisioning, and Broadcom generally wants customers with REALLY HIGH core counts. Finally, the new SKUs that Broadcom are pushing consolidate lots of products together that would have previously been purchased separately. If they were _only_ vSphere customers, the hike might have come from now needing to be NSX and vSAN customers against their will. All that said, lots of customers definitely had similar experiences; it's all over /r/vmware. Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here.

alephnerd 2y ago
> There are lots of details missing It's a submarine article from Nutanix .NEXT who seemed to have done a media buy with The Register. I've always detested that kind of underhanded vendor tactic, and am honestly happy that giants like ZScaler and Palo Alto Networks are moving away from the conferences+trade rag GTM and moving towards either direct sales or more targeted usergroups+conferences (eg. BSides). > Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here Yep! Niklesh did the same thing to turn around PANW, and imo VMWare kinda needs it. The products are good, but it seemed like a lot of shenanigans were happening at the AE level. I've heard down the grapevine that there's a significant shift towards cloud security now, which I think is something VMWare really needed to do - they had the right products, but became addicted to on-prem cash cows. Either become a PANW or become a Rackspace.
- jotsick 2y ago
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mindcrash 2y ago

And Nutanix is working incredibly great (although that is not a big surprise considering it is "just" KVM with heavy modifications), I recently finished a small consulting gig at a SMB making the jump from VMWare to Nutanix. It would not surprise me that soon Broadcom will realize they purchased a dead company, because according to my contacts at Nutanix the OP is not an edge case and small and large companies are migrating from VMWare to Nutanix and/or other solutions such as OpenStack in droves.