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Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move
- adastra22 2y agoI already have. I was a perfectly happy VMware customer until Broadcom took over and fucked it all up. I still don’t have a license allocation for a product I paid for. Will never buy VMware/Broadcom again. ETA: the context, for those who care, is VMware Workstation. VMware made that free for personal use right before the takeover, so Broadcom didn’t bother porting over the license database. If you have a pro/commercial key, make sure you back it up because Broadcom won’t help you recover it. But if VMware is now free, why does this matter? Because the key words were “personal use.” They reserve the right to pull an oracle and hit your organization up with an audit and massive fees for that one guy that installed VMware workstation that one time. We bought keys, but now Broadcom has no record of that. I’ve since switched all our virtualization scripts to use docker.
- ronsor 2y ago> They reserve the right to pull an oracle and hit your organization up with an audit and massive fees for that one guy that installed VMware workstation that one time. It's funny because Oracle has done this with their proprietary VirtualBox extensions.
- adastra22 2y agoWhat do you think pushed us to use VMware in the first place…
- imwillofficial 2y agoYou are not Broadcom’s desired customer customer. When Symantec was acquired, they cut out all but the highest 1000 customers.
- illiac786 2y agoThen all is well, undesirable customers are leaving. I think Broadcom misjudged the impact though.
- imwillofficial 2y agoThey do this with every property they acquire. I think they know exactly what they are doing.
- whimsicalism 2y agosort of an obvious planted piece and i wouldn’t trust surveys provided by a competitor
- baq 2y agoNobody likes to be price gouged and have their business be held hostage.
- minkles 2y agoFirst we got VMware because systems were getting larger than the load we could push onto them. Then we got Hyper-V because it was free and VMWare was getting needy and expensive. Then we moved to the cloud because it was "cheaper". Then we ran Kubernetes on a cloud node because it was hard to manage the workloads. Now we are having cloud cost difficulties. Hang on a minute... deep thought ... surely we fucked up somewhere?
- adastra22 2y agoGet off the cloud. Go with a reputable VPS provider like OVH or Hetzner. Get a machine allocated for a fraction of the cost of your cloud bill, and install dokku (or whatever) on it. Done.
- minkles 2y agoToo late. Leveraged too much AWS stuff to escape.
- candiddevmike 2y agoThen it's burn out or golden parachute depending on your socioeconomic status.
- minkles 2y agoSuck 'em dry and steal from the corpse.
- bunderbunder 2y agoI doubt it's too late. There may be a cost to escape, but it may not be insurmountable. At the height of the cloud hype, we were all more than happy to pay to lift-and-shift our way to higher operating costs. Surely, then, a lift-and-shift toward lower operating costs is comparably feasible. If anything the barriers are social. At the height of the cloud hype, we all believed we were riding unicorns to the end of a rainbow with a pot of gold waiting for us. When you believe that, of course you want to spare no expense on ensuring you have the fastest unicorn so you can get that pot of gold before anyone else can.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoHaving already been thru the Symantec acquisition as soon as I heard Broadcom's name in connection to VMware I advised everyone I knew was using VMware to start looking for alternatives. It's unclear to me how Broadcom can excel at apparent ineptitude so well. I assume the analysis I've read, that they want to shed all the legacy non-Fortune 100 Customers, is true.
- baq 2y ago> It's unclear to me how Broadcom can excel at apparent ineptitude so well. Reduce cost by 80% and raise prices 10x tends to do just that. > I assume the analysis I've read, that they want to shed all the legacy non-Fortune 100 Customers, is true. No other explanation makes any rational sense - no one will learn vmware on their free time now.
- poincaredisk 2y ago>Broadcom can excel at apparent ineptitude so well "Apparent" is the key word here. They don't care about all customers. They want to keep maybe 10% of the biggest enterprise customers, get rid of everyone else, raise prices 400%, and keep half of the profits while reducing costs to almost zero. Sure the product will die, but the acquisition will pay for itself multiple times over.
- candiddevmike 2y agoThe sad part is VMwares tech stack for the most part is pretty rock solid, especially ESXi. It is/was rigorously tested across a variety of hardware platforms with extensive documentation on supported configurations. This is massive undertaking and their support matrix docs would make any QA nerd drool.
- bluGill 2y agoA fair number of Fortune 100 customers are also leaving as well, but you only find this out by talking to people in locations where it won't get back to anyone since the plans are confidential. But I suppose a couple very very large customers paying their prices is a lot of money.
- siliconc0w 2y agoI've used Proxmox for home-lab stuff but anyone know how viable it is for SMB?
- topspin 2y agoIt's overkill for small business. Makes more sense at "medium". Small business does fine with plain old QEMU/KVM and the open source tools: virt-install/manager, etc. Understand that I routinely manage QEMU machine configs by hand, because it's trivial. Perhaps I lack perspective.
- jthemenace 2y agoHow many VMs you consider to be "medium"?
- topspin 2y agoVM count is a poor metric. Spawning lots of VMs is a matter of looping over virt-install or "virsh create" or what have you. The real bottleneck is storage: how are you solving that such that you can migrate VMs around to service things. Once you get past a couple (~2) network storage arrays you're probably into "medium." But I'll answer your question directly, nonetheless. At ~45 VMs, I consider the system "small." Understand you're going to need intimate familiarity with the extant tools. Not that it's hard or anything. It's not point/click Proxmox style, though.
- dangus 2y agoYou've got this a little backwards. QEMU/KVM is too console-centric for small businesses. Proxmox's appeal is that it has an easy GUI web interface that hobbyists or "de-facto IT department persons" can work with. It may be overkill in terms of features but it's a free as in beer tool that novices can install and run with quickly without much of a learning curve.
- topspin 2y agoOk, as I said, I may lack perspective. I version control VM configs and script VM deployments, and manage a herd of containers with ansible. We're talking about simple minded code monkey stuff here: the real work is elsewhere.
- nemo44x 2y agoHalf of any enterprise software's customers say they're looking to move but most won't actually do it.
- whoknw 2y agoWe wouldn't know what to move to. Is there a direct replacement for the VMware vSphere offering on the market?
- bongodongobob 2y agoWe're looking at a combo of Nutanix and Hyper-V.
- red-iron-pine 2y agodon't know if they've changed in the past ~3 years, but Nutanix was a PITA back then. Our get-off-of-VMware plan is basically #yolo into the cloud.
- bluGill 2y agoNo direct replacements, but there are a lot of options. Some of the options are with a different company that would be glad to find out what parts of vSphere you need and for a price (which might or might not be reasonable) make just those for your. Some are open source and you can hire someone to add the features you need. Some are things like AWS where are completely different in many ways and yet have tools that by nature are very different forcing to change to their model, but may be better once you pay that price. And of course nothing says you can't pick multiple from the above - but no matter what it will be significant effort to move to any of them above the cost, which is what Broadcom is counting on.
- bongodongobob 2y agoI really don't think it's necessarily "hard", it's just going to consume some time and planning. If Broadcom is actually banking on that, they're mistaken. I work for a very large multi billion dollar company and they want 3x our current costs. We told them to get fucked and we are moving. We didn't even try to negotiate, we essentially laughed at them. I got to be a fly on the wall for the call and it was hilarious.
- jmull 2y ago$myDayJob certainly is. I don’t really know if we’re a whale or not. We sure aren’t a minnow, though.
- sschueller 2y agoI would like to see the stats for Jira customers...
- jl6 2y agoPretty sure every big org is looking to move off every big tech product, as part of the contract renewal negotiation dance.
- ronsor 2y agoOf course they're looking to move. They know they're going to get Broad-conned like the customers of every other company Broadcom has purchased.
- dboreham 2y agoMBAs doing their thing. Nothing to see here.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoMBAs exist to fulfill the needs demanded by the market -- e.g. the Milton Freedman "companies only exist to increase shareholder value" mantra. aka stock price must go up. MBAs, and their behavior, is inevitable under Capitalism. don't hate the player, hate the game.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoIt's extremely rare for an acquisition to benefit anyone but the acquirer. The acquisition is either to eliminate competitors, absorb proprietary tech and axe the product, or siphon off money for the larger org's coffers. Most people don't buy a cow to benefit the cow. They either milk it or turn it into chops.
- Spooky23 2y agoBroadcom is taking advantage of the fact that most CIOs are forced to be pretty spineless. If you are big and willing to badmouth then in public, they will come to the table. There was at least one US state that did so iirc. Otherwise, pay the tax with minimum commit, and don’t allow creation of new VMs. they essentially created a business model that writes the justification for AWS or GCP. When companies flip to rent extraction business models, you need to change how you treat the business relationship. VMWare is like an incandescent light bulb… if the cost of re-platforming and availability of resources makes it cost effective to move, you move.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sweeter 2y agoTelecoms companies try not to be a cancer to society challenge (impossible level difficulty)
- ThaDood 2y agoFormer MSP I worked at is also looking to migrate customers off to something like Hyper-V or Nutanix. I told my old boss to hire a bunch of Linux gurus and go through the Proxmox partnership program and get certified. As much as people knock it for their support not really being ready for enterprise. I do think that proxmox is well suited to gain some of the market share. I've been using it in my lab for the past few years without any major issues. Running an HA 3-node cluster. Only issue I ran into was when I kept getting kernel panic from an driver issues in my RAID card. But that really only affected me during reboots. Pinning to and older kernel worked. Oh and it was also because my RAID card is like 10 years old. So HN - if you are moving off VmWare, what are you using?