6 ms·

Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

150 points by belter 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Syonyk 2y ago
> A bill from Broadcom for ten times the sum it previously paid for software licenses was one of them. Beeks's customers also told it that VMware was no longer seen as essential infrastructure. No real surprise there. As long as the bill for infrastructure remains sane, nobody is going to put in the effort to change out important parts of your arrangement, instead sticking with a "Well, we know this works, and we know how to deal with it..." approach. If they'd raised the bill somewhat - 50%, 100%... people probably would have stuck with it. But to jack it an order of magnitude, well, now it's worth putting the engineers on the project to find a cheaper solution (that may very well be better - virtio vs what VMWare is using... I certainly prefer virtio for most of my storage and networking needs). > The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling. I mean, the writing was on the wall, you don't buy out a product and jack the prices 10x if you plan to actually support it. It's pure "value extraction" at that point. Sad, really, because VMWare has a lot of nice features behind it and has been a well thought out bit of virtualization software throughout the years. I had the displeasure of having to update a VMWare install on a laptop recently (VMWare Player had been perfectly fine, which was discontinued, Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it, and I just want to run the VM I use to talk to my car, please...). I can't say I'll be considering them for anything going forward.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling. It's worth pointing out that VMware haven't been innovating on their core product for many years. The last major feature they added was vTPM, in 2018. We're almost in 2025, and they still don't have an identity and metadata service available that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs. AWS had this in 2012, and it's honestly embarrassing that VMware have done nothing about it. And support has been atrocious since at least 2015. I remember when I had to debug myself driver issues, because the people at VMware put a network card with a broken driver on their "Hardware Compatibility List", and then played dumb for a year of reports that the bloody driver is broken. The hosts kept crashing, or even more fun, silently stopping to process network traffic. And of course nobody at VMware's or Dell's support had any idea what's happening, even though there were abundant reports all over the internet and various forums about this.
  - mnau 2y ago
    Pat Gelsinger - CEO of VMware 2012-2021. I have read few comments that he wasn't great at it (no personal knowledge). Combined with Intel stuff...
    - achierius 2y ago
      My understanding was that he did a very good job. There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose.
      - sofixa 2y ago
        > There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose. Inertia? I was a part time vSphere admin at an MSP 2015-2022 and the solution was overwhelmingly underwhelming, with lots of bugs, rough edges, and some of the worst APIs I've ever seen. There was almost no innovation in that time period, and they even managed to bungle an REST API (which was billed as some sort of revolution, in 2015/2016).
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs The last thing I want is for a hypervisor to handle some secrets or manage identities. This is OS/app level job, not a HV one.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      And how does the OS/app prove who it is? How do you get the secret zero inside? You can orchestrate something with your config management tool, but there's no nice way of doing it without having to also handle rotation afterwards. It works marvelously in AWS, GCP, Azure. It allows for an extremely secure and low maintenance solution to that existential issue. It's a perfect thing for the platform to handle for you.
- ctoth 2y ago
  > Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it Next time you need to do this, you can also choco install vmwareworkstation :) if you have Chocolatey.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    That appears to only work on Windows as the host OS - I was running Windows as a guest, for some GM specific software. I normally use KVM and the RedHat VirtIO drivers for running Windows, but for some reason the VCX Nano doesn't seem to like the USB drivers in that configuration, and VMWare works.
- danudey 2y ago
  I posted this link in another thread, but AT&T claimed that their VMWare costs were going up 1050%, so that tenfold increase lines up with this one. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broadcom-tried-to-jack-vmware-prices-by-1050-percent-att-claims/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broad...
- jsheard 2y ago
  > Workstation is now free for personal use, It's now free period, even for commercial use, and even if you want to pay for support they won't take your money anymore once existing contracts expire. In other words Workstation is probably going on life support and won't have any significant development going forwards. https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/ https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...
  - p_l 2y ago
    AFAIK they also discontinued VMX in Workstation, so next versions are just going to use KVM?
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42304955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42304955 (though this link is the original source for that article)
glitchc 2y ago
Wouldn't a slow boil have been better than a massive price hike? Raising the price by 50% would be palatable to most medium to large orgs as the cost to switch is greater. And it would still net a nice chunk of change for Broadcom.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  That would give people time to leave, this is a gouging from people who are forced to pay because it takes them a long time to engineer around it. You cant repeatedly gouge them so better make it count.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. Because it will happen to others, to every single Cloud product. Or GitHub or Atlassian.
    - Syonyk 2y ago
      They've already long since done it. Cloud is staggeringly expensive compared to your own physical servers. Has been for all but trivial (almost toy) workloads since day 1. And that's before you pay for bandwidth. I was spending a decent chunk of change monthly on cloud boxes just for my personal hosting projects, and eventually realized I could get a stonking 1U box, colo at a local data center, pay for the server in the savings in a year or two, and have radically more capability in the deal. If you need a "droplet" type VM, with a gig of RAM, a couple gig of disk, and bandwidth, they're not bad. DigitalOcean works well for that, and is way cheaper on bandwidth than other places (1TB per droplet per month, combined pool). So I'll use that for basic proxy nodes and such. But if you start wanting lots of RAM (I run, among other things, a Matrix homeserver, and some game servers for friends, so RAM use goes up in a hurry), or disk measured in TB, cloud costs start to go vertical, in a hurry. It's really nice having a box with enough RAM I can just toss RAM at VMs, do offsite backup of "everything," etc. If you're spending more than a few hundred a month on cloud hosting, it's worth evaluating what a physical box would save you. //EDIT: By "go vertical," I mean "To get a cloud box with similar specs to what I racked up would be half the cost of the entire 1U, per month."
beambot 2y ago
Broadcom's handling of the VMWare acquisition gives me a renewed perspective and surprising appreciation of Oracle.
- ebiester 2y ago
  Both of them are lawnmowers. They are looking to extract the maximum amount of money possible. I'd argue that Broadcom could extract more money with smaller uplifts but I think they are also looking to consolidate their customer base. Some of these crazy numbers may be doing just that - saying that these people aren't wanted as customers anymore.
  - hotstickyballs 2y ago
    Extracting the maximum amount of money possible is the primary purpose of a company. It’s what you should expect to happen.
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      I mean, sure it is, if you have a severe case of sociopathy.
      - redundantly 2y ago
        That's capitalism for ya.
        lenerdenator 2y ago
        I'd say we're dipping more towards a return to feudalism.
    - unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
      They're just monetizing goodwill until it's zero.
    - 1propionyl 2y ago
skissane 2y ago
10x price increase? Sounds like a classic Computer Associates move. I think when Broadcom bought CA they also acquired this aspect of CA’s culture, and are now applying it to products which never had anything to do with CA.
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  Hock Tan runs it like a hedge fund. He will squeeze these products until they are dry and move on.
  - nradov 2y ago
    What you're describing is more like private equity, not a hedge fund. Hedge funds are generally passive investors and don't usually drive product pricing in their portfolio companies.
- spoonjim 2y ago
  If you see an enterprise software product starting to decline, as VMWare has in the cloud era, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk your customers as hard as you can. Just squeeze every penny out of people who are stuck with you. Any migration of a large enterprise will take several years so you can just get all that money in one big go and then shoot the product in the head.
  - airstrike 2y ago
    If you see a tenant starting to complain, like that one who’s been in your building for years, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk 'em for all they’re worth. You jack up the rent—ten times what they’re paying now. They ain't got no choice. Ain’t no place for them to go, so you just squeeze every penny outta ‘em. It’ll take ‘em years to find a new spot, so you got plenty of time to take all that cash in one big lump. And once you’ve wrung ‘em dry, you just tell 'em, 'Thanks for your business,' and throw 'em out. Nothing personal, kid. Just how the game’s played.
    - 2y ago
riffic 2y ago
everything is a hypervisor these days so I'm not seeing a problem for anyone who isn't Broadcom.
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  The Fortune 500 have 20 years of tooling, people, configs, setup etc in VmWare. It is a big deal for them to switch, it's also a big deal for them to pay 10x.
  - riffic 2y ago
    I pity the giganto-corps. Everyone saw this coming though.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Including [many of] the big corps. However if it takes 5 years to migrate and your current contract is for 3 more years that leaves 2 years of higher prices.
- danudey 2y ago
  The problem is paying the hugely inflated prices Broadcom's price gouging renegotiations are demanding, while also finding money to fund migrating off of VMWare for your infrastructure. A lot of companies out there (Canonical's OpenStack, RH's OpenShift) are so swamped with customers wanting to migrate off of VMWare that they can't keep up, meaning a lot of companies are going to have to keep paying VMWare while they wait in the migration queue.
late2part 2y ago
[flagged]
- talldayo 2y ago
  Pat Gelsinger did not create VMware, and he is very obviously not responsible for Broadcom's actions as the present owner.
bityard 2y ago
They are not the only ones. The company I work for uses a LOT of VMware. Mind you, VMWare has ALWAYS been expensive. To the point that in a lot of cases, you can end up spending more on VMWare than the hardware that runs it. I long ago crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that unless your workload really does require the kind of exceptional storage, networking, and HA integration that VMware (claims to) provide, you are better off using an open source solution for your VM infra and hiring a couple of extra engineers to manage it. When it was time for our contract to renew a few months back, our licensing and support quote was 3x the previous year and Broadcom would not budge, even a little. They said take it or leave it. Well, we left it. There is a big internal effort now to get us off of VMware and onto Kubernetes and OpenShift. Our whole fleet of VMware is still running but we're on borrowed time as we're on our own if any major technical issue comes up.
- SSLy 2y ago
  OpenShift costs as much as post hike VMware
  - gamblor956 2y ago
    Not necessarily. Red Hat negotiates prices with customers. If your company is paying as much for OpenShift as they would/were for VMware, they need to hire better negotiators.
    - belfalas 2y ago
      Hmm no. My $dayjob got quoted a nice price only for them to rug pull later. Also it’s not Red Hat anymore, it’s IBM.
      - trallnag 2y ago
        Was le cloud a la AWS evaluated?
        belfalas 2y ago
Havoc 2y ago
Still don’t get what the point is. You can temporarily squeeze the locked in customer for good quarterly numbers but in long run youre just fucking up your business permanently
- dboreham 2y ago
  Not thinking like a psychopath.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  Execs meet their target to get their outsized stock options. The Board gets theirs too. The short term investors got theirs too. It is irrelevant that the company is a burning wreck of its former self and customers and employees are saying WTF. This is the reality of Shareholder Primacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
  - winocm 2y ago
    Don't forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304405X7690026X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304405X76...
- whynotmaybe 2y ago
  What is "long run"? Oracle has been doing this for decades. For some companies, the migration from oracle to anything else would cost too much and hard to justify in some places, especially government. It's the same for VMware, It will takes many years for some government agencies to replace it with something else. I'm guessing Broadcom is going the same way. They can't compete against cloud migrations or open source alternatives. So as you said, they're squeezing locked in customers, the fastest they can until they've all migrated... Or until some decided that keeping it at that price was still a better ROI than migrating. I don't think a lot of people will start a new VMware data center in the years to come.
  - 2y ago
jmull 2y ago
My $dayjob is freaking out about the new cost of VMware. I suspect Broadcom's plan is to figure out just how much they can bear and cut a deal along those lines. That would totally work -- we're neck deep in vmware, and there's no easy way out -- except that there's a kind of network effect at play. Support is huge for us. In the beginning, we developed expertise in vmware (particularly in regard to our products), and guided our customers to it as well. Customers were happy to follow our recommended/supported option, and we were happy supporting it. (The support ain't cheap!) But our customers, by-and-large, are smaller and somewhat more nimble, meaning many will be unable or unwilling to do a deal with broadcom, and will insist on switching away. I suspect new customers will lead the way... there's no way we're going to walk away from a deal because the customer refuses to pay for vmware, and we probably can't afford to eat that cost for them. So we're going to start gaining expertise and supporting other vm platforms. I think we'll follow our original pattern: settle on one, gain expertise, start using it in support, then test and dev, and steer our customers to it. At some point we'll realize we know how to get rid of the rest of our internal use of vmware, AND realize we can sell remaining customers support to switch away from vmware themselves. Once that happens, I think it becomes a ball rolling down hill, and things will accelerate quickly. There are a couple reasons this isn't like Oracle, BTW. For one, with Oracle we're 10,000 ft below the surface with Oracle-provided air tanks. Second (I guess this is the main thing), Oracle is our problem, not our customers'.
PaulWaldman 2y ago
Has VMware won any significant customers since Broadcom's acquisition?
- zokier 2y ago
  Have they tried to win any customers?
czscout 2y ago
It really does seem as though Broadcom is entirely shifting VMware's focus the the top 5 or 10 percent of customers who probably make up the vast majority of the actual profits. The message they've delivered time and time again to businesses outside that group is pretty simple "go away" price.
- microtonal 2y ago
  It seems like it, making VMware Fusion and Workstation free seems to fit with that strategy. A bit of nostalgia: my first VMware product was VMware Express for Linux. It was a stripped down version of Workstation (probably 2.0?) that could only run Windows 95/98: https://web.archive.org/web/20010124081300/http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/exp_features.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010124081300/http://www.vmware... Does anyone remember Win4Lin 9x (based on SCO Merge)?
- silvestrov 2y ago
  Problem is when the expunged 90% creates a market that gets filled with a cheaper product that also can do what the top 10% needs. Then VMware dies because it cannot decrease prices anymore due to lack of volume.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I have to wonder if stuff like this will, over time, force companies to be extremely wary of any tech that eventually falls into the "extremely difficult to remove" category, and have companies instead requiring open source solutions and then separate contracts with support companies for those solutions. It's just further re-emphasizing that it doesn't matter how good your vendor is now, they will probably eventually get acquired by a company attempting to squeeze every last penny out of you. And their cost-benefit calculation is no longer based on how much unique value the software is providing, but it's instead about how much of a PITA it is to migrate off said software.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  Umm. The contingency plan for any big corp is to continually plan to migrate off a legacy system. It takes forever for big corp, if they don’t have a contingency plan now they will never have it. He wants to drop a bunch of run books on people and tell them go do that. He only wants configuration and does not want any development.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I have no idea who "he" is in your comment.
    - rawgabbit 2y ago
      Sorry I meant the CEO and non technical types. They want to buy software and configure it so they can easily switch vendors.
- eitally 2y ago
  Dating back 10-15 years, that premise was exactly what drove the enterprise shift away from a Microsoft stack (.Net + SQL Server + Windows Server) to a LAMP stack (where the L-A-M-P were each substitutable by various OSS options). It required a lot of reskilling in the enterprise, but after everyone was up to speed on the fundamentals of the new architectures and comfortable programming in Java/Python/Javascript/PHP it made learning all the newer things to come even easier. It also set the stage for companies like Canonical and Redhat to create viable commercial businesses wrapping FOSS software in enterprise support. Where we are now is on the cusp of starting another of these lock-in rejection cycles, but where the lock-in isn't at the OS or devtools layers, but at the data/analytics layer and with IaaS or PaaS having become unreasonably expensive alternatives to on-prem data centers [for many enterprises]. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve for Snowflake & Databricks (as well as Pega, C3AI, and similar), and whether CIOs start placing bets on their own team creating their own solutions using FOSS tooling on-prem, leaving public cloud as the domain of things like ERP & whatever SaaS business software they license.
stego-tech 2y ago
I did this research for CurrentCo in 2022 and published it in 2023, only to have it dismissed until pretty recently (and conveniently after Gartner research backed up my assertions - funny, that). I'm also a big proponent of on-prem/Private Cloud, so take my feedback in that context. VMware's biggest problems remain its lack of product cohesion and complexity relative to its cost, and while their recent conference suggested they're working to address these concerns, I worry it's about half a decade too late for it to be of value. Aria should have been a single product suite and appliance when they pivoted to public cloud, and vRealize Automate shouldn't have been so overly complex as to require professional services for deployment and maintenance. NSX seems powerful on the surface, but really only seems to thrive when the network team either relies upon it directly, or gives you a widely trunked subnet to work with and carve out. vSphere and ESXi are excellent stalwarts, but they're not as usable/automation-friendly as they should be in the modern era of IaC. Pre-Broadcom, VMware's strength was its ubiquity and core feature set for VMs relative to its pricing; post-Broadcom, not so much. As for the alternatives, I'm not really sold on any of them from commercial vendors. * Nutanix has never turned a yearly profit, doesn't support commodity hardware very well (especially if you want the full feature set), and is already expensive on its surface. The pivot towards cloud-hosted services in lieu of on-prem services suggests it's trying to emulate larger and more successful competitors, rather than focusing on its core business strategy (HCI). It's a shame, because if they went the VMware route (software only on commodity hardware), I think they'd be more successful. * Virtuozzo was the best commercial competitor to VMware on paper, but I never got to do a proper PoC. They're more focused on consumption-based services and XaaS, which is a plus, but I'm cautious endorsing them further as I have no direct experience with them - though I did suggest a PoC at the time, to explore their IaaS and PaaS suites. * OpenShift, while a very neat tool (VMs managed the same way as Kubernetes, huzzah!), doesn't really fit modern Enterprise needs either. I applaud any tooling that tries to make infrastructure scalable like containers are, but Enterprise workloads remain "VM first" for the most part, which OpenShift isn't really aiming for. If you're already working mostly with containers, I'd strongly suggest evaluating OpenShift, but most companies aren't, and Red Hat/IBM is very focused on selling VM-heavy customers on this container transition despite most of our workloads not supporting containers at all, and those that are available as containers often have strong warnings against orchestration support with K8s/OpenShift. * Microsoft's own stack is kind of a known quantity that I'd really only recommend if you're already a huge Microsoft customer, or rely heavily on MSPs/outsourced labor to support it. If you're not already on Microsoft, there's no reason to switch to it. * Proxmox was considered, but didn't make it into my final proposal due to prior evaluations not finding it Enterprise-suitable. * Red Hat Cockpit + KVM is surprisingly powerful! It'd be my default recommendation for SMBs, as RHELS pricing is fairly comparable to what vSphere licenses used to be, and once your engineers are onboarded into the world of Linux, they can convince you to migrate distros to something cheaper without significant disruption. When looking through free/Open Source projects, I initially narrowed it down to two: * Apache CloudStack was my 1st choice in my research, and the PoC was great. The initial buildout can be annoying, as it's typical Apache faire (in my experience anyway) of multi-page-manuals for a "quick start", but once the initial manager is up and running, the rest moves pretty quickly. * OpenStack was considered, but its complexity and composition of dozens of individual projects made it untenable to support in our environment. * OpenNebula was not considered at the time, but I've been looking into it on my downtime and considering my own PoC, since I dislike Proxmox for my homelab. My instincts tell me that we're a few years out from a "great reshoring" of workloads into more appropriate placements: companies reluctant to move to public cloud will do so for customer-billable workloads because they can have an easier time judging/fixing margins on it and scaling to demand, while Enterprise and stable workloads will likely move back on-prem where sovereignty and security are paramount and cost savings can be achieved through longer hardware lifespans. In that context, nobody does a particularly good job of creating a "Universal Cloud" abstraction layer to free engineers from juggling dozens of APIs, CLIs, codebases, and pipelines for each specific vendor or workload; not even Kubernetes does this well, and it's arguably the best presently-available technology suited to cross-cloud management and orchestration. Broadcom jumped the gun on price increases, because given another year or two of product improvement and shifting landscapes of both technology and geopolitics, they'd essentially have a captive audience to squeeze for higher margins; instead, we have ample time to consider alternatives that are quite comparable to VMware in capabilities, and often substantially cheaper to boot.
czhu12 2y ago
Can someone explain what VMWare does so well that allows them to do this for someone totally uninformed? No where I've worked at has used VMWare, but everywhere I've worked used containers or VM's of some sort. Even in the early 2015's kubernetes was mature enough to run production workloads. Any issues that did come up were with our own application code, never the orchestrator. I never found myself thinking that it would be nice to have a close sourced expensive option to reach for. What area does VMWare excel so much to justify this pricing power?
- eitally 2y ago
  If you actually literally meant "or VMs" in your statement, I'm curious what sort they were that were not VMWare? VMWare absolutely owns this market in the enterprise. It's been reliable, it's well-supported, there's a huge ecosystem of vendors and integration partners around it, and it's been the no-brainer choice for virtualization for CIOs since about 2010 (or earlier!).
  - czhu12 2y ago
    Yeah so we used Vagrant way way back in the day to have an easy way to distribute dev environments. Definitely not an expert here as to all the alternatives, but for what we had, the devex felt fine.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  Kubernetes demands a cloud-native approach - VMs are deployed from container images, nothing has persistent storage by default, network interfaces must be declared, etc. VMWare tolerates more conservative approaches like hoisting existing physical machines into VMs while leaving everything running on them unchanged. It's less sophisticated on a technical level, but it's also an easier "sell" for companies with an established technology stack that they may not want to change right away. It's also potentially a better fit for organizations which need to run Windows infrastructure (e.g. AD servers, mail servers, etc) which can't be hosted in k8s.
- KingMachiavelli 2y ago
  VMWare is far easier solution for normal enterprises than K8s. K8s more suited for having many small VMs that can be quickly deleted and recreated i.e modern microservice architecture. vSphere & friends is more targeted for running very large database, oriented application that need high uptime and are very long lived. VMWare can live migrate a running OS between physical hosts so that you can have continuous uptime. VMWare works with any OS so it's especially used by any Microsoft based orgs which the majority of hospitals, schools, government offices are. If you are deploying enterprise apps from the 1990-2000s you use vSphere, if you are building your own SaaS product then you use K8s.
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
What is vmware used for? I only know the virtualbox-like tool
- berbec 2y ago
  Imagine being able to centrally manage a massive fleet of these virtualbox-s and centrally control what storage, network, cpu and other compute resources get used. Throw in replication, high-availibility and a host of other features. Think on-prem AWS
egberts1 2y ago
Broadcom is going the way of the BlackBerry.
BobbyTables2 2y ago
Having worked with Broadcom (in a major vendor) — I only wish them the worst and hope the losses become too rapid to count. They are the second shittiest company I’ve ever dealt with — only recently outdone by Intel/Altera.
bastard_op 2y ago
VMWare is/was the early on easy button for windoze-only admins and managers to have an eazy button for Linux virtual services without calling it Linux or having betray allegiances to Redmond like a dirty secret. It's usually the enterprise space that is lazy and unwilling to look at open source solutions, or change at all usually. Just pay the tax like a good shakedown. Broadcom bought VMWare knowing they'd trap most into existing contracts as whales, and knew most would bear the cost increase regardless. Few casualties, so what - look at them profits.

150 points by belter 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

> A bill from Broadcom for ten times the sum it previously paid for software licenses was one of them. Beeks's customers also told it that VMware was no longer seen as essential infrastructure. No real surprise there. As long as the bill for infrastructure remains sane, nobody is going to put in the effort to change out important parts of your arrangement, instead sticking with a "Well, we know this works, and we know how to deal with it..." approach. If they'd raised the bill somewhat - 50%, 100%... people probably would have stuck with it. But to jack it an order of magnitude, well, now it's worth putting the engineers on the project to find a cheaper solution (that may very well be better - virtio vs what VMWare is using... I certainly prefer virtio for most of my storage and networking needs). > The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling. I mean, the writing was on the wall, you don't buy out a product and jack the prices 10x if you plan to actually support it. It's pure "value extraction" at that point. Sad, really, because VMWare has a lot of nice features behind it and has been a well thought out bit of virtualization software throughout the years. I had the displeasure of having to update a VMWare install on a laptop recently (VMWare Player had been perfectly fine, which was discontinued, Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it, and I just want to run the VM I use to talk to my car, please...). I can't say I'll be considering them for anything going forward.

sofixa 2y ago
> The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling. It's worth pointing out that VMware haven't been innovating on their core product for many years. The last major feature they added was vTPM, in 2018. We're almost in 2025, and they still don't have an identity and metadata service available that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs. AWS had this in 2012, and it's honestly embarrassing that VMware have done nothing about it. And support has been atrocious since at least 2015. I remember when I had to debug myself driver issues, because the people at VMware put a network card with a broken driver on their "Hardware Compatibility List", and then played dumb for a year of reports that the bloody driver is broken. The hosts kept crashing, or even more fun, silently stopping to process network traffic. And of course nobody at VMware's or Dell's support had any idea what's happening, even though there were abundant reports all over the internet and various forums about this.
- mnau 2y ago
  Pat Gelsinger - CEO of VMware 2012-2021. I have read few comments that he wasn't great at it (no personal knowledge). Combined with Intel stuff...
  - achierius 2y ago
    My understanding was that he did a very good job. There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose.
    - sofixa 2y ago
      > There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose. Inertia? I was a part time vSphere admin at an MSP 2015-2022 and the solution was overwhelmingly underwhelming, with lots of bugs, rough edges, and some of the worst APIs I've ever seen. There was almost no innovation in that time period, and they even managed to bungle an REST API (which was billed as some sort of revolution, in 2015/2016).
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  > that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs The last thing I want is for a hypervisor to handle some secrets or manage identities. This is OS/app level job, not a HV one.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    And how does the OS/app prove who it is? How do you get the secret zero inside? You can orchestrate something with your config management tool, but there's no nice way of doing it without having to also handle rotation afterwards. It works marvelously in AWS, GCP, Azure. It allows for an extremely secure and low maintenance solution to that existential issue. It's a perfect thing for the platform to handle for you.
ctoth 2y ago
> Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it Next time you need to do this, you can also choco install vmwareworkstation :) if you have Chocolatey.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  That appears to only work on Windows as the host OS - I was running Windows as a guest, for some GM specific software. I normally use KVM and the RedHat VirtIO drivers for running Windows, but for some reason the VCX Nano doesn't seem to like the USB drivers in that configuration, and VMWare works.
danudey 2y ago
I posted this link in another thread, but AT&T claimed that their VMWare costs were going up 1050%, so that tenfold increase lines up with this one. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broadcom-tried-to-jack-vmware-prices-by-1050-percent-att-claims/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broad...
jsheard 2y ago
> Workstation is now free for personal use, It's now free period, even for commercial use, and even if you want to pay for support they won't take your money anymore once existing contracts expire. In other words Workstation is probably going on life support and won't have any significant development going forwards. https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-fusion-and-workstation-are-now-free-for-all-users/ https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...
- p_l 2y ago
  AFAIK they also discontinued VMX in Workstation, so next versions are just going to use KVM?

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42304955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42304955 (though this link is the original source for that article)

glitchc 2y ago

Wouldn't a slow boil have been better than a massive price hike? Raising the price by 50% would be palatable to most medium to large orgs as the cost to switch is greater. And it would still net a nice chunk of change for Broadcom.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
That would give people time to leave, this is a gouging from people who are forced to pay because it takes them a long time to engineer around it. You cant repeatedly gouge them so better make it count.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Can’t wait to see when AWS does it. Because it will happen to others, to every single Cloud product. Or GitHub or Atlassian.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    They've already long since done it. Cloud is staggeringly expensive compared to your own physical servers. Has been for all but trivial (almost toy) workloads since day 1. And that's before you pay for bandwidth. I was spending a decent chunk of change monthly on cloud boxes just for my personal hosting projects, and eventually realized I could get a stonking 1U box, colo at a local data center, pay for the server in the savings in a year or two, and have radically more capability in the deal. If you need a "droplet" type VM, with a gig of RAM, a couple gig of disk, and bandwidth, they're not bad. DigitalOcean works well for that, and is way cheaper on bandwidth than other places (1TB per droplet per month, combined pool). So I'll use that for basic proxy nodes and such. But if you start wanting lots of RAM (I run, among other things, a Matrix homeserver, and some game servers for friends, so RAM use goes up in a hurry), or disk measured in TB, cloud costs start to go vertical, in a hurry. It's really nice having a box with enough RAM I can just toss RAM at VMs, do offsite backup of "everything," etc. If you're spending more than a few hundred a month on cloud hosting, it's worth evaluating what a physical box would save you. //EDIT: By "go vertical," I mean "To get a cloud box with similar specs to what I racked up would be half the cost of the entire 1U, per month."

beambot 2y ago

Broadcom's handling of the VMWare acquisition gives me a renewed perspective and surprising appreciation of Oracle.

ebiester 2y ago
Both of them are lawnmowers. They are looking to extract the maximum amount of money possible. I'd argue that Broadcom could extract more money with smaller uplifts but I think they are also looking to consolidate their customer base. Some of these crazy numbers may be doing just that - saying that these people aren't wanted as customers anymore.
- hotstickyballs 2y ago
  Extracting the maximum amount of money possible is the primary purpose of a company. It’s what you should expect to happen.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    I mean, sure it is, if you have a severe case of sociopathy.
    - redundantly 2y ago
      That's capitalism for ya.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        I'd say we're dipping more towards a return to feudalism.
  - unyttigfjelltol 2y ago
    They're just monetizing goodwill until it's zero.
  - 1propionyl 2y ago

skissane 2y ago

10x price increase? Sounds like a classic Computer Associates move. I think when Broadcom bought CA they also acquired this aspect of CA’s culture, and are now applying it to products which never had anything to do with CA.

fred_is_fred 2y ago
Hock Tan runs it like a hedge fund. He will squeeze these products until they are dry and move on.
- nradov 2y ago
  What you're describing is more like private equity, not a hedge fund. Hedge funds are generally passive investors and don't usually drive product pricing in their portfolio companies.
spoonjim 2y ago
If you see an enterprise software product starting to decline, as VMWare has in the cloud era, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk your customers as hard as you can. Just squeeze every penny out of people who are stuck with you. Any migration of a large enterprise will take several years so you can just get all that money in one big go and then shoot the product in the head.
- airstrike 2y ago
  If you see a tenant starting to complain, like that one who’s been in your building for years, then sometimes the "best" (but evil) thing to do is just milk 'em for all they’re worth. You jack up the rent—ten times what they’re paying now. They ain't got no choice. Ain’t no place for them to go, so you just squeeze every penny outta ‘em. It’ll take ‘em years to find a new spot, so you got plenty of time to take all that cash in one big lump. And once you’ve wrung ‘em dry, you just tell 'em, 'Thanks for your business,' and throw 'em out. Nothing personal, kid. Just how the game’s played.
  - 2y ago

riffic 2y ago

everything is a hypervisor these days so I'm not seeing a problem for anyone who isn't Broadcom.

fred_is_fred 2y ago
The Fortune 500 have 20 years of tooling, people, configs, setup etc in VmWare. It is a big deal for them to switch, it's also a big deal for them to pay 10x.
- riffic 2y ago
  I pity the giganto-corps. Everyone saw this coming though.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Including [many of] the big corps. However if it takes 5 years to migrate and your current contract is for 3 more years that leaves 2 years of higher prices.
danudey 2y ago
The problem is paying the hugely inflated prices Broadcom's price gouging renegotiations are demanding, while also finding money to fund migrating off of VMWare for your infrastructure. A lot of companies out there (Canonical's OpenStack, RH's OpenShift) are so swamped with customers wanting to migrate off of VMWare that they can't keep up, meaning a lot of companies are going to have to keep paying VMWare while they wait in the migration queue.

late2part 2y ago

[flagged]

talldayo 2y ago
Pat Gelsinger did not create VMware, and he is very obviously not responsible for Broadcom's actions as the present owner.

bityard 2y ago

They are not the only ones. The company I work for uses a LOT of VMware. Mind you, VMWare has ALWAYS been expensive. To the point that in a lot of cases, you can end up spending more on VMWare than the hardware that runs it. I long ago crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that unless your workload really does require the kind of exceptional storage, networking, and HA integration that VMware (claims to) provide, you are better off using an open source solution for your VM infra and hiring a couple of extra engineers to manage it. When it was time for our contract to renew a few months back, our licensing and support quote was 3x the previous year and Broadcom would not budge, even a little. They said take it or leave it. Well, we left it. There is a big internal effort now to get us off of VMware and onto Kubernetes and OpenShift. Our whole fleet of VMware is still running but we're on borrowed time as we're on our own if any major technical issue comes up.

SSLy 2y ago
OpenShift costs as much as post hike VMware
- gamblor956 2y ago
  Not necessarily. Red Hat negotiates prices with customers. If your company is paying as much for OpenShift as they would/were for VMware, they need to hire better negotiators.
  - belfalas 2y ago
    Hmm no. My $dayjob got quoted a nice price only for them to rug pull later. Also it’s not Red Hat anymore, it’s IBM.
    - trallnag 2y ago
      Was le cloud a la AWS evaluated?
      - belfalas 2y ago

Havoc 2y ago

Still don’t get what the point is. You can temporarily squeeze the locked in customer for good quarterly numbers but in long run youre just fucking up your business permanently

dboreham 2y ago
Not thinking like a psychopath.
rawgabbit 2y ago
Execs meet their target to get their outsized stock options. The Board gets theirs too. The short term investors got theirs too. It is irrelevant that the company is a burning wreck of its former self and customers and employees are saying WTF. This is the reality of Shareholder Primacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
- winocm 2y ago
  Don't forget: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304405X7690026X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304405X76...
whynotmaybe 2y ago
What is "long run"? Oracle has been doing this for decades. For some companies, the migration from oracle to anything else would cost too much and hard to justify in some places, especially government. It's the same for VMware, It will takes many years for some government agencies to replace it with something else. I'm guessing Broadcom is going the same way. They can't compete against cloud migrations or open source alternatives. So as you said, they're squeezing locked in customers, the fastest they can until they've all migrated... Or until some decided that keeping it at that price was still a better ROI than migrating. I don't think a lot of people will start a new VMware data center in the years to come.
- 2y ago

jmull 2y ago

My $dayjob is freaking out about the new cost of VMware. I suspect Broadcom's plan is to figure out just how much they can bear and cut a deal along those lines. That would totally work -- we're neck deep in vmware, and there's no easy way out -- except that there's a kind of network effect at play. Support is huge for us. In the beginning, we developed expertise in vmware (particularly in regard to our products), and guided our customers to it as well. Customers were happy to follow our recommended/supported option, and we were happy supporting it. (The support ain't cheap!) But our customers, by-and-large, are smaller and somewhat more nimble, meaning many will be unable or unwilling to do a deal with broadcom, and will insist on switching away. I suspect new customers will lead the way... there's no way we're going to walk away from a deal because the customer refuses to pay for vmware, and we probably can't afford to eat that cost for them. So we're going to start gaining expertise and supporting other vm platforms. I think we'll follow our original pattern: settle on one, gain expertise, start using it in support, then test and dev, and steer our customers to it. At some point we'll realize we know how to get rid of the rest of our internal use of vmware, AND realize we can sell remaining customers support to switch away from vmware themselves. Once that happens, I think it becomes a ball rolling down hill, and things will accelerate quickly. There are a couple reasons this isn't like Oracle, BTW. For one, with Oracle we're 10,000 ft below the surface with Oracle-provided air tanks. Second (I guess this is the main thing), Oracle is our problem, not our customers'.

PaulWaldman 2y ago

Has VMware won any significant customers since Broadcom's acquisition?

zokier 2y ago
Have they tried to win any customers?

czscout 2y ago

It really does seem as though Broadcom is entirely shifting VMware's focus the the top 5 or 10 percent of customers who probably make up the vast majority of the actual profits. The message they've delivered time and time again to businesses outside that group is pretty simple "go away" price.

microtonal 2y ago
It seems like it, making VMware Fusion and Workstation free seems to fit with that strategy. A bit of nostalgia: my first VMware product was VMware Express for Linux. It was a stripped down version of Workstation (probably 2.0?) that could only run Windows 95/98: https://web.archive.org/web/20010124081300/http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/exp_features.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010124081300/http://www.vmware... Does anyone remember Win4Lin 9x (based on SCO Merge)?
silvestrov 2y ago
Problem is when the expunged 90% creates a market that gets filled with a cheaper product that also can do what the top 10% needs. Then VMware dies because it cannot decrease prices anymore due to lack of volume.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I have to wonder if stuff like this will, over time, force companies to be extremely wary of any tech that eventually falls into the "extremely difficult to remove" category, and have companies instead requiring open source solutions and then separate contracts with support companies for those solutions. It's just further re-emphasizing that it doesn't matter how good your vendor is now, they will probably eventually get acquired by a company attempting to squeeze every last penny out of you. And their cost-benefit calculation is no longer based on how much unique value the software is providing, but it's instead about how much of a PITA it is to migrate off said software.

rawgabbit 2y ago
Umm. The contingency plan for any big corp is to continually plan to migrate off a legacy system. It takes forever for big corp, if they don’t have a contingency plan now they will never have it. He wants to drop a bunch of run books on people and tell them go do that. He only wants configuration and does not want any development.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Did you respond to the wrong comment or something? I have no idea who "he" is in your comment.
  - rawgabbit 2y ago
    Sorry I meant the CEO and non technical types. They want to buy software and configure it so they can easily switch vendors.
eitally 2y ago
Dating back 10-15 years, that premise was exactly what drove the enterprise shift away from a Microsoft stack (.Net + SQL Server + Windows Server) to a LAMP stack (where the L-A-M-P were each substitutable by various OSS options). It required a lot of reskilling in the enterprise, but after everyone was up to speed on the fundamentals of the new architectures and comfortable programming in Java/Python/Javascript/PHP it made learning all the newer things to come even easier. It also set the stage for companies like Canonical and Redhat to create viable commercial businesses wrapping FOSS software in enterprise support. Where we are now is on the cusp of starting another of these lock-in rejection cycles, but where the lock-in isn't at the OS or devtools layers, but at the data/analytics layer and with IaaS or PaaS having become unreasonably expensive alternatives to on-prem data centers [for many enterprises]. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve for Snowflake & Databricks (as well as Pega, C3AI, and similar), and whether CIOs start placing bets on their own team creating their own solutions using FOSS tooling on-prem, leaving public cloud as the domain of things like ERP & whatever SaaS business software they license.

stego-tech 2y ago

I did this research for CurrentCo in 2022 and published it in 2023, only to have it dismissed until pretty recently (and conveniently after Gartner research backed up my assertions - funny, that). I'm also a big proponent of on-prem/Private Cloud, so take my feedback in that context. VMware's biggest problems remain its lack of product cohesion and complexity relative to its cost, and while their recent conference suggested they're working to address these concerns, I worry it's about half a decade too late for it to be of value. Aria should have been a single product suite and appliance when they pivoted to public cloud, and vRealize Automate shouldn't have been so overly complex as to require professional services for deployment and maintenance. NSX seems powerful on the surface, but really only seems to thrive when the network team either relies upon it directly, or gives you a widely trunked subnet to work with and carve out. vSphere and ESXi are excellent stalwarts, but they're not as usable/automation-friendly as they should be in the modern era of IaC. Pre-Broadcom, VMware's strength was its ubiquity and core feature set for VMs relative to its pricing; post-Broadcom, not so much. As for the alternatives, I'm not really sold on any of them from commercial vendors. * Nutanix has never turned a yearly profit, doesn't support commodity hardware very well (especially if you want the full feature set), and is already expensive on its surface. The pivot towards cloud-hosted services in lieu of on-prem services suggests it's trying to emulate larger and more successful competitors, rather than focusing on its core business strategy (HCI). It's a shame, because if they went the VMware route (software only on commodity hardware), I think they'd be more successful. * Virtuozzo was the best commercial competitor to VMware on paper, but I never got to do a proper PoC. They're more focused on consumption-based services and XaaS, which is a plus, but I'm cautious endorsing them further as I have no direct experience with them - though I did suggest a PoC at the time, to explore their IaaS and PaaS suites. * OpenShift, while a very neat tool (VMs managed the same way as Kubernetes, huzzah!), doesn't really fit modern Enterprise needs either. I applaud any tooling that tries to make infrastructure scalable like containers are, but Enterprise workloads remain "VM first" for the most part, which OpenShift isn't really aiming for. If you're already working mostly with containers, I'd strongly suggest evaluating OpenShift, but most companies aren't, and Red Hat/IBM is very focused on selling VM-heavy customers on this container transition despite most of our workloads not supporting containers at all, and those that are available as containers often have strong warnings against orchestration support with K8s/OpenShift. * Microsoft's own stack is kind of a known quantity that I'd really only recommend if you're already a huge Microsoft customer, or rely heavily on MSPs/outsourced labor to support it. If you're not already on Microsoft, there's no reason to switch to it. * Proxmox was considered, but didn't make it into my final proposal due to prior evaluations not finding it Enterprise-suitable. * Red Hat Cockpit + KVM is surprisingly powerful! It'd be my default recommendation for SMBs, as RHELS pricing is fairly comparable to what vSphere licenses used to be, and once your engineers are onboarded into the world of Linux, they can convince you to migrate distros to something cheaper without significant disruption. When looking through free/Open Source projects, I initially narrowed it down to two: * Apache CloudStack was my 1st choice in my research, and the PoC was great. The initial buildout can be annoying, as it's typical Apache faire (in my experience anyway) of multi-page-manuals for a "quick start", but once the initial manager is up and running, the rest moves pretty quickly. * OpenStack was considered, but its complexity and composition of dozens of individual projects made it untenable to support in our environment. * OpenNebula was not considered at the time, but I've been looking into it on my downtime and considering my own PoC, since I dislike Proxmox for my homelab. My instincts tell me that we're a few years out from a "great reshoring" of workloads into more appropriate placements: companies reluctant to move to public cloud will do so for customer-billable workloads because they can have an easier time judging/fixing margins on it and scaling to demand, while Enterprise and stable workloads will likely move back on-prem where sovereignty and security are paramount and cost savings can be achieved through longer hardware lifespans. In that context, nobody does a particularly good job of creating a "Universal Cloud" abstraction layer to free engineers from juggling dozens of APIs, CLIs, codebases, and pipelines for each specific vendor or workload; not even Kubernetes does this well, and it's arguably the best presently-available technology suited to cross-cloud management and orchestration. Broadcom jumped the gun on price increases, because given another year or two of product improvement and shifting landscapes of both technology and geopolitics, they'd essentially have a captive audience to squeeze for higher margins; instead, we have ample time to consider alternatives that are quite comparable to VMware in capabilities, and often substantially cheaper to boot.

czhu12 2y ago

Can someone explain what VMWare does so well that allows them to do this for someone totally uninformed? No where I've worked at has used VMWare, but everywhere I've worked used containers or VM's of some sort. Even in the early 2015's kubernetes was mature enough to run production workloads. Any issues that did come up were with our own application code, never the orchestrator. I never found myself thinking that it would be nice to have a close sourced expensive option to reach for. What area does VMWare excel so much to justify this pricing power?

eitally 2y ago
If you actually literally meant "or VMs" in your statement, I'm curious what sort they were that were not VMWare? VMWare absolutely owns this market in the enterprise. It's been reliable, it's well-supported, there's a huge ecosystem of vendors and integration partners around it, and it's been the no-brainer choice for virtualization for CIOs since about 2010 (or earlier!).
- czhu12 2y ago
  Yeah so we used Vagrant way way back in the day to have an easy way to distribute dev environments. Definitely not an expert here as to all the alternatives, but for what we had, the devex felt fine.
duskwuff 2y ago
Kubernetes demands a cloud-native approach - VMs are deployed from container images, nothing has persistent storage by default, network interfaces must be declared, etc. VMWare tolerates more conservative approaches like hoisting existing physical machines into VMs while leaving everything running on them unchanged. It's less sophisticated on a technical level, but it's also an easier "sell" for companies with an established technology stack that they may not want to change right away. It's also potentially a better fit for organizations which need to run Windows infrastructure (e.g. AD servers, mail servers, etc) which can't be hosted in k8s.
KingMachiavelli 2y ago
VMWare is far easier solution for normal enterprises than K8s. K8s more suited for having many small VMs that can be quickly deleted and recreated i.e modern microservice architecture. vSphere & friends is more targeted for running very large database, oriented application that need high uptime and are very long lived. VMWare can live migrate a running OS between physical hosts so that you can have continuous uptime. VMWare works with any OS so it's especially used by any Microsoft based orgs which the majority of hospitals, schools, government offices are. If you are deploying enterprise apps from the 1990-2000s you use vSphere, if you are building your own SaaS product then you use K8s.

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

What is vmware used for? I only know the virtualbox-like tool

berbec 2y ago
Imagine being able to centrally manage a massive fleet of these virtualbox-s and centrally control what storage, network, cpu and other compute resources get used. Throw in replication, high-availibility and a host of other features. Think on-prem AWS

egberts1 2y ago

Broadcom is going the way of the BlackBerry.

BobbyTables2 2y ago

Having worked with Broadcom (in a major vendor) — I only wish them the worst and hope the losses become too rapid to count. They are the second shittiest company I’ve ever dealt with — only recently outdone by Intel/Altera.

bastard_op 2y ago

VMWare is/was the early on easy button for windoze-only admins and managers to have an eazy button for Linux virtual services without calling it Linux or having betray allegiances to Redmond like a dirty secret. It's usually the enterprise space that is lazy and unwilling to look at open source solutions, or change at all usually. Just pay the tax like a good shakedown. Broadcom bought VMWare knowing they'd trap most into existing contracts as whales, and knew most would bear the cost increase regardless. Few casualties, so what - look at them profits.