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VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong
- wkat4242 1y agoThe bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.
- spwa4 1y agoSo switch to openstack or kubernetes (with kubevirt if you want VMs). Open source. Way more beautiful design. With Kubernetes, actually fast storage if you need it. Can scale up to AI demands if you need it. Or proxmox or the like if you're small enough.
- tedivm 1y agoIt feels like that's the direction most people are going in, but that doesn't change the fact that no one is going to trust Broadcom again after this.
- bluGill 1y agoAfter this? Many people didn't trust Broadcom even before they bought vmware. This isn't something new on Boardcoms part, though it is high visibility and so people not even aware of Broadcom before are now.
- stego-tech 1y agoMy beef with K8s (and to be clear, it’s the leanest cut of beef from the deli - so not much substance to it) is that unless you pay someone else to manage the Control Plane for you, you’re not only going to need to upskill your workers on K8s itself but also administering the components of the Control Plane, like HA, etcd, storage, network plane, etc. Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity. I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.
- imglorp 1y agoFor small on-prem shops that don't really want to learn about running k8s, and have under a few dozen nodes, there are definitely slim options, like Talos is basically boot to k8s, and for single app level, there's things like multi-node k0s. Tech like this means you can reduce the control plane labor and focus on the workload. https://www.talos.dev https://www.talos.dev https://docs.k0sproject.io/v0.11.0/k0s-multi-node https://docs.k0sproject.io/v0.11.0/k0s-multi-node
- stego-tech 1y agoTalos is on my shortlist but its core “grease” features remain locked behind a (reasonable, but still existent) subscription, which throws it into “premium management layer” territory for me and my odd slide deck for executives. The narrative for the past fifteen years has consistently been “we have no money for what we need because we spent it all on what Gartner suggested and a consultant told us we should have”, which means we’re constantly having to not only do more with less, but also rely heavily on “pre-greased” products like hypervisors. I don’t like it, but that’s how the current technology environment is unfortunately setup. God help the enterprise software segment if customers realize 90% of their needs are served perfectly well with KVM+QEMU and VMs.
- 63stack 1y agoWord for word my experience with operating k8s.
- stego-tech 1y agoTo be clear: I like K8s! It’s fun to be able to write some YAML, apply it, and be done! But the sheer work of getting to that point, safely and securely? It ruins the experience for me, personally.
- spwa4 1y agoWhat would you like setup to look like? Would there be real interest in a kubernetes distro that takes IPs and a (set of) domain names, and boots up on N nodes, installing letsencrypt, so that you can do a deployment and have ingress actually working?
- andrewinardeer 1y agoPretty sure in Tesco's case switching to openstack is a decade long project.
- bluGill 1y agoI think they can do it in 5 years with some investment. Which is how long they need Broadcom to honor the current contract. The effort is mostly technical, and much of it you can just hire contractors to help.
- boznz 1y agoI would bite the bullet and begin any switch from Broadcom now on the principle you can never trust the vendor again and you will just be kicking the can down the road.
- bananapub 1y agothat doesn’t seem to be an issue in this case, since it’s exactly what everyone expects Broadcom to do in any given situation. their victims/customers are people stuck on the platform from before Broadcom bought it.
- stego-tech 1y agoThis. I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom. “Good thing Microsoft would never do that to us.” Ha. Hahaha.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoAt least VMware isn't user-facing and it can be removed without riots. Imagine trying to tell someone they don't need Excel. I try to maintain at least plausible flexibility to go tell vendors to shove it, but if you have some enthusiastic fans of Microsoft Teams (they exist, who knew?)... Teams is one of those things that is inescapably tied to an incredibly deep well of platform lock-in.
- snapplebobapple 1y agoReally? Teams?? We went teams abd microsoft ecosystem fully because we needed extra windows management stuff as we have grown and users had software that required windows and excel and the biggest pain point has been teams. As near as i can tell it tries to do everythibg wrong and the things that are so blindingly obvious that it can't do them wrong, it finds a way to do them suboptimally
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoI would never invent a lie as implausible as this. Yes, there are fans of Microsoft Teams. They're out there and they make decisions.
- CamelCaseName 1y agoI... I like Teams...
- 1y ago
- magicalhippo 1y agoIsn't their whole strategy that they want to squeeze the customers they got by the balls? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoMostly they seem committed to drop smaller customers and pursue very lucrative deals with large companies only. But to do that they should be valuing those relationships with the big customers, and they clearly aren't doing that either.
- stackskipton 1y agoOps person here, VMware is so embedded at these companies that switching away would be like Google saying, no more gRPC, everything is now SOAP. The amount of impacts is just too mind boggling to even consider. 2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware. Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.
- zhengyi13 1y ago... Google did say "No more Oracle EBS" and switched entirely to SAP. It took multiple years, and it was not a small effort, but there was the will, and a way was found.
- stackskipton 1y agosigh I didn’t work at FAANG type, we don’t hire FAANG skill level. Whatever Google did is completely irrelevant to this conversation and most other conversations.
- kstrauser 1y agoIn my experience, FAANG are no more skilled than anyone else. The main thing is that they seem to do a better job of not hiring complete duds, so their average cleverness may be higher, but I’ve worked with brilliant people at every regular shop.
- stackskipton 1y agoI agree but complete duds can really drag your team down as you end up spending a ton of time trying to fix their shortcomings and amount of code written on the Ops side to prevent them from completely screwing everything up is mind boggling.
- raverbashing 1y agoThe bias with technical people is thinking every problem is technical VMWare may have hiked the prices and might be an important dependency but at a certain point it is cheaper to sue and/or switch from them. Seems that they have gone way past this point
- fragmede 1y agoThe bigger issue is the lawyers get the money so go back to school as a lawyer and choose better parents.
- eqvinox 1y agoAs someone who only knows Broadcom's silicon business: there, they're just used to people having no other choice, with their quasi monopoly in some fields. Are they (mistakenly) transferring that attitude to VMware?
- natebc 1y agoYes. Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed. Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.
- testdelacc1 1y agoI’m curious, why does higher ed need VMWare? Is it because you have some supercomputers that you want to share among your employees? I’m asking because for $12m I’d just buy all the employees some high end commodity hardware.
- Symbiote 1y agoIt will be for ordinary administration, employees, students, finance etc. The academic work (including the supercomputer) will run Linux and open source systems for job scheduling etc.
- snapcaster 1y agoWhy does any of this use VMs? Not familiar with the space at all
- jabl 1y agoUh? IT for higher ed is not that different from any other enterprise IT. I used to work at a university, although I worked on the Linux/HPC side of things we did have regular contact with the IT department. So things the IT department used VM's for of the top of my head: - Web servers. Yes, the official university web pages, with fronted servers, database servers and whatnot. But also a lot of departments had their own servers, even some research groups ran their own. To get rid of the zillions of ad-hoc servers running in closets here and there IT gave out VM's pretty freely to staff members. - Email. Yes, this was before everyone + dog outsourced their email, so they ran their own in-house email servers. - print servers - (I think file servers were mostly non-VM appliances, my university used netapp's a lot) - All kinds of management systems to manage the campus workstations and network. And things like Active Directory and other directory services type services which are critical. - A zillion in-house applications for things like signing up for courses and other things necessary for handling thousands of students. - A lot of bespoke systems given out to research groups for whatever purposes they needed, again in order to get rid of the zillion repurposed old pc's running in closets acting as servers or running some experiments etc. - Critical services and some not-so-critical services as well had test environments to test changes before rolling out to production. - Finance/admin stuff like payroll etc. - Shell servers (ssh), RDP servers, VPN servers etc. to enable staff to access university services from outside. All in all, it was hundreds and hundreds of VM's. Wouldn't surprise me if there were actually thousands.
- wer232essf 1y ago[flagged]
- haskellshill 1y ago> who is ever going to sign up for another contract with [VMware]? Oh geez I dunno, surely now it's over for them
- mihaaly 1y agoThere seems to be a "squeeze" phase in several of the software's life. When the organization goes from engineering oriented into sales oriented. Mostly true for those acquired by investors, wanting more money on spending no more. EBITDA and other related matters becoming paramount having no decade long perspectives, not even half in some instances. No long term there. Of course, you have to find the gold mines, those with locked in users.
- bluelightning2k 1y agoI have never understood how Oracle remains a big company. Seems to me they have this type of reputation and just nobody will ever willingly buy anything from them ever
- n4r9 1y ago> As The Register's European editor wearily remarked: "Search the site for Simon and VMware. We've got pages of this stuff. Go. Look." In case anyone else was wondering who "Simon" is, I'm pretty sure it refers to this editor: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Sharwood https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Sharwood
- lewdwig 1y agoTo Broadcom you’re not a customer, you’re a mark, a patsy, stooge, a _victim_. Their aim is to establish exactly what they can get away with, how far they can abuse you, before you’ll just walk away.
- travisgriggs 1y agoBut this is where all/most “platforms” go. As the product offering flounders over time, your quality talent (engineering and business) boils off to other opportunities. Then the short term value extraction methodologies show up, and everyone looks on in horror as the platform is “destroyed” through “mismanaged” consumer relationships. Working in agtech, I’ve always wondered if this isn’t just the disenfranchised farmer story. Give a farmer 1,000 acres to farm, and if they’re playing the long game, they’ll intermix their high value crops with responsible crop rotations. Managed well, this business can go on indefinitely. But tell them they have 5 years left to farm the ground, and that the land will be of no value after that, they’ll grow the most expensive crop they can every year, soil quality be damned. It makes the most sense from a value extraction point of view. Broadcom seems to be the kind of farmers that buy up forsaken land and extract as much value as possible before it finally fails.
- walterbell 1y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemcdowell/2025/08/31/broadcom-plays-defense-at-vmware-explore-2025/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemcdowell/2025/08/31/broadc... > Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.
- alephnerd 1y ago> Many mid-market and regional operators These aren't Broadcom's ICPs. > Nutanix Good for Nutanix. Market segmentation exists for a reason. The article is also written by Steve McDowell, who's analyst firm (NAND Research) is sponsored by Nutanix [0][1] Welcome to Enterprise Sales. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93FbVZGDXoY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93FbVZGDXoY [1] - https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix/technology/hyperconverged-infrastructure-for-managing-ai-at-the-edge https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix/technology/hype...
- walterbell 1y agoThe article mentions several VMware alternatives: - RedHat OpenShift (k8s) - Scale Computing HC3 - Wind River Cloud - public cloud providers Any other alternatives?
- riddley 1y agoProxmox leaps to mind. HyperV, XCP-ng, raw KVM..
- sherr 1y agoXen is still around, including an open-source version. It's not as visible as it used to be but works e.g. XenServer (https://www.xenserver.com/editions https://www.xenserver.com/editions). I'd look at this over VMWare anyday.
- alexvitkov 1y agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes. If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working. Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.
- amluto 1y agoTo be fair, and I know nothing about Tesco’s actual stack, a large grocery chain needs to track their contracts with suppliers, track their inventory in each location and in transit, track what goods they want in which locations, understand which larger pallets and big boxes contain which goods, track things prepped in house, and also optimize what to move from where, to where, and when and how. The latter part probably uses some spiffy stack involving something like CPLEX or Gurobi, and it’s not running on their “1 computer” OLTP stack. That being said, I don’t see what 40k servers is for unless the POS machines are thin clients that use a substantial fraction of a server each.
- regularfry 1y agoA long and storied history of nasty surprises has taught me to never underestimate the complexity of an unfamiliar domain. In that sense I'm surprised it's only 40,000.
- Terr_ 1y agoYeah, I'm pessimistically sure that there is other stuff, like: * Checking whether each item scanned has satisfied a logical contract for a discount, some of which may be per-region, per-store, or even per-customer. * If multiple exclusive coupons or deals are available, resolve the contradiction, preferably in favor of the customer. * Check if any items or quantities of items require an ID to be shown before proceeding, and record information about the employee authorizing it. * Update customer "rewards" data and generate any special offers so that you can put it onto their receipt. And that's not even starting to get into all the other less-customer-synchronous stuff that you still need CPU power somewhere to do. Managing stock levels, orders, deliveries, price changes, anti-"shrinkage", employee shifts, market-research, status and repairs of freezer-units, operational logging and telemetry, every form of reporting/dashboard "strategic insight" stuff beloved by upper management...
- andrewstuart 1y agoMost startups struggle to get any clients and would lavish love on any the could. Imagine being a company so big that your strategy is to kick your clients in the teeth then throttle revenue out of them.
- Zigurd 1y agoThis is the ghost of Charlie Wang haunting the software industry. Computer Associates was notorious for this kind of licensing shenanigans. Guess where Computer Associates is now? A new generation of IT departments are discovering the Long Island wiseguy approach to licensing.
- jm4 1y agoI was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great. I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.
- sqircles 1y agoIf I never have to have two weeks of meetings around discussing how many vCAN points we will need for the next year ever again, I'll be a happy man.
- colechristensen 1y agoMicrosoft is doing well and you were a small customer for them. VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.
- kelsey98765431 1y agoDoing things that way (virtualization rather than containerization) fell out of vogue specifically because of how bad vmware was to work with. CPU quotas were probably what pushed serious people away from the product instead of machine licenses. I was early in my career but working with vmware products was the bane of our existence because if we wanted to make any sort of configuration change or spin up a test machine or really do anything at all it had to run through accounting which was just an instant non starter. we all started fiddling with alternatives and docker swiftly became reliable at least for spinning up a new web server or testing the latest and greatest whatever. vmware did this to themselves.
- sqircles 1y agoThe state of software companies is pretty terrible. I have been on the acquisition side as well as the development / end-user side and it’s mind-boggling knowing the exorbitant costs with bare minimum value delivered, yet companies just keep paying whatever they’re told it costs, until it’s comically astronomical and the customers have to tell them to get bent. Yet still, software vendors keep changing their licensing structure until it meets that comically astronomical figure and pushing customers away. Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients. The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead. These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed. This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams. It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.
- lenerdenator 1y agoCharlie Munger once said something to the effect of "show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes". There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold. Those things cost money. Money paid for those things is money not paid to shareholders, and that's the ultimate incentive in our system. They've got you by the balls, and secretly, your CEO thinks their CEO is a genius for thinking up and implementing that business model. Pay up.
- bluGill 1y agoI know someone (I'm not going to say who - too many sue-happy people are accused here) who was using VMWare at work, and they decided to switch to virtualbox because they trusted Oracle more than Broadcom. Oracle has long has a reputation of being licensing jerks, but they are still trusted more than Boardcom.
- garganzol 1y agoLong-term VMware customer here and I am in the same boat as your friend.
- johncolanduoni 1y agoBroadcom is headquartered in Palo Alto, and their physical product lines are mostly manufactured outside China from what I can tell (Broadcom itself is fabless). Are you sure you don’t have them confused with another company?
- garganzol 1y agoYes, sorry, my fault. It was indeed another company, I have updated the original message.
- b3lvedere 1y agoPerpetual licenses are eventually very bad for business if nobody pays for support. Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it. Shit starts hitting the fan when you actually need excellent support and get a (huge) invoice. People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting. Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.
- kjs3 1y agoNobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it. Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.
- b3lvedere 1y agoAgree. It's my experience and most of those are small businesses.
- mixermachine 1y agoAs soon any certification is required for the business the chapter SLA (service level agreements) comes up. Basically every business that is medium to large has to pass some kind of certification. Most of them will pay for an annual support contract because the SLA chapter forces them to have some kind of measure to recover from architecture problems.
- whalesalad 1y agoTIL VMware Fusion is free now. 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-...
- washadjeffmad 1y ago"As of March 2025, the current versions of VMware Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro are available at no charge for all use cases, including personal, educational, and commercial use. Users no longer need to purchase a license for these versions for any scenario. Broadcom will continue releasing updates and security patches but will no longer sell new support contracts for these versions." FYI. I know we weren't the only ones left gun shy after Oracle's legal team reached out to let us know about the dozen or so employees using VirtualBox from their work laptops a few years ago.
- mrpippy 1y agoYes, but just try to download it from them. You have to make an account, agree to all kinds of garbage, and then you still might be stuck in "authorization" like my account is. They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app, so you have to manually go through their horrendous website to download updates. It's 10x easier to just search reddit or internet archive for a link to the .dmg.
- JeffeFawkes 1y agoIf your name or email address has non-alphanumeric characters, their entire authorization/EULA flow breaks silently. I had to use an old email to get it to work.
- kotaKat 1y ago> They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app Oh, they didn’t want to deal with the “token” bullshit they added to the VMware download site that the updates come from. That’s why. https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/03/24/download-changes-vmware-software-binaries/ https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/03/24/downloa...
- whatever1 1y agoYou can either buy our product voluntarily or we can make you pay for it anyway.
- IshKebab 1y agoKind of funny to see businesses screwed over by "lifetime" deals.
- drewg123 1y agoIn a past life in the mid/late 2000s, I did 10GbE NIC drivers for a small IHV. VMWare was by far the most awful vendor to deal with. They had mandatory certification testing which was required to distribute the driver. Their tests were so much worse than MS WHQL. There was invariably something broken in their tests that we had to work around. Each time this happened, we had to go through their support (And pay for the privilege) to tell them their tests were broken and to give them patches to fix it. This would happen pretty much every driver release, and we would end up dealing with a different person each time. My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
- ayaros 1y agoVMware Fusion's graphics drivers suck harder than a Dyson. For the love of god, I just want to play some games without rebooting to a native Windows environment. I'm not even asking to run, say, Crysis, or something... I guess my days are numbered as an x64 Mac user but let me at least go out with some dignity.
- beaviskhan 1y agoWe ran 100% of our workloads on VMWare this time last year. We'll be at 0% this time next year. We were heading that direction over the long term anyway, but the Broadcom shenanigans made us double down on that effort. They may actually be more unpleasant to deal with than Oracle, which is something I would have thought to be impossible.
- lokar 1y agoRemember: Broadcoms’ (the non-chip part of it) business model is to buy tech companies in long term decline (VMware: check) that have a significant locked in customer base (VMware: check), slash development and support while raising prices. They extract as much cash out of the decaying corpse as they can, and then discard it. They were actually fairly open about this to investors when they bought VMware .