9 ms·

The 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

The 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 ago
So 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    After 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    For 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 ago
      Talos 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 ago
    Word for word my experience with operating k8s.
    - stego-tech 1y ago
      To 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 ago
        What 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 ago
  Pretty sure in Tesco's case switching to openstack is a decade long project.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I 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 ago
      I 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 ago
that 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 ago
This. 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 ago
  At 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 ago
    Really? 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        I... I like Teams...
        1y ago
magicalhippo 1y ago
Isn'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 ago
  Mostly 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 ago
Ops 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 ago
    sigh 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 ago
      In 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 ago
        I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
The bigger issue is the lawyers get the money so go back to school as a lawyer and choose better parents.
eqvinox 1y ago
As 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 ago
  Yes. 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 ago
    I’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 ago
      It 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 ago
        Why does any of this use VMs? Not familiar with the space at all
        jabl 1y ago
        Uh? 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 ago
There 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 ago
I 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

spwa4 1y ago

So 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 ago
It 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 ago
  After 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 ago
My 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 ago
  For 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 ago
    Talos 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 ago
  Word for word my experience with operating k8s.
  - stego-tech 1y ago
    To 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 ago
      What 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 ago
Pretty sure in Tesco's case switching to openstack is a decade long project.
- bluGill 1y ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago

that 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 ago

This. 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 ago
At 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 ago
  Really? 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I... I like Teams...
      - 1y ago

magicalhippo 1y ago

Isn'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 ago
Mostly 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 ago

Ops 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 ago
  sigh 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 ago
    In 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 ago
      I 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 ago
The 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 ago

The bigger issue is the lawyers get the money so go back to school as a lawyer and choose better parents.

eqvinox 1y ago

As 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 ago
Yes. 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 ago
  I’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 ago
    It 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 ago
      Why does any of this use VMs? Not familiar with the space at all
      - jabl 1y ago
        Uh? 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 ago

There 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 ago

I 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