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Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct
- nubinetwork 5mo ago> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses. What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
- Fordec 5mo agoI've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.
- d3Xt3r 5mo agoHPE's VMWare alternative is Morpheus, and it supports both Veeam and Zerto. So it's probably not them.
- cloudie78 5mo agoOpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu. OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare. Used to do those migration in a previous life.
- Flere-Imsaho 5mo agoProbably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nick__m 5mo agoProxmox for 40k vm would be surprising also veeam support Proxmox.
- proxysna 5mo agoI'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.
- nick__m 5mo agoBefore my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoWould you do it again (ProxMox)?
- nick__m 5mo agoThe FC multipathing was a learning experience and the manual workload placement requires good metrics on your workloads. The built-in ceph is decently configured and more performant than FC if you have 100GBS mellanox NICs and adequate quantity of ram. Veeam integration is serviceable but it's not as mature and polished as the integration available on vmware. Having tried azure local before (it seems magical but the more you use it the worst it gets, update failed for no apparent reason on only some supposedlyidentical nodes, the sdn was atrocious to deploy and was manageable from wac only), I would recommend proxmox over it anyday. If you don't have linux expertise on hand and have traditional FC based storage, I would recommend something else, probably nutanix if your budget is big enough.
- digitalsin 5mo agoNutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.
- beniihana 5mo agoHow has pricing been? I’ve heard their renewals can get expensive. Have lots of customer who run it and would echo your same positive review.
- digitalsin 5mo agoI don't love their pricing but it's not brutal like others I've seen. We run 3 clusters - one of which is an old legacy cluster that was our original and despite Nutanix not supporting it officially (meaning we don't pay for support on it), their support has still been helpful with it and like the other 2 clusters, uptime/stability has been rock solid. Prism Central has definitely gotten better with the UI since the earlier days. I still prefer Prism Element in some cases, but overall it all works pretty well. We use HYCU for backups and while I was really skeptical about it in the beginning, it is absolutely solid in a Nutanix environment. Overall we are happy with Nutanix.
- twizod 5mo agoWe have migrated from VMware to Nutanix, well, over half way there from a 8,000 VM pool. Nutanix has been a royal pain. LCM updates fubar'ing, Firmware upgrades screwing up UUID numbers of disks so CVM's won't boot, VM's not handling vlan nic and vxlan nic together, our SAN's just now being supported, the amount of bug fixes is weekly and impossible to keep up with, a team's ddos'ing of us with their app caused distributed storage to reboot every VM in the cluster, etc etc etc......I hate Broadcom but Nutanix has been painful!
- naturalmovement 5mo agoI'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.
- nikanj 5mo agoCurrently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026. Interesting times.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoRunning machines under basic Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machines). Veeam have started supporting it, but only on RedHat.
- xvxvx 5mo agoBefore AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming. If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo agoVMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.
- mjr00 5mo ago... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?
- sokoloff 5mo agoIf Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants. Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
- fsuts 5mo ago[flagged]
- vr46 5mo ago[dead]
- throwaway85825 5mo ago>filings are private That's horrific
- fsuts 5mo agoIf uk media were not silenced then yes, everyone would be horrified at what goes on.
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoIt would be if it were true.
- fsuts 5mo agoIt is Im confused as to why you think you know better
- malfist 5mo agoWhat are you talking about? Judicial filings in the UK are not generally confidential and when they are it is usually only about specific documents.
- fsuts 5mo ago
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- GlacierFox 5mo agoWhy would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?
- simonjgreen 5mo agoEvidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible
- laserDinosaur 5mo agoFrom the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank" >"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI" Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
- LastTrain 5mo agoBroadcom has paying customers - they sell chips to companies that have no paying customers.
- fsuts 5mo agoVMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?
- windexh8er 5mo agoApparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s
- lmm 5mo agoHonestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.
- quickthrowman 5mo agoBroadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product. Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
- proxysna 5mo agoGreat time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.
- rwmj 5mo agoI work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move. It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization. There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time). [I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.] Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/ https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
- stackskipton 5mo ago>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me. I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time. Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-broadcom-customers-sign-for-vmware-private-cloud/1104430?td=rt-3a https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.
- nmstoker 5mo agoI wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!
- tonyedgecombe 5mo agoNot just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.
- dzonga 5mo agothis is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot. migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand. if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
- lijok 5mo agoWhat’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?
- ickyforce 5mo agoMostly 30 years of people writing code.
- bijowo1676 5mo agothere is no risk since spring boot is open source. any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something
- dzonga 5mo agosupport contracts ? if your spring-boot version is 2 releases behind etc. You use extensions that are [VMWare Tanzu Spring Enterprise Extensions]
- bijowo1676 5mo agoClaude Code is your best support contract
- fsuts 5mo ago”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom” For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores. (2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
- lmm 5mo agoWalmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.
- rwmj 5mo agoThe fifth largest (Morrisons) was also sold to PE with predictable results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrisons#CD&R_takeover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrisons#CD&R_takeover
- stuaxo 5mo agoWe need a private equity tracker so we can get alerts on these and track the debt loading and looting.
- eterm 5mo agoIn really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves. So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies. By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired! There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.
- rwmj 5mo agoIt should simply be illegal.
- Nikhil37475 5mo agoextremely effective
- Nikhil37475 5mo agoeffective
- chatmasta 5mo agoIf anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it. At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19. [0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg
- driverdan 5mo agoAs someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?
- mjfisher 5mo agoI can't speak to this particular case, but most of the delay is likely to be organisational rather than technical at this kind of scale. Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to: * Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor * Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime * Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team * Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime * Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire * Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above
- to11mtm 5mo agoDon't forget any relevant training for employees (e.x. for things like 'how to connect to a virtual desktop'). That can add up in some cases.
- rwmj 5mo agoI work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months. In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.) Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent. Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.
- usernametaken29 5mo agoAt that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.
- majewsky 5mo agoGo and try to create 40000 VMs on Hetzner. The cloud may look infinitely big, until it suddenly isn't.
- elevation 5mo agoMy hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to: > procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
- 9x39 5mo ago>VMWare is still basically the only option The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space. I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)
- senshan 5mo agoInteresting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.
- 9x39 5mo agoThe ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency. I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.
- nunez 5mo agoThere was no second product. vSphere was in a league of its own.
- eqvinox 5mo ago[dead]
- Alien1Being 5mo agoSpoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware. He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
- lokar 5mo agoI’m sure they don’t care. They were pretty up front when they bought VMware what the play was
- kbar13 5mo agoi just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart
- firesteelrain 5mo agoI don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.
- burnte 5mo agoHire me, I'll be more than happy to show you! :D I'm an expert at it!
- firesteelrain 5mo agoHa I have done migrations recently from vSphere to vSphere using vMotion and it was easy. But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)
- burnte 5mo ago> But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place Like I said, I specialize in that. My career has been doing hard infra stuff other people won't or can't.
- rwmj 5mo agoWe usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.
- toast0 5mo agoI don't work at this level, but there's lots of things you can do. a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once. b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration. c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration. d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion. e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases. There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work. Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.
- puskavi 5mo agoImagine paying for virtualization software when open source options are almost industry standard
- bdavisx 5mo agoThey also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts. They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.
- sqircles 5mo agoI worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period. Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one. I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
- ajsnigrutin 5mo agoIt's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo agoThere is also risk introduced by change. Risk is very scary when you are in management.
- alexjurkiewicz 5mo agoIt might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.
- joelthelion 5mo agoThis in turn introduces a lot of economic inefficiency, for no good reason. I think regulation would be useful here.
- mbac32768 5mo agoIt's incredible how hard it is for firms to migrate away from platforms. Clearly you could just give something away for nearly free for 20 years and then jack the price up and make bajillions. Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.
- lokar 5mo agoI’m surprised by the comments here. The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it. They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
- SlightlyLeftPad 5mo agoIt’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.
- lokar 5mo agoKKR bought Avago, which bought Broadcom and took the name. They are a PE firm
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 5mo agoI think KKR sold Avago/Broadcom years ago but the same CEO and private equity mindset is still there.
- asdff 5mo agoWikipedia's ownership section on broadcom is stale 2024 data but back then at least 10 investment firms and banks owned about 40% of it.
- ddeck 5mo agoBroadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly). You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%. None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted. Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVGO/holders/?p=AVGO https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVGO/holders/?p=AVGO
- whatever1 5mo agoWhy a retailer needs 40k servers? What are they serving? To whom? What is wrong with system designers these days? Are they designing or just selling?
- fragmede 5mo agoHow do you imagine cash registers work these days? With 5,000 stores worldwide, 40k servers is 8 computers per store, which doesn't seem excessive to me.
- whatever1 5mo agoI imagine that cash registers have the cpu power of at least a cellphone and that they can store transactions over internet in the central company database.
- tancop 5mo agoat Tesco scale you really dont want a central database even if its big and high availability. if one store loses connection because of isp issues it would shut down everything and make it impossible to serve customers in that location. a global outage would cost billions. latency is also a big deal when you got a crowd lining up in front of every checkout lane and the self serve machines, at that point it can even turn into a safety/liability issue. and dont forget that different countries have different rules about customer private data and payment information. if you send eu customer info into the uk for processing you might be breaking privacy laws. some places do automatic tax reporting where you need to send info to a country specific tax office api, get back a code and print it on the receipt. cash registers dont work alone. its connected with inventory management, employee perf monitoring, payment processing and other things that make more sense as a store local service sending regular reports to corporate instead of waiting for round trips on every operation.
- mrweasel 5mo ago5000 stores, let's say 10 checkout lines per store, just to overprovision, so at worst 50000 simultaneous transactions going on, but probably way less. You can do that with a single server, but you'd want some redundancy and spare capacity. I worked with a Danish retailer with +3000 store in ~50 countries, and even adding their webshop on top and they were closer to 200 (maybe 300) servers (most VMs). Then you need the ActiveDirectory, office IT, all that stuff, with redundancy and it adds up quickly... but not to 40K. What I will say that people forget is that production might be 8 beefy VMs, you still need to replicate that to a number of test systems, staging environments and so on. So a 8 node production cluster because maybe 24 servers when accounting those other environments.
- Alien1Being 5mo agoBroadcom shares are performing spectacularly well. With the new $35 billion dollar AI / XPU deal, Broadcom is looking to ditch the legacy customers and move to the new shiny AI billions.
- figmert 5mo agoWhen I was working at Tesco some 7 years ago, the goal was to move to AWS. Surprised they're still not even close. Good on them for sticking it to Broadcom.
- jocelyner 5mo ago[dead]
- zombot 5mo agoGood. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.
- sscaryterry 5mo ago40k server workloads… what a good, objective, quantifiable unit of measure. I’m sure the author’s intent was to make it sound like 40k servers or virtual machines. Either way, those numbers would be insane. Sensationalist clickbait headline. Could very well just have been that last stubborn server they just never got round to!
- devchix 5mo agoWhat other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.