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“We want to focus on keeping our large customers”
Loses large customers
Surprised pikachu face
It’s entirely possible that 24,000 VM’s didn’t count as “large” by VMWare standards.
We want to focus on
keepingmilking our large customers until they can find an alternative to us
Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND research, told The Register that VMware by Broadcom is “laser focused on high-revenue, high-margin business” and has priced its wares “just below the pain threshold for customers they care about.”
Interesting way to word “we charged as much as we could possibly get away with”
That analyst doesn’t work for Broadcom; it’s a third party. It could say, “they charged as much as they could possibly get away with” but I think “prices just below the pain threshold” is stronger language in a business setting.
Nearly the strongest possible language I can imagine being used.
To be fair, this is what every single company is doing right now. Stallman tried to warn you!
Good.
My VPS provider also migrated away from VMWare - got an email saying VMs would be down temporarily during the move, and the main website no longer contains any references to the virtualization tech. I miss my /64 IPV6 😭 but i’ll happily give that up if it means Broadcom’s dumpster fire comes crashing down as big customers pull the plug and migrate
Would guess that they probably migrated to proxmox
I know several large companies looking to Microsoft, Xen, and Proxmox. Though the smart ones are more interested in the open source solutions to avoid future rug-pulls.
So is Xen.
I thought Xen and OpenVZ etc. became obsolete with KVM? But it’s probably for the best that Xen is still used.
Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, KVM is a type 2 hypervisor
It runs on the bare metal itself as dom0
Doh I meant LXC 🤦 instead of KVM.
Yes…? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren’t looking that way.
Xen looks great for VPS stuff, and seemed to have good support for vGPUs. That’s what I’d choose as a provider. I wish I used it at home but I ended up going with good ol’ Linux KVM for USB and PCI support.
Nutanix is another one.
Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions
Phase 1: Fuck around
Phase 2: Find out
Phase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will
Phase 4: Fucking do it again
“We just love our customers so much, it makes us crazy sometimes…”
“I don’t want to lose you but the shareholders make me do it.”
It will be probably more. I talked with sysadmin from some smaller provider in my country few months ago. And he told me that the migration will take them for most systems about 2 years (depreciation of hardware) and for some machines about 5 years.
So lot of customers are in process of replacing it but it will take multiple years.
Many SMBs will walk away at next server refresh.
VMware is walking dead.
We’re currently testing Nutanix and Proxmox for smaller clients.
Proxmox support is similar (~65%) in cost to VMware licensing, but it’s not likely to pull this sudden increase BS. Plus it’s capabilities are significant for SMB.
I wouldn’t be afraid to use Proxmox for small and middle size business. It’s solid and based on solid, opensource tech. As long as people make sure they get paid, I’m sure they’ll get even better.
Good on you for making sure your clients pay for support, that’s how opensource thrives.
Paid support is a requirement for business. Tryinto avoid that is Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
When shit goes tits-up, you really need the support resources right now.
Win-win in my book.
That’s the point. Broadcom focuses on only the top consumers and desire everyone else to go away. They then focus only on what those top consumers want and their support staff can be cut down considerably.
It’s an interesting tactic that they have mastered.
Eventually even those customers will look at alternatives too if there’s only like 50 companies worldwide using it.
Yeah, this is one scenario where the principles in F2P games like MOBAs applies to the business world. Focusing only on the top X companies and losing that market share has a cascading effect where it’s harder to find competent administrators, it’s harder for those administrators to find support online (which then means they have to call for the support they pay for - which while good in the short term for VMWare, is frustrating for the customer, and means that the extra money they’re charging has to partially be used to cover techs to provide said report). The little fish in a market like this help to provide what is essentially free troubleshooting online via stack overflow etc. And giving that market share to competitors gives them the cash flow and experience to build a support system online and improve their product, and then win over the big fish.
Bingo.
Where does the next gen of admins come from, if they’re been using Proxmox, etc, to learn on?
All my peers started with VMware years ago because they could get ESXi for free and run it on test boxes, then have the experience to deploy in client sites.
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Except this is a top customer with tens of thousands of VM’s, walking away.
SMBs aren’t running 10k vms.
It sounds like every large sas company tbh.
You’re not wrong!
I think Broadcom overplayed it on this one, as this example shows.
Or, they’re playing a game we can’t figure out. A 20,000 VM client is in the “large customers we want to keep” category.
I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.
But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.
yep, my employer is one of them. Only around 200 VMs but my former employer (an MSP with several hundred customers, among them the administration of the city I live in, all schools, all kindergartens and the church) was also in the process of migrating when I switched.
My friend who works at an MSP said they’re migrating most of their customers to HyperV, but these are mostly extremely small companies with a dozen or so employees and only a handful of services
In my workplace we worked tirelessly to get rid of all VMware VMs as fast as possible when new pricing became clear. Thousands migrated. What a huge fuckup by broadcom.
I’m convinced VMware started downhill when they dropped the hard windows client for the web based admin panel.
They claimed it was for multi os compatibility… But they wrote the thing using ActiveX. For the youngsters, ActiveX shit was Internet Explorer and M.S. only. So the idiots wrote a UI that still only worked in Windows, and was now 5 times slower than the thick client.
BTW, I run proxmox clusters in my garage. Its awesome
I don’t understand diddly about the specifics of this article (I’m a member of the normie minority on this site who is neither working in IT, nor interested in the field), but I gotta say, I loved how it was structured and written. In a sea of AI generated crap, or simply parroting talking heads and calling it news, I found the way they laid out the article in two parts ("this is what happened, followed by “this is our subjective opinion on those events based on the wider context”) to be very refreshing.
Kudos for immersing yourself in it!
Fuck Broadcom. I liked VMware and their products and actually paid for them as a consumer. Broadcom is a ham-fisted money grabber and cares little about anything else. This will not end well for any businesses they serve to. Why? Maya Angelou: ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’ They’re focused on milking the cow dry, not spending money on anything (despite their R&D claims). They have a history and have straight up said who they are before, and said who they’re planning to continue to be. Flee while you can.
We are also in the process of looking of ways out of VMware. Have also cancelled projects investing further into the stack. (NSX)
It sucks in a way, I’d rather work on other things than system migrations but has to be done.
We have about 10.000 VMs for reference
What solution are you looking towards? I work in a massive organization with 20,000+ VMs and we’ve been having weekly virtual working groups across the country (our overseas depts have been doing their own) to try and discuss finding other solutions. We haven’t been very successful, as the biggest pitfall we’ve seen is no one offers lifetime licenses so if we don’t renew a yearly maintenance our VMs won’t stop functioning properly. That’s one of the main reasons we’re looking to off board from VMware.
I have been using Proxmox with a couple thousand VM’s and have been very happy with it.
Being able to properly evaluate the market is a whole job, and they failed at it. No company deserves to unconditionally exist, let alone forever
We were very *very *close to replacing our ~700 office Cisco SD-Wan environment with VeloCloud, which is owned by VMware. The Broadcom merger put the brakes on the project completely, they missed out on a few million dollars on that effort alone. The Velo guys were totally in the dark on what was coming down the pipe for them, Broadcom forced them to change hardware vendors on day one, for example.
Fucking good. They should go down in flames for what Broadcom is doing to VMware. Our company switched off it too. Not as large but we have a couple thousand servers and they are all now slowly moving to hyper v
Why do people still use VMware? It’s not 2012 anymore.
Because up until Broadcom bought them, it was a good product with a ton of useful features, endless supported integrations with 3rd party software and hardware, relatively easy to learn/use, with good support, all at reasonable and flexible price points depending on your needs.
Of course Broadcom has now thrown all of that into the toilet…
Because if you throw enough money at them, they’ll trip over themselves trying to fix your production critical issue in 4 hours or less, and that’s valuable to business because they get to go “it’s not our fault the site was down and we lost $2 million, it’s our vendor’s support team that was inadequate”
Yeah, at a certain scale you’re not paying for the technology… you’re paying for a scapegoat.
