Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO
Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO
Civo's Mark Boost says price hikes appear designed to retain whales while tossing back small fry
Things haven't gone well for Broadcom since it acquired VMware, and much of what has happened has confirmed fears that Virtzilla customers expressed well before the deal closed.
Oh no! I guess.
Broadcom is out to juice a product for its value before throwing it in the bin. Broadcom knows exactly what it’s doing, and that is preying on customers and exploiting engineers.
I'm not even sure they're going to bin it. Maybe shed the last-profitable customers to maximize profit from the large consumers. At least for a few years.
Call me cynical, but to me it's about pushing consumers (SMB) to cloud providers instead of virtualizing on-prem with VMware. Broadcom can still sell VMware and support to larger vendors, or to SMB's for a heftier profit margin.
I can only hope many SMB's have support vendors who see the value in shifting to TrueNAS, Proxmox, etc (there are vendors who provide support contracts for those Open-source packages).
This sounds like it’s exactly what Broadcom intended. They are going to charge as much as they can and companies that depend on it will have to pay until they can move away and that may take years. Broadcom didn’t dig a hole. They triggered a trap on their customers.
Exactly.
Many SMB's lack the in-house expertise to switch to something like Proxmox, and even then the support contract cost for things like Proxmox or TRUENAS, etc, isn't much less than what VMware intends to charge.
Management in such businesses have a hard time comprehending the value in paying for a transition when the annual support costs at the moment don't seem significantly lower (depending on number of processors, of course). There's still the migration cost, and the risk of migrating.
SMB tends to outsource their system management a great deal - I can only hope these vendors see the value in migrating away from VMware.
Everyone I talked to knew that this was what was going to happen when Broadcom bought VMware. I work in a relatively agile industry so everyone starting moving away from VMware as soon as the sale was announced. But I know a lot industries will be stuck for awhile.
What? Have you looked at the prices? Proxmox and TrueNAS have ridiculously low prices compared to VMware support. If we're talking about Nutanix and stuff, sure - they aren't cheaper than VMware. But Proxmox and TrueNAS are dirt cheap in comparison - not only because the documentation is pretty damn good, your standard, run of the mill Linux admin can do both, while Nutanix and the likes is an entirely different animal.
I've spent the last 15 years working with VMware exclusively. A little nervous about all of this
When Broadcom announced the purchase a year or so ago, I abandoned all further VMWare certs, and put the time into getting my head around the alternatives.
I still have to use VMWare for 90% of my job, but I'm absolutely treating it like a locked-in platform, and assuming that anything I learn to do in VMWare, I need to understand the underlying concepts, not just their interpretation, and how I can do similar things on other platforms.I took a good look at Apache CloudStack. I of course have been migrating stuff to k8s and working with cloud native stuff that can be hypervisor independent or bare metal even.
I'm this close to an NSX-T cert and that will be the last one. That will be in high demand for quite some time I'd expect.
Is there not an alternative to what you use?
Same. Since the aquisition, I've moved all my home infrastructure off vmware to debian/docker and currently trying to get in front of our next renewal at work. I've been ready to pivot if necessary but no one seems to believe me that we need to be ready for our pending licensing converation..
I was too, but as soon as I heard about the acquisition I started diversifying my non production kit for testing. I've now got Proxmox installed on an HPE DL380G10 with GPU pass thru, same on an HP Z440, and XenServer 8 installed on a pair of DL380G9 with MSA2040 backing storage.
At home I've got both truenas scale and truenas core set up each on a z230.
No matter what happens with the IT department at my office, I'm ready to either meet the new standards here, or go find work elsewhere.
Well if the CEO of clouds says it, it must be true!
Broadcom has a history of acquiring IP and not having the first clue what to do with it.
Look at CA Tech... they had partnered with CNN to manage election data in 2016... bought by Broadcom in 2018... And now?