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VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

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Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#23
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking. The challenge is that companies architect their…

There is also Rancher Harvester ( https://harvesterhci.io/ ) which I think is a breadth of fresh air compared to VMware and OpenStack and then there is the Windows Server based Azure Stack HCI, too. In my experience, VMware‘s biggest moat is the vast support from software vendors. It basically is the default supported platform for almost every business application. This comes with well known best practices, many expe…

Harvester has been great for me, except when I wanted to start using a real SAN with it. It's KubeVirt under the hood if I recall correctly, which is also a great project to check out.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#24
You know, I always used to think that e.g. Amazon talking about “customer obsession” was stupid. Of course a business is focused on its customers? That’s where the money comes from?

Then I got to see the conversation about subscriptions at VMware. The storyline was always “wouldn’t it be great for us if we switched to subscriptions? Look how good all the math gets!” The customer barely appeared as a background character.

Especially entertaining when it came to things like PWS. After the acquisition VMware shut it down — because it didn’t have any real customers — and then in the push to subscriptions the new folks in charge of TAS were like “Great idea everyone! What if we provided Cloud Foundry… as a Service!” The engineers who had been around long enough to see the whole cycle tried to explain but I don’t think it got through.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#25

I'm used to corporate marketing speak, but damn this is impresively corporate orwellian. This is real copy/paste from TFA, not some parody that I wrote. > Q: Why is this good for partners? > A: The industry has already widely embraced subscription and SaaS, and many partners in our ecosystem have already developed success practices in this area. Subscription and SaaS models provide an opportunity for partners to enga…

I mean it does look like a shifter of paradigms that businesses are demanding. What's not to like here.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#26

[flagged]

This isn't enshittification. This is a sustainable business bought by a greedy business to then squeeze dry their customers.

I think we could call this e13n in the sense that a current product offering, with some degree of stickiness, is being made worse for the benefit of the seller.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#27
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter. It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined networking. The challenge is that companies architect their…

There is also Rancher Harvester ( https://harvesterhci.io/ ) which I think is a breadth of fresh air compared to VMware and OpenStack and then there is the Windows Server based Azure Stack HCI, too. In my experience, VMware‘s biggest moat is the vast support from software vendors. It basically is the default supported platform for almost every business application. This comes with well known best practices, many expe…

Or go vendor independent with pacemaker + drbd + libvirt. For that stack you can get support from SUSE, Redhat and Linbit and maybe even Ubuntu. Or just go with Debian if you don't need support.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#28

My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without requiring significant staff increases?

Has OpenStack as an organization solved the problem where there’s not really such a thing as OpenStack? In terms of e.g. what APIs will be available and so on?

That’s basically what stopped it back in ‘14 or so. It was too hard to provide software that could run on an OpenStack because it was such a choose-your-own-adventure.

Re: VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

#30
post #3

> VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments. Yea, a one-time cost wasn't predictable enough, instead a subscription number that will be changed each year on a whim is predictable. Got it.

Doublespeak at its finest - unless one is to interpret "predictable investments" as investments by Broadcom, which will indeed become easier once all customers are turned into digital serfs-- sorry, subscribers.
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