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VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual licenses

news.vmware.com

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

#101

Post by Zuiii »

The whole point behind VMware products was that they offered full control to orgs that want it. That's what made some large orgs choose them over aws or google cloud even when the later are more cost effective. It's fascinating to see VMware (Broadcom?) fumble their only real uvp like this.

On the plus side, there is now a nice big clearing for new competitors to pop up. I hope open source uses this chance to catch up and offer something good to compete with nsx-t Datacenter or, at the very least, the SDN component of it. We have decent open source solutions for vms but no real open source solutions for software-defined networking or software-defined data centers. At least not any that I know of.

Either way, I think this is very good news overall. VMware was far too strong.

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

#102

Post by chii »

sangnoir wrote: post #94
mynameisvlad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the two both use subscriptions doesn’t mean their business models are in any way similar. JetBrains, for instance, also does subscriptions. They are generally lauded as doing them right. I would never compare JB to Amazon or VMWare just because they both do subscriptions.

To be fair, JetBrains did attempt to get rid of perpetual licenses too at one point, the plan they backed away from - after massive blowback - was to brick customers' IDEs as soon subscriptions lapsed.

And the reason the backlash worked is because there are at least viable alternatives to intellij (at worst you go back to eclipse, or switch to vscode or any number of other lesser known IDEs).

Therefore jetbrain cannot afford to alienate their customer base. Unlike vmware or adobe.

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

#103

Post by fuzzylightbulb »

fredski42 wrote: post #11
whalesalad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free esxi is pretty crippled at this point, esp for high core counts. Proxmox is the way to go!

What about Nutanix?

Acropolis is free but severely limits your choices when it comes to hardware and expansion down the line. I always felt like you were putting yourself over a barrel to consolidate both hypervisor and physical infrastructure to a single vendor.

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

#104

Post by FireBeyond »

SteveNuts wrote: post #17
fredski42 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Nutanix?

Nutanix has a Community Edition which works well, but has some fairly strict requirements due to the overhead of their controller VMs and such https://www.nutanix.com/products/community-edition

I know(? it's been a while) that Nutanix focuses on HCI, so maybe less of an issue, but for me, even at home, all my storage backing is iSCSI over 10G. Nutanix CE purposefully doesn't support 10gbps NICs.

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

#105

Post by system2 »

Question: What is the best alternative for VMWare Vsphere?

I am so sick of this subscription game. They will lose me as a customer and anyone who will ask my suggestion in the future for virtualization. Their license upgrade model was already frustrating and now there is not even a year break from the license hell. At least I could get the license and upgrade the hosts for a few years before upgrading to the next version (ie: Vsphere 6 to 7 to 8).

It will be a pain to migrate and restructure but I won't accept subscriptions as the core of my business solution. Broadcom go to hell.

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

#106

Post by system2 »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #70
el-dude-arino wrote: post #62

We're entering a post-growth economy in the near future, so the only way for companies to have reliable revenue streams is to create subscription services. Get ready because y'all are about to be rundled to death.

Yeah, just pirate and crack everything at some point.

Good luck doing it in a corporate environment. One visit from BSA and you will get wrecked. IT departments will take the major blow from this because we are the ones sitting down with CEOs and trying to explain the costs. Now a major cost increase about a subject they can't even comprehend.

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

#107

Post by freeopinion »

KaiserPro wrote: post #53
thedougd wrote: 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…

unless something has changed recently, openstack is a horror to setup and administer. the point of vmware is that is fairly trivial to go from a single server with some VMs, to a massive cluster with live zero-downtime migrations. (and have funky storage, get working snapshots and backups.) Sure openstack can do that. but its non trivial to setup.

I see companies hire a team of experts who plan and architect for six months to a year before they are ready to deploy a new VMWare cluster. I've seen a two or three rack cluster cost a million dollars before the architecture team requisitioned a single piece of hardware or software.

I've seen a very small outfit spend six months with all hired consultants to set up a 3-server VMWare cluster.

VMWare doesn't seem that trivial.

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

#108

Post by sebazzz »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #77
fuzzylightbulb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is ending mainstream support of Hyper-V Server 2019 on January 9, 2024 and extended support will end on January 9, 2029. Hyper-V Server 2019 will be the last version of this product and Microsoft is encouraging customers to transition to Azure Stack HCI.

Hyper-V as a role you can install on Windows Server is not being discontinued. They're discontinuing the no cost SKU but the feature isn't going away.

Exactly, but the Windows license you need for a proper Hyper-V server is quite high

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

#110

Post by tlamponi »

phpisthebest wrote: post #89
csydas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past clients I've had are considering proxmox and other virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast answer for this new change in the virtualization realm. Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the change except the price, and unless other platforms include all the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sur…

We would have to see a 2x minimum YoY cost increase just to justify a poliot program to consider moving to something else Keep in mind it is more than just shifting all of the VM workloads to a new platform something not easy in the first place But you also have to factor admin training, backup and recovery systems, monitoriting systems, automation tooling, etc. We have been using vmware since version 3 or 4, our ent…

> Something like ProxMox that has no third party support, no veeam support, limited automation tooling, limited support for commerical monitoring (like PRTG) etc etc is probally a non-starter unless those things support it.

Proxmox VE has an extensive REST API with API tokens and an access control system to allow for safe automation. There are also Terraform providers and Ansible modules for those that do not want to use the API directly, or use those automation tools already.

There's also Proxmox Backup Server that can handle guest-level backups as good as Veeam can, but yes, the agents and application level backups is still not there, but most of those are unrelated to the outer hypervisor, so one can still use their preferred backup solution for those parts just fine.

Central monitoring is possible through the external metric server integration.

Further third-party integration is a natural chicken-and-egg issue. For a lot of third party integrations you might just need to ask the vendor of said third party if they can support Proxmox VE, as long as they receive no inquiries as admins won't even ask if it would be possible, they have no incentive to add support for anything.

But it's getting better, and more eggs are hatching.

> It would cost us far far far far more than 3x licensing increases to git rid vmware. Broadcom knows this.

The migrations I saw in our enterprise support had way lower cost. IMO 3x the cost would need some heavily specialized workload (which IME fewer admins actually really have than they might think) and/or admins that are just heavily against any change (as yes, they must relearn how to do some things, there are training courses for a few thousand bucks that cover the whole stack though) or having an anti-FOSS/Linux'ish mindset. I.e., come to us with so many prejudices that it's hard to make them realize that, while there are surely things that can improve, that just the same on the other side of the "pasture", but overall the grass is quite green enough for most use cases already.

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