Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#231

Post by whatever1 » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #186

fragmede wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How 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.

5000 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 t…

See these numbers I buy. 40k smells over engineering to me (or more likely a 3P salesman made a huge bonus after selling the architecture to tesco)

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#232

Post by digitalsin » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:27 PM UTC

beniihana wrote: post #76

digitalsin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

How 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.

I 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.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#233

Post by devchix » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

What 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.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#234

Post by fsuts » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:57 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #211

fsuts wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need permission of the court(I.e. Judge ) as per CPR Phoning will get you the national Contact centre, emails may or not any not be replied to… court registry needs an appointment… It’s all very nuanced. Until you know how it all works, you don’t know

There's a hell of a difference between "court filings are secrete and the media is censored to not talk about that" and "there's a process, but I personally don't know how to follow it"

The takeaway is the appearance of justice has been carefully maintained over decades.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#235

Post by roryirvine » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

red-iron-pine wrote: post #224

roryirvine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates. Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up. T…

used to work at a company that was tied to literally all of those. life was miserable. then oracle cut costs on next gen exo-data stuff and agreed to waive some license costs this time and bam just doubled down on them again. ugh.

I did a gig at a Fortune 500 that had actually succeeded in entirely eliminating Oracle. Life was still miserable.

They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.

Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.

There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#236

Post by 8ytecoder » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

swarnie wrote: post #167

8ytecoder wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco sells really good hotdogs with a large coke for $1.50.

Mechanically reclaimed meat and a half gallon of high fructose corn water isn't much of a comparison.

I honestly can’t understand why not wasting meat is such a bad thing?

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#237

Post by stackskipton » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #227

stackskipton wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run everything on VM just for flexibility. Want to stand up a new machine for testing? Boom, run the script, new Ubuntu server. We need to decommission a machine. Shutdown all the guests, move them over to new machine and start them. Sure, most of what we do is very cattle and we could run on bare hardware but why not take advantage of easy to add flexibility.

I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state). Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.

sigh Not everything in the world is containers. Applications running outside of container still exist in many companies for various reasons including political ones.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#238

Post by swarnie » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

8ytecoder wrote: post #236

swarnie wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanically reclaimed meat and a half gallon of high fructose corn water isn't much of a comparison.

I honestly can’t understand why not wasting meat is such a bad thing?

Sure from an efficiency point of view its fantastic, personally i like some texture from my meal deal.

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#239

Post by twizod » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

digitalsin wrote: post #10

nubinetwork wrote: post #2

> 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?

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

We 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!

Re: Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

#240

Post by twizod » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #19

proxysna wrote: post #14

Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.

I 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 a…

I think your assessment is pie in the sky. I am moving hundreds of VM's per day and the amount of anchors attached to the source VM's is ridiculous. LB's that are mapped via VMware object, VLAN's extended for the migration but not working, SR-IOV enabled, etc etc....you may have the most perfect setup here but in real life I've never seen it that simple so I truly doubt what you're saying.