It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer • Hacker News Board

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#111

Post by alephnerd » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

JeremyNT wrote: post #96

alephnerd wrote: post #2

> he found the IT department using two hypervisors: Nutanix AHV, and ... VMware. The CTO felt two hypervisors was one too many and considered a consolidation Good move, and plenty more like this will happen. But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. And companies like Broadcom are fine with that because market segmentation is a thing. (A…

> But like I've said before, the winners will be Nutanix, Citrix, and other existing enterprise infra vendors - not Proxmox. It can be all of the above though. I work in higher education and Proxmox is the only option we are seriously considering right now.

Fair point. I was thinking solely from a Upper Market perspective.

Higher Ed is in a weird place where budgets are small but the personnel are fairly adept, so depending on the size you guys could actually be a good fit for deploying and managing a FOSS offering like Proxmox.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#112

Post by alephnerd » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

markus_zhang wrote: post #87

alephnerd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consolidation is a good move, because it minimizes your overhead from a team management and procurement management basis. Infra is a cost center at the end of the day. > I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future Can you justify spending 2x your hypervisor budget when that same pot of money could be used to hire more e…

However, would it be sensible to keep a small team on a different tech (in this case move everything to N but keep a small V team) so that when shit happens in the other side you have an immediate team to migrate everything to this side? (I'm thinking about MSFT who maintained a small Windows team when the majority effort went to OS/2 back in the 80s)

The MSFT case was R&D spend, but Infra falls under the Finance&IT bucket, where the available capital is much less.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#113

Post by grubbs » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #31

elygre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone looking at nutanix: what are the issues?

They still force you into a specific hardware organisation (hyperconverged, disks are on the compute nodes and storage is distributed) which doesn't make sense for everyone's workloads. Also, at least a few years ago(hope it's not still the case), a lot of their services were a bunch of open source poorly stitched together with bash, and their poor abstraction over it was leaking heavily. Their APIs were also very po…

I believe it's all Supermicro hardware. We looked into it as well (higher ed) and it was just way too expensive for their NX servers with Intel Silver CPUs.

I've heard stories that it's usually low cost to enter, but when you want more CPU/storage it's ungodly expensive.

Even the initial quote for three hosts was ridiculous for the CPUs offered.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#114

Post by prmoustache » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #103

prmoustache wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because migrations should happen all the time. If things are done right requires the same effort to patch and have downtime of all your systems than it is to migrate from one hypervisor to another. I've migrated tons of systems, sometimes p2v and v2v makes it simpler/faster but more often than not it is more useful and as fast to reinstall system then redeploy app (you can often use that time to migrate to major OS r…

> Because migrations should happen all the time Hypervisor migrations? Complete DC migrations? If you are doing that every single quarter you are doing something VERY wrong (or you should migrate to the cloud).

You don't have to do these migrations, but you should be able to do them because basic security maintenance of systems require regular patching, reboots, downtimes, etc. Setting up a new VM and deploy the apps/services takes minutes, not days.

The infra has to be setup to support downtime of systems (not all at once obviously).

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#115

Post by mlrtime » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:30 PM UTC

karmarepellent wrote: post #54

alephnerd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consolidation is a good move, because it minimizes your overhead from a team management and procurement management basis. Infra is a cost center at the end of the day. > I thought the main lesson from the whole VMware fiasco would be that IT departments would not rely on a single vendor/hypervisor in the future Can you justify spending 2x your hypervisor budget when that same pot of money could be used to hire more e…

You are absolutely right that consolidation minimizes overhead. I work in an IT department who relies on VMware and I certainly do not look forward to the prospect of updating all our tooling to work with multiple hypervisors. It works quite well as it is. And it certainly makes sense in the short term to spend the money on the product instead of on infrastructre. I just wonder about the long term in the context of h…

Why does risk management go out the window? Don't you highlight a single vendor in your BCP plan? Raise the risk, do some quick analysis on how to mitigate that risk and let someone sign off on it.

Accepting the risk doesn't mean 'going out the window'.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#116

Post by mlrtime » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #31

elygre wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone looking at nutanix: what are the issues?

They still force you into a specific hardware organisation (hyperconverged, disks are on the compute nodes and storage is distributed) which doesn't make sense for everyone's workloads. Also, at least a few years ago(hope it's not still the case), a lot of their services were a bunch of open source poorly stitched together with bash, and their poor abstraction over it was leaking heavily. Their APIs were also very po…

I'm not up to speed but we didn't choose Nutanix many years ago because their Terraform maturity was way behind vmware.

Vmware sponsored? the plugin where Nutanix made everything go through their web UI or some new convergence product they purchased.

We just wanted APIs for everything, no UI. Nutanix failed hard.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#117

Post by mlrtime » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:35 PM UTC

quibuss wrote: post #80

Good for proxmox.

I will stay this is still good for Proxmox in the long run.... Maybe not for this article's use case.

Just the fact that less people will know or care about vmware and just start playing with proxmox and not ESX.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#118

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#119

Post by croes » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #4

> 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.” If you hike your prices by 10-15x, you only need 6-10% of customers to stay to maintain your revenue, reduce costs and massively increase profit margins!

But that's the way to become a niche product and not one of the standard supplier of VM solutions.

They will lose reputation and reference customers.

Re: It looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer

#120

Post by nunez » Thu, May 23, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

There are lots of details missing. VMware had a crazy amount of product and support SKUs. It is possible that they were vastly underpaying relative to what they should have been licensed for. Also, 24k VMs is a lot but core count is what matters. They could have been running that compute with insane overprovisioning, and Broadcom generally wants customers with REALLY HIGH core counts. Finally, the new SKUs that Broadcom are pushing consolidate lots of products together that would have previously been purchased separately. If they were _only_ vSphere customers, the hike might have come from now needing to be NSX and vSAN customers against their will.

All that said, lots of customers definitely had similar experiences; it's all over /r/vmware. Broadcom is not joking about wanting to cull the herd here.