Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 297 posts

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

#21

Post by naturalmovement »

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?

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

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

#22

Post by mjr00 »

xvxvx wrote: post #3

Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming. If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.

... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?

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

#23

Post by fsuts »

”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom”

For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.

(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).

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

#24

Post by laserDinosaur »

GlacierFox wrote: post #13

Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?

From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

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

#25

Post by stackskipton »

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…

>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.

Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter

If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.

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

#26

Post by nikanj »

naturalmovement wrote: post #21
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?

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.

Interesting times.

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

#29

Post by bijowo1676 »

dzonga wrote: post #17

this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot. migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand. if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.

there is no risk since spring boot is open source.

any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something

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

#30

Post by jamesfinlayson »

stackskipton wrote: post #25
rwmj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me. I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US…

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.
Post reply on HN