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Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

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Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#31

Post by to11mtm »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #18
jasonjayr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything. They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license. So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be…

I've experienced multiple MSFT compliance audits at small business Customers in the 2004-2020 timeframe. MSFT only ever cared about reconciling what was in use with what was paid-for. I've been asked for photos of OEM key stickers attached to hardware but never asked to retrieve keys from installed software. I assume keys are another facet of keeping specific details around licenses vague enough that there's always r…

> MSFT only ever cared about reconciling what was in use with what was paid-for. I've been asked for photos of OEM key stickers attached to hardware but never asked to retrieve keys from installed software.

If I recall correctly, CALs don't really get 'installed', so my guess is that going off of 'provable licenses' keeps the audit process more uniform and streamlined.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#32

Post by hitpointdrew »

miohtama wrote: post #29

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors.

KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool in your stack.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#33

Post by pc86 »

jasonjayr wrote: post #13
dijit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions. So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a licen…

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything. They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license. So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be…

So if you're using the same SKU(s) and are not oversubscribed, it should still be fine shouldn't it? If you buy SKU A and get Key 1, then use keygen to get Key 2 which is for SKU A, I'm not seeing where the audit will come back against you as long as you're only using one instance of SKU A.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#34

Post by nunez »

linsomniac wrote: post #19
chris_wot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So… what are the alternatives?

We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it. When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet spot,…

I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#35

Post by icedchai »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #32
miohtama wrote: post #29

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors. KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool i…

KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#36

Post by oldpersonintx »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #32
miohtama wrote: post #29

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors. KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool i…

[dead]

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#37

Post by Dalewyn »

mschuster91 wrote: post #30
chris_wot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So… what are the alternatives?

if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult. Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest…

>pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.

I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:

* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.

* Host webcam passthrough.

* Intel PXE boot ROM.

* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.

* Cloud integration features.

[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#38

Post by newsclues »

mixdup wrote: post #28
sofixa wrote: post #15

It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed... I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.

Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they alre…

Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible.

This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want.

They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#40

Post by mixdup »

newsclues wrote: post #38
mixdup wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they alre…

Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible. This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want. They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

But they're cutting off customers who have paid and are under contracts

I'm not talking about ripping off the bandaid on the new sales channels, I'm talking about the fact that customers who have active licenses they've paid for can no longer activate them because they've shut these systems down

That inevitably is going to lead to a class action against them

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