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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

#51

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

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…

Theres clouds built with KVM, you dont know your stuff.

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

#52

Post by hocktheman »

What an absolute shitshow. These are customers who have paid major $$$ for something they now can't redeem.

The sad thing is... this is nothing compared to what they've done to their cloud providers (formerly known as VCPP partners)... All resellers and cloud partners got a letter in december ending the program, with the 'good news' that some of them would be invited back somewhere early in 2024. The rest will have to turn off their workloads by end of March.

So these 4500+ cloud providers now (including the likes of OVH, Rackspace, IBM, ...) are now in limbo. Some will know next week or early feb if they can still legally host their customer's workloads. Else they will have 6 weeks (!) to migrate away to one of the partners that made the cut. Ignoring that many of these cloud partners have multi-year contracts with their end customers (which include banks, hospitals, public sector, ... especially the niche kind of environments that often have boutique requirements that make them unsuitable for an easy public cloud migration) they can now no longer fulfill.

Oh, and the license aggregator partners that used to run the admin side of this business and help those partners? They're being reduced to 10 worldwide too, and they're also in the dark.

At least their SaaS partners have a clear message: that business is dead. ("sunset")

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

#53

Post by gertrunde »

icedchai wrote: post #35
hitpointdrew wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment.

Do you think major cloud providers haven't engineered the whole "You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day." step?

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

#54

Post by SteveNuts »

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,…

>Windows GUI

I assume you're referring to the (ancient) VIC? Vsphere has been all web based for a long long time now. It had probably just never been upgraded.

Also I'm curious why the move to local storage, what do you do if a host dies?

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

#55

Post by icedchai »

gertrunde wrote: post #53
icedchai wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment. Do you think major cloud providers haven't engineered the whole "You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day." step?

Of course, they build their own tooling. They'd have to build their own to operate at scale. For a small business or home lab operation that needs dozens of VMs, that already exists (as pointed out by another poster, who mentioned libvirt and virt-manager.)

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

#56

Post by iforgotpassword »

newsclues wrote: post #44
mixdup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.

How does that make sense? Had they chosen a slow gratuitous path those customers might've switched to other products, now they've been burned and will think twice before choosing VMware again.

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

#57

Post by api »

newsclues wrote: post #44
mixdup wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.

Ahh the grand BigCo tradition of acquiring a company and then setting fire to it.

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

#58

Post by gertrunde »

icedchai wrote: post #55
gertrunde wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment. Do you think major cloud providers haven't engineered the whole "You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day." step?

Of course, they build their own tooling. They'd have to build their own to operate at scale. For a small business or home lab operation that needs dozens of VMs, that already exists (as pointed out by another poster, who mentioned libvirt and virt-manager.)

libvirt, virt-manager, et al are all perfectly suitable tools for an average member of the HN audience, or someone playing with a home lab, or any number of other technically proficient users - but those people are not the people who are buying vmware's products.

And virt-manager comes across from their docs as a bit on the basic side, proxmox and ovirt look a bit more polished - but again, companies are often wary of running their entire infrastructure on something where there isn't someone they can blame if it goes wrong - it's more about managing the risk than anything else.

I would absolutely love it if these sorts of companies used and relied on open source technologies more, but it's unlikely that they would pay for the staff with the relevant skills to manage it all, or pay enough to retain those staff that get trained up internally. (And I'm somewhat hopeful that this broadcom/vmware mess will cause more resources to flow into open source projects, or spark new developments in this space - cloud isn't always the answer to everything).

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

#59

Post by alphager »

sofixa wrote: post #46
newsclues wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap. Why would they think that after that disaster said customers will still be with them? I no longer have the displeasure of being a VMware customer, but if I saw what they're currently doing while jacking up prices and trimming support, what possible reason would there be to remain as a customer? Inertia? A…

That's the whole plan. They basically only want to retain the fortune 500 customers and wing them dry. Anybody that can migrate away will do so, but the rest will be taken to the cleaners.

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

#60

Post by The_Colonel »

sofixa wrote: post #46
newsclues wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap. Why would they think that after that disaster said customers will still be with them? I no longer have the displeasure of being a VMware customer, but if I saw what they're currently doing while jacking up prices and trimming support, what possible reason would there be to remain as a customer? Inertia? A…

There's little competition in some of VMWare's segments and even if there is, the migration is long, expensive and risky.
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