filisterIt looks a lot like VMware just lost a 24,000-VM customer • The Register
Surprise, surprise.
Good.
My VPS provider also migrated away from VMWare - got an email saying VMs would be down temporarily during the move, and the main website no longer contains any references to the virtualization tech. I miss my /64 IPV6 😭 but i’ll happily give that up if it means Broadcom’s dumpster fire comes crashing down as big customers pull the plug and migrate
OhaWould guess that they probably migrated to proxmox
Kata1ystI know several large companies looking to Microsoft, Xen, and Proxmox. Though the smart ones are more interested in the open source solutions to avoid future rug-pulls.
So is Xen.
BeigeAgendaI thought Xen and OpenVZ etc. became obsolete with KVM? But it’s probably for the best that Xen is still used.
Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, KVM is a type 2 hypervisor
It runs on the bare metal itself as dom0
Doh I meant LXC 🤦 instead of KVM.
LXC is for containers, rather than virtual machines
I was just saying “obsolete” isn’t a good description; All three still have uses depending on your goals
LXC is probably better for most people, and I think Podman is one of the best rootless container options
Yes...? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren't looking that way.
Xen looks great for VPS stuff, and seemed to have good support for vGPUs. That’s what I’d choose as a provider. I wish I used it at home but I ended up going with good ol’ Linux KVM for USB and PCI support.
Nutanix is another one.
RegalPotooWell well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions
pikachu.jpg
“We want to focus on keeping our large customers”
Loses large customers
Surprised pikachu face
KushanIt’s entirely possible that 24,000 VM’s didn’t count as “large” by VMWare standards.
robocallWe want to focus on keeping milking our large customers until they can find an alternative to us
It will be probably more. I talked with sysadmin from some smaller provider in my country few months ago. And he told me that the migration will take them for most systems about 2 years (depreciation of hardware) and for some machines about 5 years.
So lot of customers are in process of replacing it but it will take multiple years.
Many SMBs will walk away at next server refresh.
VMware is walking dead.
We’re currently testing Nutanix and Proxmox for smaller clients.
Proxmox support is similar (~65%) in cost to VMware licensing, but it’s not likely to pull this sudden increase BS. Plus it’s capabilities are significant for SMB.
ikiddI wouldn’t be afraid to use Proxmox for small and middle size business. It’s solid and based on solid, opensource tech. As long as people make sure they get paid, I’m sure they’ll get even better.
Good on you for making sure your clients pay for support, that’s how opensource thrives.
Paid support is a requirement for business. Tryinto avoid that is Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
When shit goes tits-up, you really need the support resources right now.
Win-win in my book.
That’s the point. Broadcom focuses on only the top consumers and desire everyone else to go away. They then focus only on what those top consumers want and their support staff can be cut down considerably.
It’s an interesting tactic that they have mastered.
Eventually even those customers will look at alternatives too if there’s only like 50 companies worldwide using it.
Yeah, this is one scenario where the principles in F2P games like MOBAs applies to the business world. Focusing only on the top X companies and losing that market share has a cascading effect where it’s harder to find competent administrators, it’s harder for those administrators to find support online (which then means they have to call for the support they pay for - which while good in the short term for VMWare, is frustrating for the customer, and means that the extra money they’re charging has to partially be used to cover techs to provide said report). The little fish in a market like this help to provide what is essentially free troubleshooting online via stack overflow etc.
And giving that market share to competitors gives them the cash flow and experience to build a support system online and improve their product, and then when over the big fish.
But why would they long-term viability and quality over short-term profits?
Bingo.
Where does the next gen of admins come from, if they’re been using Proxmox, etc, to learn on?
All my peers started with VMware years ago because they could get ESXi for free and run it on test boxes, then have the experience to deploy in client sites.
PriorityMotifIt sounds like every large sas company tbh.
You’re not wrong!
I think Broadcom overplayed it on this one, as this example shows.
Or, they’re playing a game we can’t figure out. A 20,000 VM client is in the “large customers we want to keep” category.
Except this is a top customer with tens of thousands of VM’s, walking away.
SMBs aren’t running 10k vms.
yep, my employer is one of them. Only around 200 VMs but my former employer (an MSP with several hundred customers, among them the administration of the city I live in, all schools, all kindergartens and the church) was also in the process of migrating when I switched.
My friend who works at an MSP said they’re migrating most of their customers to HyperV, but these are mostly extremely small companies with a dozen or so employees and only a handful of services
I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.
But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.
my work quit on AirWatch and jfc was that a beautiful day. I have been in IT since 1997 and I have never seen a worse UI that that POS
Being able to properly evaluate the market is a whole job, and they failed at it. No company deserves to unconditionally exist, let alone forever
Schadenfreude intensifies
Why do people still use VMware? It’s not 2012 anymore.
Because up until Broadcom bought them, it was a good product with a ton of useful features, endless supported integrations with 3rd party software and hardware, relatively easy to learn/use, with good support, all at reasonable and flexible price points depending on your needs.
Of course Broadcom has now thrown all of that into the toilet…
themoonisacheeseBecause if you throw enough money at them, they’ll trip over themselves trying to fix your production critical issue in 4 hours or less, and that’s valuable to business because they get to go “it’s not our fault the site was down and we lost $2 million, it’s our vendor’s support team that was inadequate”
Yeah, at a certain scale you’re not paying for the technology… you’re paying for a scapegoat.
Phase 1: Fuck around
Phase 2: Find out
DrasglafPhase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will
Phase 4: Fucking do it again
“We just love our customers so much, it makes us crazy sometimes…”
“I don’t want to lose you but the shareholders make me do it.”
beanFuck Broadcom. I liked VMware and their products and actually paid for them as a consumer. Broadcom is a had fisted money grabber and care little about anything else. This will not end well for any businesses they serve to. Why? Because they’re focused on milking the cow dry, not spending money on anything. Despite their R&D claims. They have a history and have shown who they are before, and said who they’re planning to continue to be. Flee while you can.
We are also in the process of looking of ways out of VMware. Have also cancelled projects investing further into the stack. (NSX)
It sucks in a way, I’d rather work on other things than system migrations but has to be done.
What solution are you looking towards? I work in a massive organization with 20,000+ VMs and we’ve been having weekly virtual working groups across the country (our overseas depts have been doing their own) to try and discuss finding other solutions. We haven’t been very successful, as the biggest pitfall we’ve seen is no one offers lifetime licenses so if we don’t renew a yearly maintenance our VMs won’t stop functioning properly. That’s one of the main reasons we’re looking to off board from VMware.
I have been using Proxmox with a couple thousand VM’s and have been very happy with it.
Noble ShiftIf you haven’t tried Nutanix, you really really should. I’m a six year veteran and there is absolutely no way I would ever bate metal again with VMWare in spaces I didn’t have to, and that’s Prior to the Broadcom buyout.
Download The Nutanix Bible and start reading.
How expensive (or cheaper) Nutanix compare to VMware
That’s a very broad question. I can say by switching I saved the firm $60,000 the 1st year out of the gate. This included purchasing the Nutanix hardware as well, to run what was at the time, a six node cluster, replacing a 6 node VMW setup (on premise).
After the 1st year we replaced the VMW setups at the remote office and the COLO. It was a no brainer. That was also close to $60k each site as well saved as well, though we had other cost considerations.
You will spend more money for competent Administration over a VMW farm in the short run unless you/your team are *nix capable. If you are a *mix/CLI house, you’re going to absolutely wet your pants with joy, possible #2 as well.
I like the idea of spending money on team member rather than VMW service. :D
Better ROI for sure.
kingthrillgore“Hey guys, we bought VMware and ate all it’s seed corn. Please remember to like and subscribe, and ring the bell!”
i love seed corn
We were very *very *close to replacing our ~700 office Cisco SD-Wan environment with VeloCloud, which is owned by VMware. The Broadcom merger put the brakes on the project completely, they missed out on a few million dollars on that effort alone.
The Velo guys were totally in the dark on what was coming down the pipe for them, Broadcom forced them to change hardware vendors on day one, for example.
In my workplace we worked tirelessly to get rid of all VMware VMs as fast as possible when new pricing became clear. Thousands migrated. What a huge fuckup by broadcom.
This may be a silly question, but what are VMs generally used for in a corporate setting? Is it the same use case as docker?
In large scale computing, a server will have VERY powerful hardware. You can run multiple VMs on that one machine, giving a slice of that power to each VM so that it basically ends up with multiple individual computers running on one very powerful set of hardware instead of building a ton of individual.