“We want to focus on keeping our large customers”
Loses large customers
Surprised pikachu face
this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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It's entirely possible that 24,000 VM's didn't count as "large" by VMWare standards.
We want to focus on ~~keeping~~ milking our large customers until they can find an alternative to us
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.”
Interesting way to word "we charged as much as we could possibly get away with"
That analyst doesn’t work for Broadcom; it’s a third party. It could say, “they charged as much as they could possibly get away with” but I think “prices just below the pain threshold” is stronger language in a business setting.
Nearly the strongest possible language I can imagine being used.
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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
Would guess that they probably migrated to proxmox
I 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.
Yes...? All are except Microsoft, which is why most companies I work with aren't looking that way.
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Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions
Phase 1: Fuck around
Phase 2: Find out
Phase 3: Say you've changed to earn some good will
Phase 4: Fucking do it again
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.
I 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.
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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 win over the big fish.
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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.
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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.
I'm convinced VMware started downhill when they dropped the hard windows client for the web based admin panel.
They claimed it was for multi os compatibility.... But they wrote the thing using ActiveX. For the youngsters, ActiveX shit was Internet Explorer and M.S. only. So the idiots wrote a UI that still only worked in Windows, and was now 5 times slower than the thick client.
BTW, I run proxmox clusters in my garage. Its awesome
I don't understand diddly about the specifics of this article (I'm a member of the normie minority on this site who is neither working in IT, nor interested in the field), but I gotta say, I loved how it was structured and written. In a sea of AI generated crap, or simply parroting talking heads and calling it news, I found the way they laid out the article in two parts ("this is what happened, followed by "this is our subjective opinion on those events based on the wider context") to be very refreshing.
Kudos for immersing yourself in it!
Fuck Broadcom. I liked VMware and their products and actually paid for them as a consumer. Broadcom is a ham-fisted money grabber and cares little about anything else. This will not end well for any businesses they serve to. Why? Maya Angelou: 'When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.' They’re focused on milking the cow dry, not spending money on anything (despite their R&D claims). They have a history and have straight up said 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.
We have about 10.000 VMs for reference
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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
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.
Fucking good. They should go down in flames for what Broadcom is doing to VMware. Our company switched off it too. Not as large but we have a couple thousand servers and they are all now slowly moving to hyper v
Surprise, surprise.
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...
Because 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.
pikachu.jpg
"Hey guys, we bought VMware and ate all it's seed corn. Please remember to like and subscribe, and ring the bell!"
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Schadenfreude intensifies
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.
The other key feature being cost. A VDI terminal is much cheaper than actual PCs for employees. When I was working IT for a large company, we were able to get them in bulk for about $100 each. A PC cost us at least $800.
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Similar to docker, but the technical differences matter a lot. VMs have a lot of capabilities containers don't have, while missing some of the value on being lightweight.
However, a more direct (if longer) answer would be: all cloud providers ultimately offer you VMs. You can run docker on those VMs, but you have to start with a VM. Selfhosted stuff (my homelab, for example) will also generally end up as a mix of VMs and docker containers. So no matter what project you're working on at scale, you've probably got some VMs around.
Whether you then use containers inside them is a more nuanced and subtle question.
Running a virtual server allows you to run a server application on its own virtual machine, this eliminates the chance that (when running multiple applications from a server) the underlaying requirement for each apllication conflict.
In comparison to docker the full server can offer more native capabilities for some applications, while other applications simply only run on a full OS.
So by virtualizing the servers one large piece of Hardware can be used to run multiple servers and you can (sometimes dynamically) allocate resources as needed.
The backups can consume all computing power put of office hours while the other applications share during Office hours as needed.. sometimes a bit more for VM A and sometimes a bit more for VM B.
Off course monitoring overallocation is a thing as you might end up with bottlenecks caused by peak loads that occur at the same time.. the issue would be bigger when running on dedicated hardware.
And off course having multiple hardware platforms interconnected allows for a VM to be moved from hardware platform to hardware platform without interruption (license required) meaning you can perform hardware maintenance without an outage.
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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 than that POS
Really looking forward to seeing more Rancher Harvester clusters out there.
VMWare stuff are a pain to work with and open source and more modern systems are needed anyways. Really want to see all of the crazy powerful stuff people do when VMs are just another type of container.
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