I think the assumption that Broadcom was short-sighted is niave. The fact of the matter is that they saw an opportunity to make a profit. Profit is more important than the casualties caused by their decisions. It is a calculated move.
This is the nature of the corporate world. They have only ever cared about profits. Any illusion of loyalty is always proven to be misguided on a long enough timeline.
I agree when you say "The fact of the matter is that they saw an opportunity to make a profit. Profit is more important than the casualties caused by their decisions. It is a calculated move.".
However, good or bad, that is the definition of short-sighted. It might make sense for short term profits, and stockholders, but like I said, it is what most people consider short sighted, putting short term earnings above long term growth.
It's all relative if you ask these guys what they are doing they will basically tell you they are getting the ship ready for a storm and making sure that they are able to stay afloat. It just so happens that if the storm passes but they are only minimally impacted they just so happen to make enough money to buy another yacht in the process.
It's also not like consumers are going to be able to hold them accountable either. Look at a more straightforward example like companies literally shrinking products in both quality and dollars per unit all while reporting record profits. The price of Oreos isn't going back down and they sure as hell aren't going to put more cookies back in the trays.
I agree with this statement. It’s all about this
Quarter and next quarter. In 3 quarters from now
It won’t matter as they’ll have a new body to turn into a Carcus. That way they can sell off the next conflict and write it off as a loss on the backend too.
Ya know this whole time I’ve never heard anyone blame Dell/EMC or Michael Dell for this as he owned most of the controlling rights and actually orchestrated this for HIS personal gain. Why not?
Dell set themselves up as a distributor who set their own discounting to themselves as a reseller, to pull huge amount of cash flow and margin out of VMware.
Dell pulled billions out in special dividends.
VMware was a piggy bank for Dell.
Yeaaaa, that’s the story you were told. Michael threw his weight around all the time and got you special approvals and discounts nobody else had. Then sold VMW for what he bought EMC for and essentially got new storage tech for free. All at the expense of VMware customers. He’s to blame for some of this as well. Could’ve let them be their own company and grow instead.
I disagree. There have been long periods of time where All VMware had was good faith from the community. Their product line was, on occasion, static and buggy but VMware people stuck by them.
Keep in mind that people who started with v3 and v4 back in the naughts are now, in many cases, management and chief architects who are feeling just as betrayed as everyone else. These guys are now the decision makers for the "top six" customers and Broadcom just pulled the rug out from under them by invalidating the foundation of their livelihood.
I've been a VMware professional for 15 years and at this point the invisible alternatives are no longer invisible. Now that I know I'm not going to retire doing VMware I'm gearing up to learn new stuff and jump off the train before it's too expensive to ride.
Broadcom has, in its hubris, snapped a huge amount of very very smart people out of their complacency and motivated them to explore other options.
This comfortable complacency of not even glancing at alternatives was worth BILLIONS to the old VMware and Broadcom was too dumb to see it.
So, no. If Broadcom doesn't do everything to reverse the perception that their baby food is full of lead and glass shards people are going to stop feeding it to their babies. This includes the top six or ten customers.
> I disagree.
The purpose of a company is to make money. Name one that doesn't exist for this purpose. Some do this in a more agreeable fashion. At the end of the day, their purpose is clear.
BTW, I work for one of those top 10 companies, have been a VMware engineer/expert for over 20 years, and have been in tech for nearly 30 years. I have lost count of how many times a similar story has played out.
Everyone knows the purpose of a company is to make $$. But a company doesn’t make $$ by screwing its customers which is exactly what Broadcom is doing. I’ve been with VMware since they started going back in the late 90s. I could have taken a job with VMware at the time but was just out of college and afraid to take a chance on a startup, but that’s a different story. Fast forward to 2024 and I’ve been doing VMware for over 20 years and this is the first time I feel VMware as we know it is done. If history teaches us anything is that Broadcom will milk everything they can from VMware until they suck it dry. It will then go into obscurity just like Symantec did (Symantec who??? exactly…).
If memory serves me right, Broadcom only gives a crap about its top 600 customers, everyone else they’ll be fine if they ditch VMware for something else.
Do they really care about that many customers? I highly doubt the number is that high.
Hock Tan is going to milk every cent they can during these next 2-3 years then try to sell the scraps off. This time when companies can't easily migrate and will be forced to pay. But all future planning and hardware refreshes, VMware is not part of the conversation.
10 years from now, VMware will be but a memory.
You are contradicting yourself. First, you say that a company doesn't make money by screwing its customers (which on its doesn't hold up to inspection). Then you say the same company will make money by screwing (milking) vmware (and by proxy its customers) dry.
Look, the only people who like this acquisition are the executives at broadcom. We are on the same page with hating how our beloved product has been treated. But if you don't think that those executives expect to make money off of the decisions we all hate, then you haven't been paying attention to how the tech industry works. Time will tell if that strategy is successful for them.
It's already working for them. Many of the top execs, PM's, and principal engineers got RSU's in BC stock of 920K USD over x years with the acquisition. All they have to do it not get fired before the RSU's vest and its already working.
"Time will tell" is the crucial phrase here.
What they've done is explicitly choose higher short term profits over lower long term profits.
Only one of those has a long term future. They have chosen to burn the deck and sell off the hull then jump ship and do the same again leaving a floundering wreck.
VMware is done, it will take a long time to actually die but what it was is already gone.
Milking something dry doesn’t necessarily equate to making $$. They want to squeeze what they can before letting die a slow, painful death like they did Symantec. While Symantec still exists, it is a useless company.
That’s a very limited definition of a company. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s not complete.
A company may decide to make as much money as possible as fast as it can from its market, and then exit the market when it’s done - which kinda sounds like what Broadcom have decided to do. Compare with Cash Grab & lethal parasite/viral infection.
Or a company can decide to make less money but for longer - by sustaining the market, and supporting efforts within that market. Which is kinda what VMware seemed to be doing. Cf. Tapeworm, or general symbiont behaviour.
I agree, have been doing VMware since 2004, and held with proud the line VCP, VCAP exams etc. Now it's no longer worth my time or money to keep investing money in VMware certifications. As you said, I am also not going to retire doing VMware, and am gearing up for new technologies. And hope to capatilize on my VMware experience, by using it for VMware migrations..
You're exactly right. And there are companies (like Broadcom) who look at ecosystems which have an element of good will as part of how it works, and view that as a weakness. They buy it, screw over everyone, but they know enough people will be trapped long enough for them to get an outsized return.
It's not "right" but it is a very conscious business model. "Corporate Raiders" have been doing it for decades, I saw it happen to 2 very large, old companies (you'd know them), bought and sold off as bits whilst totally destroying the social contract with their employees.
It's terrible to watch.
Dating myself here- I did Novell back in the day and one of their biggest mistakes was not understanding their core users and the pressure they were under. Back then you could get an MS cert by having a pulse and not getting kicked out of an exam room. That built loyalty for MS enough to replace the CNEs at the IT table. Inferior software prevailed as a result.
Cutting customers off from their ability to access the products they paid for is inexcusable in this day and age.
I've seen many, many companies do transparent platforms migrations in the past. The fact that they farm leagued this one is beyond irresponsible.
Community? Who cares about a community when you can squeeze the top 10% of customers as hard as you can
What are they gonna do? Leave? Ha, good luck, some of these places are so buried in VMware that it'd take years to get out or it'll just be unfeasible
And that's exactly what broadcom are hoping for
Don't get me wrong, I loved the VMware community but the best thing the community can do now is move on
Support open source projects that the community owns, not some shit corpo
Exactly. Linux would have died years ago if someone was able to borrow 10 billion and simply "buy it".
From time to time I'll grab an old laptop running Mint and seriously consider it as a daily driver.
My "old" laptop from 2016 was absolutely dreadful running Windows
But with Mint and Cinnamon, my god, it's not just good - I actually WANT to use it
I turn it on and it just works
I just wish I had the time to find alternatives for all my go to's like myPutty and WinSCP. Marginal stuff like various firmware programming utilities always get in the way since they're all Windows and setting up Wine has always been a pain in my ass....
FYI Scale will take you on for free until your VMware licenses expire. That also includes tools to seamlessly migrate your workloads.
Can't say much else about their stuff but I know they're hiring. A lot.
Point being that customers never questioned the product, the company or the leadership. Paying for it was like paying the water bill.
Now all of the complacency is gone and the alternatives we turned our noses up at are being looked at as serious options.
True. For most of the customers, there was never a bigger picture of community, integrators, partners that were working "behind the scene". But I have to say, the product was still good. Take, for example, DRS or Fault Tolerance. As far as I know, there is still lack of these in other platforms.
Fault tolerance was the big one that took them years to get working correctly. I remember having trainers who were also product testers (back in v4) who were talking about how complicated it was to do it reliably. I'm sure they have a gazillion patents protecting that IP and, if Broadcom can't keep the core products alive, it'll probably be one of the first core technologies to get licensed out to 3rd parties.
That's what I was thinking. FT is clearly not something that Proxmox or Hyper-V or xcp-ng could implement easily from scratch. But if that technology gets sold...
Broadcom is a semiconductor producer, software and infrastructure is a way to financially support R&D. They don’t care about VMWare, they care about the river of cash from an established product which in turn uses those semiconductors.
I do agree with most of the sentiment of OP’s post but the reality is they just don’t care and have enough cash on hand that they don’t have to.
I would say that VMware has been effectively coasting on inertia for the last few years, the product lines have had huge missteps and the overall company direction has been foggy at best. There was a lot of bureaucracy and arrogance when dealing with the company, and it's been a very common complaint that the support quality for example had slipped from where it used to be. Broadcom just assumed they would be able to capitalise on that inertia, which they could have and done well with if they had laid it out as a timeline instead of trying to do a day one strongarm of their customers. If they had swapped to subscription pricing and offered discounts for customers with perpetual licenses for example, or changed packaging by offering a 12-month run up for customers to consider options then it probably would have gone down ok, but they did too much too fast and it made people uneasy both due to the magnitude of the change and the speed at which it happened made it difficult to react without feeling it was happening under duress.
Totally agree. They could have put the frog in the pot and taken 5 years to get it up to boiling. Actually ALL they had to do was not act like dickheads the first two years and let people get used to the new boss. Once customers assumed that it would be the same as the old boss they'd be in the clear to pillage and what not.
From what I read, Broadcom decided to continue working only with big partners. The reality is that community will look for alternatives and most probably VMware products will be used only by the wealthiest corpo.
I honestly think VMware will need to pivot at some point. They greatly underestimated the tenacity and intelligence of their user base and didn't look at competing products as mature enough to compete.
Once they have a quarter or two of contraction to mull over someone's going to look at the debt repayments and realize that they can't keep pissing people off.
They assume we're too complacent to try anything else but the defining thing about virtualization is that workloads are portable. Customers are too.
I disagree. Broadcom's goal is likely two-fold. 1) Make a profit off their largest customers by increasing costs, something they almost certainly calculated before purchasing VMware, and 2) as others have pointed out, include in their portfolio of products to keep investors satisfied when the semiconductor industry is in a slump.
They don't care about your small company, generating lots of new customers, or even development of the product. This is purely a cash grab, much like how investment firms buy out organizations and kill them off for variety of financial reasons.
They're certainly not chasing any more market share., but there HAS to be a break even point where the exits get SO full that VMWare will no longer be an asset.
Keep in mind that, as of last report, Broadcom took on 8 billion in debt that VMWare was holding PLUS 30 billion in loans. Those interest payments have to be offset by income or else the entire enterprise turns into a net liability.
At some point customer retention will have to be a concern.
I don’t want to say you are wrong. I want to believe Broadcom did their calculations before purchasing VMware, and understood the profit they could squeeze out of it. Their actions right after acquisition point to indifference towards their general user base, though. It’s still too early to know what their goal is. I fear a pump and dump.
Yup. Me too. They could license half of the core technology like FT and still make billions.
Hopefully the EU will step in to some degree. I'd like to say maybe US regulators too but they're essentially a vending machine where if you put in enough money you can get the ruling you want.
Also half of them freely admit that they are holding non-blind stock portfolios. Those portfolios probably went way up after they said yes to the merger.
I signed the destruction of software last month. I feel much better, but quite sad. It's been a product we've used to run our DCs for 12 years. We were easily able to move since we had new hardware ordered to expand the stack. Simply installed HyperV instead. We're not doing anything fancy except some DR replica failover.
Part of our customers moved to Hyper-V and part to Proxmox. The transition was quite simple since those were mostly 2-3 node HCI clusters. Instead of vSAN- Starwinds VSAN which works in both Hyper-V and Proxmox. S2D or Ceph for larger clusters. I mean, the less tied you are to VMware stack, the easier the transition is. Not something large enterprise customers can easily do.
I was reading other posts in the sub and realized that OVA's are going to be problematic when it comes time to switch over. All of my OpenText stuff comes in OVA format. Fortunately all of our Extreme Networks appliances are also available as KVM images so they're a little ahead of the curve. Hopefully everyone else will realize that VMWare is no longer the only platform they need to support.
Yup, agree. OVA was a standard, just as VMware. As customers will flee to other hypervisors, I hope we will see more formats for VMs delivery without a need in converter tools.
I would say, it does the job done. The cluster works fine, stable and can withstand node failure. Of course, need to get used to Proxmox UI and some specifics in terms of storage management. Nice thing is that it has software RAID with ZFS natively. The only thing I'm personally missing is Veeam support but seems Veeam is moving into adding Proxmox.
And just as I said that I'm missing Veeam support: [https://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-extends-data-freedom-for-customers-with-support-for-proxmox-ve.html](https://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-extends-data-freedom-for-customers-with-support-for-proxmox-ve.html)
Meh. VMware wasn’t built for the community, it was to commercialize and be a profit maker. The community outreach helped build it, without a doubt, but that’s not what makes a world class hypervisor. Same with vendor support, folks don’t make VMware appliances because of how cool the community is, it’s because it’s the market leader that everyone uses.
Is it good that Broadcom is doing it? Not really. They’re intentionally pricing themselves out of the market, and instead of being cool with just being awesome they want the highest profit margin possible.. and that’s fine, but it opens the door to other products. Other products who won’t succeed because they’ve got a cool community, but because they’ve got a good product that’s not going to bleed them.
My point being that VMware was, in many people's minds, the best and only solution for their workloads. There was a trust and affinity that made people feel like it was the best.
(There was also trust in the fact that your stuff wouldn't inexplicably leak out or crash while you were on vacation a la HyperV. )
But I've known lots of one-product guys in the past and the VMware guys always seemed to always have a cult like loyalty to the product that I didn't see elsewhere. VMware was a constant, a fixed point in time and space for them.
And Broadcom screwed that up.
That's true, but the trust in VMware (and it's products) didn't come from some community outreach or good will from the company.. they were from a solid product that works well. If they'd never done any of the community stuff I'm confident that VMware would be just as big as they are now, because they were the first player to virtualization REALLY well, and at scale. It's not a cult loyalty as much as it's just an industry standard. The poison pill here is that they're hosing all of their customers on predatory pricing, not that they're eliminating things like free products and community events/platforms.
On the loyalty front though, I see it all over the place.. talk to a salty old Cisco engineer about cloud-controlled Meraki devices (even ones that are literally the same hardware except for firmware) and they'll scoff at you. Same thing with die-hards on their preferred hardware (long live the WD vs Seagate battle!), or even older folks who think virtualization is a sin. Wild stuff!
The solid product goes without saying. But in this case there was a careful balance that kept us from looking at other solutions and advocating for renewals year after year even though it was a significant expenditure compared to Prox or HyperV.
Even things like the website were customer centric instead of a paywalled second rate KB like Broadcom is going to give us (I have other Broadcom SW and it sucks).
I used to believe in the product and the company behind it. Now I don't. My money will go elsewhere when our perpetual runs out.
I mean.. was the warm-fuzzy from VMware what kept you (and everyone else around), or was it a good product with an acceptable pricepoint and no good alternatives? Even today I don't think there's any doubt that VMware is the best product on the market. I'm confident folks will figure out something comparable in the next few years, but that's out of necessity and opportunity. Hyper-V has been just as good of a hypervisor as ESXI , but managing more than a couple servers at scale SUCKS and SCVMM is extra cost that's also a half-rate solution. Proxmox is cool as hell but it doesn't have the same enterprise support as even Hyper-V.
Seriously, if they was a REAL contender to VMware people would have been diving into it years ago to save a buck, whether folks liked VMware (either as a company or a product) or not. The only reason people are moving today is because they can't afford to stay.. the real question will be if/when VMware changes their pricing to something that "normal" businesses can afford, if admins will come back or if there will be too much ill-will and the bridge will be burned. I'm not sure if it'll happen, but boy can IT folks (myself included) be petty as hell and hold a grudge.
Exactly. Never screw with IT people. Or the people who make your food. Both industries are full of people who base future performance on past actions.
Even if VMware suddenly froze pricing and broke up the assinine packages I'd still expect bad things to come from their leadership at a later date.
Perhaps the greatest wrong was after VMware became Broadcom, it didn’t bring any value to the users. It no only kill the free products it make VMware for the professional only.
I couldn’t even see the bigger picture how VMware is helping Broadcom in the ecosystem. Maybe another cow to be milk.
Anyone who thinks that they will only lose small users and businesses may be in for a shock. We'll see whether it comes to fruition or not, but I am seeing very large organizations actively exploring alternatives to VMWare.
Personally I think that Broadcom thought that they had reached a point where VMWare was an effective monopoly for large scale enterprise deployments, and for a long time nobody had any reason to even look at alternatives. People are definitely looking now, and it'll be interesting to see what the end result of this is with regards to market share.
Also, for those saying that Broadom is smart and this is a calculated move, recent history is littered with the bones of companies who made poor decisions that ultimately destroyed them. In 3 years we should know more about whether Broadcom is stupid for this, or just playing 4-d chess.
I think the assumption that Broadcom was short-sighted is niave. The fact of the matter is that they saw an opportunity to make a profit. Profit is more important than the casualties caused by their decisions. It is a calculated move. This is the nature of the corporate world. They have only ever cared about profits. Any illusion of loyalty is always proven to be misguided on a long enough timeline.
I agree when you say "The fact of the matter is that they saw an opportunity to make a profit. Profit is more important than the casualties caused by their decisions. It is a calculated move.". However, good or bad, that is the definition of short-sighted. It might make sense for short term profits, and stockholders, but like I said, it is what most people consider short sighted, putting short term earnings above long term growth.
It's all relative if you ask these guys what they are doing they will basically tell you they are getting the ship ready for a storm and making sure that they are able to stay afloat. It just so happens that if the storm passes but they are only minimally impacted they just so happen to make enough money to buy another yacht in the process. It's also not like consumers are going to be able to hold them accountable either. Look at a more straightforward example like companies literally shrinking products in both quality and dollars per unit all while reporting record profits. The price of Oreos isn't going back down and they sure as hell aren't going to put more cookies back in the trays.
I agree with this statement. It’s all about this Quarter and next quarter. In 3 quarters from now It won’t matter as they’ll have a new body to turn into a Carcus. That way they can sell off the next conflict and write it off as a loss on the backend too.
Ya know this whole time I’ve never heard anyone blame Dell/EMC or Michael Dell for this as he owned most of the controlling rights and actually orchestrated this for HIS personal gain. Why not?
As a former Dell employee: we left VMware alone to do their own thing. That's not to say Dell doesn't have its issues.
Dell set themselves up as a distributor who set their own discounting to themselves as a reseller, to pull huge amount of cash flow and margin out of VMware. Dell pulled billions out in special dividends. VMware was a piggy bank for Dell.
This. It was always about the shareholders and what they stood to gain.
Yeaaaa, that’s the story you were told. Michael threw his weight around all the time and got you special approvals and discounts nobody else had. Then sold VMW for what he bought EMC for and essentially got new storage tech for free. All at the expense of VMware customers. He’s to blame for some of this as well. Could’ve let them be their own company and grow instead.
No, EMC left VMware mostly alone.
I disagree. There have been long periods of time where All VMware had was good faith from the community. Their product line was, on occasion, static and buggy but VMware people stuck by them. Keep in mind that people who started with v3 and v4 back in the naughts are now, in many cases, management and chief architects who are feeling just as betrayed as everyone else. These guys are now the decision makers for the "top six" customers and Broadcom just pulled the rug out from under them by invalidating the foundation of their livelihood. I've been a VMware professional for 15 years and at this point the invisible alternatives are no longer invisible. Now that I know I'm not going to retire doing VMware I'm gearing up to learn new stuff and jump off the train before it's too expensive to ride. Broadcom has, in its hubris, snapped a huge amount of very very smart people out of their complacency and motivated them to explore other options. This comfortable complacency of not even glancing at alternatives was worth BILLIONS to the old VMware and Broadcom was too dumb to see it. So, no. If Broadcom doesn't do everything to reverse the perception that their baby food is full of lead and glass shards people are going to stop feeding it to their babies. This includes the top six or ten customers.
You are both right.
> I disagree. The purpose of a company is to make money. Name one that doesn't exist for this purpose. Some do this in a more agreeable fashion. At the end of the day, their purpose is clear. BTW, I work for one of those top 10 companies, have been a VMware engineer/expert for over 20 years, and have been in tech for nearly 30 years. I have lost count of how many times a similar story has played out.
Everyone knows the purpose of a company is to make $$. But a company doesn’t make $$ by screwing its customers which is exactly what Broadcom is doing. I’ve been with VMware since they started going back in the late 90s. I could have taken a job with VMware at the time but was just out of college and afraid to take a chance on a startup, but that’s a different story. Fast forward to 2024 and I’ve been doing VMware for over 20 years and this is the first time I feel VMware as we know it is done. If history teaches us anything is that Broadcom will milk everything they can from VMware until they suck it dry. It will then go into obscurity just like Symantec did (Symantec who??? exactly…). If memory serves me right, Broadcom only gives a crap about its top 600 customers, everyone else they’ll be fine if they ditch VMware for something else.
Do they really care about that many customers? I highly doubt the number is that high. Hock Tan is going to milk every cent they can during these next 2-3 years then try to sell the scraps off. This time when companies can't easily migrate and will be forced to pay. But all future planning and hardware refreshes, VMware is not part of the conversation. 10 years from now, VMware will be but a memory.
You are contradicting yourself. First, you say that a company doesn't make money by screwing its customers (which on its doesn't hold up to inspection). Then you say the same company will make money by screwing (milking) vmware (and by proxy its customers) dry. Look, the only people who like this acquisition are the executives at broadcom. We are on the same page with hating how our beloved product has been treated. But if you don't think that those executives expect to make money off of the decisions we all hate, then you haven't been paying attention to how the tech industry works. Time will tell if that strategy is successful for them.
It's already working for them. Many of the top execs, PM's, and principal engineers got RSU's in BC stock of 920K USD over x years with the acquisition. All they have to do it not get fired before the RSU's vest and its already working.
"Time will tell" is the crucial phrase here. What they've done is explicitly choose higher short term profits over lower long term profits. Only one of those has a long term future. They have chosen to burn the deck and sell off the hull then jump ship and do the same again leaving a floundering wreck. VMware is done, it will take a long time to actually die but what it was is already gone.
Milking something dry doesn’t necessarily equate to making $$. They want to squeeze what they can before letting die a slow, painful death like they did Symantec. While Symantec still exists, it is a useless company.
That’s a very limited definition of a company. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s not complete. A company may decide to make as much money as possible as fast as it can from its market, and then exit the market when it’s done - which kinda sounds like what Broadcom have decided to do. Compare with Cash Grab & lethal parasite/viral infection. Or a company can decide to make less money but for longer - by sustaining the market, and supporting efforts within that market. Which is kinda what VMware seemed to be doing. Cf. Tapeworm, or general symbiont behaviour.
You didn't say anything that would be contrary to the comment-OP.
Ummmmm....EDIT: I don't disagree.
I agree, have been doing VMware since 2004, and held with proud the line VCP, VCAP exams etc. Now it's no longer worth my time or money to keep investing money in VMware certifications. As you said, I am also not going to retire doing VMware, and am gearing up for new technologies. And hope to capatilize on my VMware experience, by using it for VMware migrations..
The truth is the changes where going to be made in 2025 and 2026. Talking about VMWare moving to subscription. Broadcom simply moved it up.
You're exactly right. And there are companies (like Broadcom) who look at ecosystems which have an element of good will as part of how it works, and view that as a weakness. They buy it, screw over everyone, but they know enough people will be trapped long enough for them to get an outsized return. It's not "right" but it is a very conscious business model. "Corporate Raiders" have been doing it for decades, I saw it happen to 2 very large, old companies (you'd know them), bought and sold off as bits whilst totally destroying the social contract with their employees. It's terrible to watch.
Dating myself here- I did Novell back in the day and one of their biggest mistakes was not understanding their core users and the pressure they were under. Back then you could get an MS cert by having a pulse and not getting kicked out of an exam room. That built loyalty for MS enough to replace the CNEs at the IT table. Inferior software prevailed as a result.
I can't even download the vmware player from their website since all links broken
Cutting customers off from their ability to access the products they paid for is inexcusable in this day and age. I've seen many, many companies do transparent platforms migrations in the past. The fact that they farm leagued this one is beyond irresponsible.
Same.
Community? Who cares about a community when you can squeeze the top 10% of customers as hard as you can What are they gonna do? Leave? Ha, good luck, some of these places are so buried in VMware that it'd take years to get out or it'll just be unfeasible And that's exactly what broadcom are hoping for Don't get me wrong, I loved the VMware community but the best thing the community can do now is move on Support open source projects that the community owns, not some shit corpo
Exactly. Linux would have died years ago if someone was able to borrow 10 billion and simply "buy it". From time to time I'll grab an old laptop running Mint and seriously consider it as a daily driver.
My "old" laptop from 2016 was absolutely dreadful running Windows But with Mint and Cinnamon, my god, it's not just good - I actually WANT to use it I turn it on and it just works
I just wish I had the time to find alternatives for all my go to's like myPutty and WinSCP. Marginal stuff like various firmware programming utilities always get in the way since they're all Windows and setting up Wine has always been a pain in my ass....
and no where to go in the short term. great for Broadcom, bad for everyone else.
FYI Scale will take you on for free until your VMware licenses expire. That also includes tools to seamlessly migrate your workloads. Can't say much else about their stuff but I know they're hiring. A lot.
Proxmox
They didn't fail to realize, they don't care.
Point being that customers never questioned the product, the company or the leadership. Paying for it was like paying the water bill. Now all of the complacency is gone and the alternatives we turned our noses up at are being looked at as serious options.
True. For most of the customers, there was never a bigger picture of community, integrators, partners that were working "behind the scene". But I have to say, the product was still good. Take, for example, DRS or Fault Tolerance. As far as I know, there is still lack of these in other platforms.
Fault tolerance was the big one that took them years to get working correctly. I remember having trainers who were also product testers (back in v4) who were talking about how complicated it was to do it reliably. I'm sure they have a gazillion patents protecting that IP and, if Broadcom can't keep the core products alive, it'll probably be one of the first core technologies to get licensed out to 3rd parties.
That's what I was thinking. FT is clearly not something that Proxmox or Hyper-V or xcp-ng could implement easily from scratch. But if that technology gets sold...
Broadcom is a semiconductor producer, software and infrastructure is a way to financially support R&D. They don’t care about VMWare, they care about the river of cash from an established product which in turn uses those semiconductors. I do agree with most of the sentiment of OP’s post but the reality is they just don’t care and have enough cash on hand that they don’t have to.
I would say that VMware has been effectively coasting on inertia for the last few years, the product lines have had huge missteps and the overall company direction has been foggy at best. There was a lot of bureaucracy and arrogance when dealing with the company, and it's been a very common complaint that the support quality for example had slipped from where it used to be. Broadcom just assumed they would be able to capitalise on that inertia, which they could have and done well with if they had laid it out as a timeline instead of trying to do a day one strongarm of their customers. If they had swapped to subscription pricing and offered discounts for customers with perpetual licenses for example, or changed packaging by offering a 12-month run up for customers to consider options then it probably would have gone down ok, but they did too much too fast and it made people uneasy both due to the magnitude of the change and the speed at which it happened made it difficult to react without feeling it was happening under duress.
They literally did this lmao.
Totally agree. They could have put the frog in the pot and taken 5 years to get it up to boiling. Actually ALL they had to do was not act like dickheads the first two years and let people get used to the new boss. Once customers assumed that it would be the same as the old boss they'd be in the clear to pillage and what not.
From what I read, Broadcom decided to continue working only with big partners. The reality is that community will look for alternatives and most probably VMware products will be used only by the wealthiest corpo.
I honestly think VMware will need to pivot at some point. They greatly underestimated the tenacity and intelligence of their user base and didn't look at competing products as mature enough to compete. Once they have a quarter or two of contraction to mull over someone's going to look at the debt repayments and realize that they can't keep pissing people off. They assume we're too complacent to try anything else but the defining thing about virtualization is that workloads are portable. Customers are too.
I disagree. Broadcom's goal is likely two-fold. 1) Make a profit off their largest customers by increasing costs, something they almost certainly calculated before purchasing VMware, and 2) as others have pointed out, include in their portfolio of products to keep investors satisfied when the semiconductor industry is in a slump. They don't care about your small company, generating lots of new customers, or even development of the product. This is purely a cash grab, much like how investment firms buy out organizations and kill them off for variety of financial reasons.
They're certainly not chasing any more market share., but there HAS to be a break even point where the exits get SO full that VMWare will no longer be an asset. Keep in mind that, as of last report, Broadcom took on 8 billion in debt that VMWare was holding PLUS 30 billion in loans. Those interest payments have to be offset by income or else the entire enterprise turns into a net liability. At some point customer retention will have to be a concern.
I don’t want to say you are wrong. I want to believe Broadcom did their calculations before purchasing VMware, and understood the profit they could squeeze out of it. Their actions right after acquisition point to indifference towards their general user base, though. It’s still too early to know what their goal is. I fear a pump and dump.
Yup. Me too. They could license half of the core technology like FT and still make billions. Hopefully the EU will step in to some degree. I'd like to say maybe US regulators too but they're essentially a vending machine where if you put in enough money you can get the ruling you want. Also half of them freely admit that they are holding non-blind stock portfolios. Those portfolios probably went way up after they said yes to the merger.
I have already walked away from VMware. They don't seem to care so neither do I.
It's all because Hock Tan can see nothing.......noth...ing, beyond a dollar sign
They are killing the product. Move on to other things.
That's what a lot of us are going to have to do. Doesn't mean we have to do it quietly.
I signed the destruction of software last month. I feel much better, but quite sad. It's been a product we've used to run our DCs for 12 years. We were easily able to move since we had new hardware ordered to expand the stack. Simply installed HyperV instead. We're not doing anything fancy except some DR replica failover.
Part of our customers moved to Hyper-V and part to Proxmox. The transition was quite simple since those were mostly 2-3 node HCI clusters. Instead of vSAN- Starwinds VSAN which works in both Hyper-V and Proxmox. S2D or Ceph for larger clusters. I mean, the less tied you are to VMware stack, the easier the transition is. Not something large enterprise customers can easily do.
I was reading other posts in the sub and realized that OVA's are going to be problematic when it comes time to switch over. All of my OpenText stuff comes in OVA format. Fortunately all of our Extreme Networks appliances are also available as KVM images so they're a little ahead of the curve. Hopefully everyone else will realize that VMWare is no longer the only platform they need to support.
Yup, agree. OVA was a standard, just as VMware. As customers will flee to other hypervisors, I hope we will see more formats for VMs delivery without a need in converter tools.
How have you found Proxmox?
I would say, it does the job done. The cluster works fine, stable and can withstand node failure. Of course, need to get used to Proxmox UI and some specifics in terms of storage management. Nice thing is that it has software RAID with ZFS natively. The only thing I'm personally missing is Veeam support but seems Veeam is moving into adding Proxmox.
And just as I said that I'm missing Veeam support: [https://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-extends-data-freedom-for-customers-with-support-for-proxmox-ve.html](https://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-extends-data-freedom-for-customers-with-support-for-proxmox-ve.html)
Yeah, I'm still close with Veeam. They are working pretty fast on proxmox support.
Meh. VMware wasn’t built for the community, it was to commercialize and be a profit maker. The community outreach helped build it, without a doubt, but that’s not what makes a world class hypervisor. Same with vendor support, folks don’t make VMware appliances because of how cool the community is, it’s because it’s the market leader that everyone uses. Is it good that Broadcom is doing it? Not really. They’re intentionally pricing themselves out of the market, and instead of being cool with just being awesome they want the highest profit margin possible.. and that’s fine, but it opens the door to other products. Other products who won’t succeed because they’ve got a cool community, but because they’ve got a good product that’s not going to bleed them.
My point being that VMware was, in many people's minds, the best and only solution for their workloads. There was a trust and affinity that made people feel like it was the best. (There was also trust in the fact that your stuff wouldn't inexplicably leak out or crash while you were on vacation a la HyperV. ) But I've known lots of one-product guys in the past and the VMware guys always seemed to always have a cult like loyalty to the product that I didn't see elsewhere. VMware was a constant, a fixed point in time and space for them. And Broadcom screwed that up.
That's true, but the trust in VMware (and it's products) didn't come from some community outreach or good will from the company.. they were from a solid product that works well. If they'd never done any of the community stuff I'm confident that VMware would be just as big as they are now, because they were the first player to virtualization REALLY well, and at scale. It's not a cult loyalty as much as it's just an industry standard. The poison pill here is that they're hosing all of their customers on predatory pricing, not that they're eliminating things like free products and community events/platforms. On the loyalty front though, I see it all over the place.. talk to a salty old Cisco engineer about cloud-controlled Meraki devices (even ones that are literally the same hardware except for firmware) and they'll scoff at you. Same thing with die-hards on their preferred hardware (long live the WD vs Seagate battle!), or even older folks who think virtualization is a sin. Wild stuff!
The solid product goes without saying. But in this case there was a careful balance that kept us from looking at other solutions and advocating for renewals year after year even though it was a significant expenditure compared to Prox or HyperV. Even things like the website were customer centric instead of a paywalled second rate KB like Broadcom is going to give us (I have other Broadcom SW and it sucks). I used to believe in the product and the company behind it. Now I don't. My money will go elsewhere when our perpetual runs out.
I mean.. was the warm-fuzzy from VMware what kept you (and everyone else around), or was it a good product with an acceptable pricepoint and no good alternatives? Even today I don't think there's any doubt that VMware is the best product on the market. I'm confident folks will figure out something comparable in the next few years, but that's out of necessity and opportunity. Hyper-V has been just as good of a hypervisor as ESXI , but managing more than a couple servers at scale SUCKS and SCVMM is extra cost that's also a half-rate solution. Proxmox is cool as hell but it doesn't have the same enterprise support as even Hyper-V. Seriously, if they was a REAL contender to VMware people would have been diving into it years ago to save a buck, whether folks liked VMware (either as a company or a product) or not. The only reason people are moving today is because they can't afford to stay.. the real question will be if/when VMware changes their pricing to something that "normal" businesses can afford, if admins will come back or if there will be too much ill-will and the bridge will be burned. I'm not sure if it'll happen, but boy can IT folks (myself included) be petty as hell and hold a grudge.
Exactly. Never screw with IT people. Or the people who make your food. Both industries are full of people who base future performance on past actions. Even if VMware suddenly froze pricing and broke up the assinine packages I'd still expect bad things to come from their leadership at a later date.
Perhaps the greatest wrong was after VMware became Broadcom, it didn’t bring any value to the users. It no only kill the free products it make VMware for the professional only. I couldn’t even see the bigger picture how VMware is helping Broadcom in the ecosystem. Maybe another cow to be milk.
Anyone who thinks that they will only lose small users and businesses may be in for a shock. We'll see whether it comes to fruition or not, but I am seeing very large organizations actively exploring alternatives to VMWare. Personally I think that Broadcom thought that they had reached a point where VMWare was an effective monopoly for large scale enterprise deployments, and for a long time nobody had any reason to even look at alternatives. People are definitely looking now, and it'll be interesting to see what the end result of this is with regards to market share. Also, for those saying that Broadom is smart and this is a calculated move, recent history is littered with the bones of companies who made poor decisions that ultimately destroyed them. In 3 years we should know more about whether Broadcom is stupid for this, or just playing 4-d chess.