Broadcom ends VMware perpetual license sales, testing customers and partners
Broadcom ends VMware perpetual license sales, testing customers and partners
Already-purchased licenses can still be used but will eventually lose support.
SaaS is a scam
Software as a scam
I think a lot of enterprises are going to look at RHEV and Proxmox now. Broadcom will squeeze so little out of VMware thinking they can convert per seat licenses, it's baffling to me why they decided to do this. Do all these companies want to spend $2 to make $1 all the sudden?
Watch: in a year they'll offload it to private equity.
I think a lot of enterprises are going to look at RHEV
I don't think so, because:
Development of RHV has ceased and as of August 2020 the product is now only receiving maintenance updates, with extended life phase updates provided until 2026.[8] The successor to RHV is Red Hat's OpenShift container platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Virtualization
Proxmox
I'm no expert btw, but from what I understand (from speaking with others and researching for my own homelab setup) is that LXD/Incus is now the preferred solution over Proxmox. LXD is faster, the CLI is very good, it has a huge library of ready to run Linux distro images which is convenient, and it runs on top of your favorite distro, which makes it easy to install/setup, more flexible, and more compatible (Proxmox runs an old and custom kernel, which may not be fully compatible with new hardware).
Watch: in a year they’ll offload it to private equity.
and that's the kiss of death for any company
Proxmox is a decent option, or just use kvm provisioning directly with ansible.
Proxmox is not a complete replacement for VMware. Proxmox still does not have a distributed resource scheduler or distributed power management for it's cluster which means the only time a VM will move between nodes is if a node goes down.
There's no official support for VDI within proxmox and all the third party tools are janky at best, definitely not ready for enterprise level deployments.
Nvidia does not officially support vGPUs on proxmox. You can get it working but it's definitely not something you'd want to run on production.
I get why enterprise likes VMWare but KVM isn’t harder to deal with. I’ve always worked at smaller companies so this isn’t an expert opinion. But I’ve always felt like at the infrastructure level, it ends up being cheaper to hire experts and run the open source solution (assuming it’s mature and at feature parity) than pay licensing and support fees.
An expert in one thing will usually add to your company in other ways too. Talent > “solutions” in the long run.
I learned years ago that buying something from a big company instead of using a free open source solution is about aoutsourcing responsibility. Its about being able to sue a company about damages instead of hiring reliable personell to run and write fixes for foss software. Also insurance is much easier.
Not that I follow that advice, my company is still 99% foss software.
Exactly. All enterprise software pricing is about liability and how much blame you can put on the software vendor when everything goes wrong.
Of course, your company's employees are still going to be the ones picking up the pieces but you get to tell your investors "actually it was VMWare's fault". And you can't do that with OSS, even if you're buying support.
Let me tell you about a large bank and two data centers operated using VMware and the type of talent the bank is able to hire and retain. A move away from VMware is a 5-year project involving hiring, retraining, design mistakes, budget overruns, and a lot of grey hair. The year was 2012. 7 years later, one DC converted to OpenStack, the project is shelved and the majority of th OpenStack DC gets converted back to VMware due to "OpenStack disaster."
I work in hosting. We mostly use Proxmox for our Hypervisors which is already a step up from "bare" KVM in regards to convenience/ease of use (especially for High availability scenarios and the like) We also run VMWare and while I don't love the "locked down you gotta do it the VMWare way" nature it's often so much easier and the HA is mich more convenient. Also it has proper functionality for custom resourcing/access/billing.
Say what? Going back to only KVM in modern DCs is some crazy talk. If your org is small enough that KVM is even remotely an option, then I'd recommend running a cost/benefit analysis on whether hosting a small server farm on prem is even worthwhile.
But when you're managing hundreds of servers with dozens of various purposes, FOSS solutions aren't always tenable. And not using a mature, feature complete virtualization platform is just straight up masochistic, not to mention potentially dangerous from a security standpoint.
I agree that talent > solutions, but if you want to retain that talent, you have to make their lives not miserable at work, which means sometimes having to purchase solutions to make their lives easier.
Small and medium (and even large) companies investing in talent instead of commercial solutions is the solution to improving FOSS. I know it has downsides, as you stated, but there are significant upsides. FOSS is cheaper than a custom solution, and the company only has to pay for the modifications it wants to see. The whole community then benefits from their hard work adding features and maintaining the software.
I'm not saying that it's the BEST idea for every company. All I'm saying is not to discount FOSS out of hand for these companies. There are significant advantages for companies that should be weighed against the cons. This kind of advocacy is also important in furthering the FOSS model.
Broadcom used to be a worthwhile company, but now their whole M.O. seems to be buying up mature solutions and price-gouging the companies that rely on those solutions. They sell off the parts they can't price gouge with and then the solutions stagnate. They did it with CA, and again with Symantec, and now it's VMware's turn.
Broadcom's business was making chips and this is a horizontal move into new territory. Baffling.
They paid $61B for it, they're going to do everything in the book to make it back.
They won't
They could kill VMware while trying though. Seeing a worthy competitor rise through the ashes would be nice.
I first deployed ESX back in 2003 and from then on I was a huge fan of VMware. So, watching Broadcoms changes unfold is a little sad.
What i really wanted to ask is, for meduim to large enterprises that want on-prem infrastructures what are their options nowadays? I don't work in this area any more so I'm out of touch.
Linux KVM. I've used it on bare metal production servers for years.
for meduim to large enterprises that want on-prem infrastructures what are their options nowadays?
Proxmox probably comes the closest, there's also...HyperV (gross)
Your option is Azure or AWS...
/s
The enshittifications will continue until morale improves
but just think of the brief moment of incredible profits before people migrate to other options.
I tasked my VAR to find out what our pricing is going to look like in 2024 when our support agreement is up. They said VMware is a mess right now, do t expect a response soon. I need time to migrate and decide if I’m sticking with on-prem or moving god damn workloads to some cloud. This is a fucking shitshow. I fucking hate shareholders.
decide if I’m sticking with on-prem or moving god damn workloads to some cloud
Well, if you really want to burn through a lot of money really fast, and don't want to think of any other option at all, then yeah.
In my experience, Citrix offers a pretty viable alternative with xen if you want to stay on-prem
Can you name one peer that manages Citrix hypervisor?
Good thing I just dumped them for proxmox.
Ah another company ruining the company they just acquired
Is anyone really shocked? They publicly stated months ago that 70% of VMware’s profits come from Fortune 500 companies and that’s what they would focus on.
We just renewed support for our socket based perpetual licences for 3 years. This gives us plenty of time to find an alternative solution.
I love VMware, but man are they being short sighted with this one.
I saw this starting to happen around 2 years ago when they first hinted at this purchase. Instantly bought proxmox licenses (which are very cheap, by the way, in case you need help convincing some management people) for our hypervisors and haven’t looked back since. Very satisfied, very glad I’m not a VMware shop anymore.
Anyone know if QEmu or any other solutions 3D support is near or as good as VMWare Workstation yet?
Gpu passthrough, if you can do that will always be most performant.
If you want the qemu/kvm equivalent of what vmware workstation does, than look into virtualgl, which is very good (a wine port on android uses this to get good performace without direct access to host hardware), but it still may not be everything you want.
Ideally what VMWare Workstation does would be preferable as the stuff isn't like super heavy 3D but it needs a little more than what CPU alone provides.
Not directly my experience, but qemu/KVM is used for VM-gaming with near bare metal performance
That requires GPU passthrough. Totally different ballgame in complexity and experience.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Broadcom has moved forward with plans to transition VMware, a virtualization and cloud computing company, into a subscription-based business.
However, in May, soon after announcing its plans to acquire VMware, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan signaled a “rapid transition” to subscriptions.
For years, software and even hardware vendors and investors have been pushing IT solution provider partners and customers toward recurring revenue models.
VMware's blog this week listed "continuous innovation" and "faster time to value" as customer benefits for subscription models but didn't detail how it came to those conclusions.
A CRN report in late November pointed to VMware partners hearing customer concern about potential price raises and a lack of support.
Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, which reportedly made $30 million in VMware-tied revenue in 2022, told the publication that partners and customers were experiencing "significant concern and chaos” around VMware sales.
The original article contains 711 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!