Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

I already have. I was a perfectly happy VMware customer until Broadcom took over and fucked it all up. I still don’t have a license allocation for a product I paid for. Will never buy VMware/Broadcom again.

ETA: the context, for those who care, is VMware Workstation. VMware made that free for personal use right before the takeover, so Broadcom didn’t bother porting over the license database. If you have a pro/commercial key, make sure you back it up because Broadcom won’t help you recover it.

But if VMware is now free, why does this matter? Because the key words were “personal use.” They reserve the right to pull an oracle and hit your organization up with an audit and massive fees for that one guy that installed VMware workstation that one time.

We bought keys, but now Broadcom has no record of that. I’ve since switched all our virtualization scripts to use docker.

First we got VMware because systems were getting larger than the load we could push onto them. Then we got Hyper-V because it was free and VMWare was getting needy and expensive. Then we moved to the cloud because it was "cheaper". Then we ran Kubernetes on a cloud node because it was hard to manage the workloads. Now we are having cloud cost difficulties.

Hang on a minute... deep thought ... surely we fucked up somewhere?

Having already been thru the Symantec acquisition as soon as I heard Broadcom's name in connection to VMware I advised everyone I knew was using VMware to start looking for alternatives.

It's unclear to me how Broadcom can excel at apparent ineptitude so well. I assume the analysis I've read, that they want to shed all the legacy non-Fortune 100 Customers, is true.

Of course they're looking to move. They know they're going to get Broad-conned like the customers of every other company Broadcom has purchased.

It's extremely rare for an acquisition to benefit anyone but the acquirer. The acquisition is either to eliminate competitors, absorb proprietary tech and axe the product, or siphon off money for the larger org's coffers.

Most people don't buy a cow to benefit the cow. They either milk it or turn it into chops.

$myDayJob certainly is. I don’t really know if we’re a whale or not. We sure aren’t a minnow, though.

Former MSP I worked at is also looking to migrate customers off to something like Hyper-V or Nutanix. I told my old boss to hire a bunch of Linux gurus and go through the Proxmox partnership program and get certified. As much as people knock it for their support not really being ready for enterprise. I do think that proxmox is well suited to gain some of the market share.

I've been using it in my lab for the past few years without any major issues. Running an HA 3-node cluster. Only issue I ran into was when I kept getting kernel panic from an driver issues in my RAID card. But that really only affected me during reboots. Pinning to and older kernel worked. Oh and it was also because my RAID card is like 10 years old.

So HN - if you are moving off VmWare, what are you using?

Pretty sure every big org is looking to move off every big tech product, as part of the contract renewal negotiation dance.

Half of any enterprise software's customers say they're looking to move but most won't actually do it.

I've used Proxmox for home-lab stuff but anyone know how viable it is for SMB?

I would like to see the stats for Jira customers...

Broadcom is taking advantage of the fact that most CIOs are forced to be pretty spineless. If you are big and willing to badmouth then in public, they will come to the table. There was at least one US state that did so iirc.

Otherwise, pay the tax with minimum commit, and don’t allow creation of new VMs. they essentially created a business model that writes the justification for AWS or GCP.

When companies flip to rent extraction business models, you need to change how you treat the business relationship. VMWare is like an incandescent light bulb… if the cost of re-platforming and availability of resources makes it cost effective to move, you move.

Telecoms companies try not to be a cancer to society challenge (impossible level difficulty)

MBAs doing their thing. Nothing to see here.

sort of an obvious planted piece and i wouldn’t trust surveys provided by a competitor