I’ve been seeing a lot of doom and gloom about VMware. The cutting of services and licensing changes of the cost of core offerings are huge issues. Is anyone planning or budgeting to change to another hypervisor? If so what?
I work in sales. I don’t sell anything related to VMware directly but customers bring it up. They are looking at other alternatives. Not sure what changed In the last two weeks but there has been an uptick in my customers talking about it. It’s early stage, so they haven’t decided on the path but they’ve decided they need to leave.
Broadcom acquired VMware and has a reputation for making good value products into poor value product in the industry. They seem to be doing just that.
That was months ago. Two weeks ago all my customers seemed to come to the conclusion, it’s time to leave.
I would have planned to leave as soon as I heard the announcement. Broadcom just raises prices, cuts support unless you’re their target customers.
They canceled the ability to sell new licenses for all partners. For licenses ordered in time but not delivered before this it’s unknown whether you’ll get them. Their license activation portal went offline, so when you bought a license and got it, you couldn’t activate your software. Also they basically “fired” all of their partners and told them that they’re not eligible to offer VMWare hosting anymore unless they’re joining the new partner program and are accepted there. But it is unknown when the new partner program starts and what you hoops you have to jump through to get accepted.
So… they basically fucked most of their direct and indirect customers and didn’t provide a way forward while doing so. No wonder everyone mistrusts them now and is looking for an alternative
I work for Disney and we’re in the process of migrating all VMware boxes in our 3 data centers over to azure. We decided not to renew our contract with them. Guess it wasn’t just us?
Have your group ask microsoft what the charges for Azure will be for your year 3 year 4 and year 5 commitments.
100% sure the Azure rep will gag on whatever they have in their mouths at that moment and start deflecting. If MS can fuck the US Government in a 10yr Azure contract, odds are pretty high they’ll do the same to Disney.
Source: Our company bought into O365+Azure+ADFS at a good rate for 3yrs, then got burned by MS once the honeymoon was over. They’re not going to make it fun for you all once your contract ends.
I’m not affected by the change but I heard Proxmox and Xen brought up frequently as alternatives.
Of course there are always cloud providers but that’s not really a good option for many.
Proxmox is missing a lot of enterprise features. If you run a virtualized data center, it’s really not going to cut it. OTOH, if you are a small operation with just a handful of virtual servers, it might be “good enough”.
The obvious alternative was Hyper-V, but it looks like MS is already killing it to force people into Azure.
When you look at enterprise-level hypervisors, there really aren’t a lot of options.
What enterprise features is it missing? The only problem I see is the limited support plans.
The two big ones I see is no official vGPU support (you can get it to work unofficially but it’s not prod ready) and the clustering scheduler is still in active development while still missing several features that vSphere’s scheduler offers.
I feel like Broadcom is aiming for cloud-like pricing for on prem services with none of the other benefits inherent to an Azure or AWS deployment. Not exactly the way to hold onto clients.
I’m familiar with proxmox and the broader KVM ecosystem. I’m also a huge fan of Veeam, who have said they’re exploring support for proxmox. Shouldn’t be too difficult to implement, given they have a RHEL backup product already.
Exciting stuff.
I think Broadcom intends to dig VMware out of dept to turn it into a profitable company. This means killing off the smaller customers as 90% of the business comes from enterprises that will never switch to anything else no matter the cost.
PBS is an excellent backup solution. I wouldn’t let the lack of Veeam support on Proxmox hold you back.
Instead of veam there’s also https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server/overview
I manage 30 Esxi hosts with around 800 VMs currently on vSphere Enterprise licensing. Our company is preparing for the worst case by employing a 3yr plan involving:
- Upgrading all perpetual lics still under contract to vsphere 8
(So we can run on unsupported vsphere 8 for up to 3yrs. if needed or until a resolution is found)
- Assigning members from QC, Cyber security and Systems as an exploratory solutions planning group who report to the CIO and CTO.
(So we can explore different hybrid solutions, assign them for evaluation and give feedback based on those findings annually)
- Hiring a Reseller partner of ours to do an audit plus an impact analysis in moving our environment from VMware to one of the exploratory solutions planning group recommendations.
(My company fancies getting ‘non-biased’ opinions from external sources, so we tolerate it)
- Building active-active, multi -master, active-passive and active-failover hybrid solutions including those with SaaS vendors for our highest value systems.
(While expensive to do, this option gives us a clear nuclear level fuck you to VMware should pricing become too outrageous and we decide to pull out of renewal)
In the end, we will probably give VMware a 3yr probation period, regardless of cost and have a clear migratory path before that time should we decide that VMware’s TCO is no longer viable.
Unfortunately the boss man decided to stick with VMware instead of migrating to proxmox. Sadly there’s no good migration solutions for proxmox unless you’re ok with a lot of down time.
Maybe if they can make a live convert tool I can convince him to make the switch. But until we can get past the hurdle of converting everything painfully we’re stuck.
