this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Sure!
Here's more relatable analogy. Microsoft Office costs about $30/month per user for companies. For our example imagine Google Workspace doesn't exist. So the "default" office software of MS Office that nearly everyone uses is not cheap, but not expensive. Further, you don't buy MS Office from Microsoft directly, but through a partner that gives you other discounts and support. Now imagine that overnight Microsoft decides they're desolving their partner network and you have to buy MS Office directly from Microsoft and also starting tomorrow that MS Office now costs ten times as much at $300/month per user. Would everyone stop using MS Office? Eventually, but you've got business you need to do today. Your company can't even send email without Outlook, which is part of MS Office. So your company is BLEEDING money just paying for MS Office, and there's no good alternative. So you pay it for now. You try desperately to come up with a plan to use something else, but for now you're paying through the nose. Companies will take years to identify another product that replaces everything in the company that MS Office is used for and training the entire company to use and support this new product.
Replace the name Microsoft with Broadcom. Replace the name MS Office with VMware. This is what is happening and Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank.
Except companies are already jumping ship to other solutions. One very large company is moving thousands of VMs to an implementation of KVM, virtually eliminating the insane VM licensing.
Broadcom has all but admitted their own solution is inferior, by converting their workstation virtualization to KVM!
To Broadcom's credit, the writing was on the wall that versions of KVM would be eating their market over the next 10 years (for example, Proxmox), so they're getting all they can now before their corner on the market weakens.
Nobody was going to bother changing if they had been left alone. There would be a gradual shift to cloud native on new applications, but you underestimate the amount of time a company will stick with ancient technologies on a line of business app that works. Shit, Cobol programmers are still in demand.
Sure there are a few, but its unlikely that many large enterprises will be able to completely migrate away from VMware, evaluate and deploy ancillary support products for the alternate hypervisor, as well as retrain all their support staff inside of the time that their existing support contract expires. All but a lucky few that happened to negotiate a long multiyear support deal under the old licensing terms (and pricing) will be paying at least 1 year of expensive support renewals and more than likely more than one year.
Broadcom knows this and will make these companies bleed until they can migrate away.
This is what sucks about Broadcom. Vmware vSphere is still a good product with thousands of trained professionals available for hire to support it, and great third party support for things like backup and enterprise support services.
There was no such writing. Most large enterprises were just fine paying for VMware licensing under the old terms.
I like Proxmox, but it doesn't even provide half of all the features that vSphere does that are needed for large enterprises. Small shops with a few nodes and no HA requirement? Sure. Hundreds of ESX nodes and tens of thousands of VMs? That is just beyond Proxmox as it is today. Also, good luck hiring Proxmox trained staff. Large companies want ready pools of labor, and Proxmox doesn't have that market penetration today.
This is us. We have a heavy footprint with VMware and have been going over plans to switch since before the buyout. Sadly were not there yet but should be mostly migrated to something else by EOY 2025. Our issues come with some solutions we have in place for some complex situations that is taking a bit longer to test and have a working solution with the next company we pick.