Broadcom buying VMware - thoughts?

[mikeely]

I'm sure most folks reading this have heard the news, but if not here's one source:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/27/ ... criptions/
So, fellow VMWare admins and users, what are you hearing? Anybody with some inside scoop? Really want to know what to plan for here.

[PetrM]

Hi Mike,

We continue to work closely with VMware and do not expect any changes in our cooperative process. Also, no changes are expected on products integration side.

Thanks!

[chris.childerhose]

This is great to hear from the Veeam standpoint.

[Moopere]

From that Register article:

"focus on rapid transition to subscriptions' for VMware"

They want to go subscription. Wow, just wow. Depending on how that goes I suspect MS won't be far behind.

[mikeely]

Sure wish Citrix hadn't basically abandoned Xenserver.

[brendanb]

Check out XCP-NG as a supported alternative to Xenserver, that's where we are moving to if Vmware doesn't work out due to the subscription pricing going through the roof. We would have already moved if Veeam supported it....

[Ioannis.T]

based on the last 2 acquisitions I would expect 2 things
1. Prices will go up.
2. Support and/or quality of the product will go down
Hopefully the second will only last a few months up to a year, since I believe the complains from customers will flood the team, and if a couple of the big ones jump ship they will forced to get back on track.

Maybe, they learned their lesson from Symantec, CA, and they will not repeat it this time. Let's see how it plays out

[Moopere]

Subscription pricing _always_ means cost goes up over product lifecycle. But even taking that as a given, how would VMWare start to phone home to ensure subscription licensing is valid? Some shops simply wouldn't allow that sort of communication, they'll have to move to a different product .. and these shops are most likely to be represented in the favoured 'whale' class of customer. I wonder what will happen if you fail authentication/validation? VMWare hosts will stop working? Any number of legitimate reasons a phone home might stop working.

[robnicholsonmalt]

>We continue to work closely with VMware and do not expect any changes in our cooperative process. Also, no changes are expected on products integration side.

Let's hope this is the case but history shows that the new owners just can't help themselves and will start to meddle.

[robnicholsonmalt]

>They want to go subscription. Wow, just wow. Depending on how that goes I suspect MS won't be far behind.

Microsoft is pretty much subscription already?

[AndyFearless]

Speaking as someone who just about survived the stunning array of stupidity and incompetence that was the Symantec merger, I'd be very afraid.

The worst tech merger i've seen in my life. They bought the Symantec enterprise AV line but with no ability to sell licencing for it. They had to give all of my clients 18 months of free licencing - that's how long it to fix - but only every 3 months, and you had to ring up to extend it, for every client, all 20-odd of them. Then when we could finally buy licences, instead of applying it to the account with the email address and account number provided by me, they created a new account with the same email address and put them in that instead. Took 2 months to re-licence some of them. Stunning idiocy.

Two years down the line and buying licencing still means they add the licences to the wrong account for a few of them. I'm giving up this year and moving everyone to Sophos.

[AndyFearless]

Hi Mike,

We continue to work closely with VMware and do not expect any changes in our cooperative process. Also, no changes are expected on products integration side.

Thanks!

Good luck with that!

[Moopere]

>They want to go subscription. Wow, just wow. Depending on how that goes I suspect MS won't be far behind.

Microsoft is pretty much subscription already?

Its certainly their dream. But office 365 and Azure aside ... no? Activation is a thing, but after that I can't think of any core MS products that I use which require a phone-home to keep working.

I might be jumping to the worst conclusions on how VMWare will implement subscription. They might be quite fair and reasonable about it and only require authentication say once every contracted 'subscription' period ... which could be years in length. We will see.

[rciscon]

I'm sure most folks reading this have heard the news, but if not here's one source:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/27/ ... criptions/
So, fellow VMWare admins and users, what are you hearing? Anybody with some inside scoop? Really want to know what to plan for here.

We've spoken with our local VMware rep, and he states that there shouldn't be any changes for at least 2 years, and that any changes will be communicated in advance.

We are on the brink of moving forward with a Disaster Recovery initiative and we had considered Zerto--until they got bought out by HPE. We are now considering VMware's SRM or Cloud Disaster Recovery--but the acquisition by Broadcom makes this a bit more interesting.

[david.matthewson]

Speaking as someone who just about survived the stunning array of stupidity and incompetence that was the Symantec merger, I'd be very afraid.

and I thought we were the only shop to hit by this level of incompetence! Pls don't do the same to VMware.. (we are already looking at ProxMox..)

[david.matthewson]

Or ProxMox which looks promising..https://www.proxmox.com/en/ Downside is that Veeam is tricky to use with it...:{

[kjstech]

Im looking at XCP-NG

[Matts N]

Subscription pricing _always_ means cost goes up over product lifecycle. But even taking that as a given, how would VMWare start to phone home to ensure subscription licensing is valid? Some shops simply wouldn't allow that sort of communication, they'll have to move to a different product .. and these shops are most likely to be represented in the favoured 'whale' class of customer. I wonder what will happen if you fail authentication/validation? VMWare hosts will stop working? Any number of legitimate reasons a phone home might stop working.

As far as I understand it for now, you connect vCenter to a cloud service, which monitors licensing and adjusts any discrepancies in over/under utilization. One thing with this is that you cannot have vCenter in linked mode, since each vCenter itself needs to connect to this cloud service. The visibility into all vCenters is then moved to said cloud service, instead of using linked mode.

Personally, this worries me. I have a number of customers that are black sites and/or not allowed to use ANY cloud services for legal/integrity reasons. Really hope VMware has planned for those customers too.

[voyager529]

We too are getting a bit nervous about VMWare. Our clients are all small enough to be set with VSphere Essentials (i.e. enough VMWare to run Veeam), but I wouldn't put it past Broadcom to either discontinue the product or turn it into an annual subscription. Hyper-V isn't much of a bargain either at that size; Windows Server Standard has the "2 OSE" limit that, while not technically enforced, requires additional Windows Server licenses for each additional 2 VMs, even if they're running a different OS, so that gets expensive pretty quick...on top of their additional licenses for >16 cores.

The takeaway here, Veeam, is that it seems that there's room for a third competitor in the hypervisor market. Proxmox is a pretty good contender, others have mentioned XCP-NG as an option, Bhyve keeps iterating...and one of the things that is super difficult about moving to any of these hypervisors is the absence of Veeam support. I know that some rando comes up in the forums from time to time asking about support for these environments, and "we have no plans to support $HYPERVISOR at this time" understandably tends to be the open-and-shut answer.

if I may be so bold to say, friends at Veeam...this is the time to revisit that stance. Over the next few years, Broadcom will do what they have historically done: raise prices, slash support, move core features to higher priced tiers, and make security patches "when they get around to it"...i.e. literally everything we *don't* want in a software vendor. Some VMWare customers will eat the increases, but others will move away as the squeeze becomes more painful than migrating. The folks on this forum would probably be thrilled to have Veeam support for their destination hypervisor (some may move to Hyper-V for that reason), but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised "Leaving VMWare" and "Leaving Veeam" end up being a single decision for many. To whatever extent a forum post can encourage consideration...please, PLEASE consider supporting a third hypervisor.

[Regnor]

@voyager529: Besides VMware and Hyper-V there are already 2 other solutions supported (or at least in beta): Nutanix AHV and Red Hat Virtualization

[Gostev]

I guess he meant a fifth

[Moopere]

Personally, this worries me. I have a number of customers that are black sites and/or not allowed to use ANY cloud services for legal/integrity reasons. Really hope VMware has planned for those customers too.

Yes, indeed. This is quite common and becoming more so.

Some decisions by big centralised providers of services over recent years to withdraw support (or just outright ban) specific customers should be a warning to all when thinking about platforms as a service.