Broadcom / VMware debacle

[jasonede]

That information was meant to be out the start of this week, but I've heard nothing yet. I suspect it's going to be a big jump in cost.

[MaartenA]

Still unknown is what happens to smaller VCSPs who don't meet that 3500 core minimum.

Previously they billed points per RAM utilization. Now they've flipped it to billing on (host) CPU Cores.

Those with 3500 cores must whitelabel VCSP to the smaller ones.

[Origin 2000]

Today 1.2M$ , what was previous request? Just to put in perspective their greed

Marco

1.2M$ is the start price... prior it was ~300$. Yes it was threehundred $ for the 360 Point contract.

Regards,
Joerg

[mattiamigliorati]

On a final note, I find it ironic that VMware may have finally persuaded us to move to a hybrid cloud, and now they likely won't be part of it.

Thank you all for sharing your opinion about this useful topic.
Let me say just one thing:
Seeing a company like VMware losing the Cloud train, when they built the fundamentals of it and now they lose products and customers (?!!)

Does anyone else is starting to think that this isn't just ironic, but a clear plan to "shutdown" on-prem to let the cloud survive (because in my opinion cloud would just be a small part of the market).

[hoFFy]

As a service provider with a strong will to sell every product as a managed service we had some trouble with the licensing of Veeam, no one was able to clearly answer our questions or was able to make the billing as easy as possible for us, therefore we moved away nearly all of our customers from Veeam to another solution. From the technical perspective I was very sad about it, because I loved Veeam like everyone else as an simple "setup and run" solution, with a lot of more benefits like SureBackup, Replication, Application Item restore and so on, but from my perspective as being the manager for our technical department too, we needed a simple solution that had nearly the same features as Veeam, as we were using only a small subset of all the features Veeam had, and needed to have immutable backups sent to Wasabi. That being said, I'm still reading the forums and no one says we will never come back to Veeam with our customers. But for the moment, we are completly into VM Backup from Hornetsecurity (formerly Altaro). I hope they, or Veeamm will be supporting Proxmox soon, because I love FOSS and its Made in Germany as I am too
But for the moment we are planing to move all customers to Hyper-V if they are not willing to pay the new prices for VMware. We had the first offers and customers would have had to pay a lot more for their vSphere licenses. We are also planing to investigate if Storage Spaces Direct might be an alternative for our customers that are using Datacore for their storage.
Does anyone know if there is ANY third party backup solution which is already supporting proxmox, has a MSP-friendly licensing and is able to do immutable cloud backups without the need for extra hardware?

[UAPResearcher]

Another Player in the virtual world would be Inuvika. We looked into them and ran testing for 4 months on a virtualized app platform. Unfortunately, the client bailed on it due to cost, and it wasn't that high. They had a budget, but unfortunately, they went back to terminal servers. We found the cost to be about 10.00 per workstation and once we had all the applications set up, it was seamless and fast. We tested using two Cisco UCs 240's running Windows 2019 server and the Virtual Env. Worked flawlessly, we did have some kinks like any new setup to work out but the apps ran like a champ, and licensing was way cheaper than VMW Horizon. If you are looking to move away from the new outrageous pricing set by VMware check out Inuvika. Little PSA, I don't work for Inuvika, I loved the product and looking to help others save money and kick VMW to the curb.

M.

[JamesNT]

For those of you who are so in love with VMWare, you may wish to really give Hyper-V a second chance.

* Both platforms have their issues. I would argue you are so accustomed to VMWare's problems you don't even notice them anymore. But they are there.
* You have to purchase the Windows license, anyway. Why add more cost/complexity?
* Veeam is very happy with Hyper-V.
* Hyper-V Replica == cheap redundancy.

James

[MPECSInc]

HV is not an alternative for me that I would like to start over with now. Microsoft is no longer interested in on-premises products, there is no significant further development of HV.
Proxmox also feels like it has been treading water for a long time, maybe the problems with VMware and encouragement from people desperately looking for a VMware alternative could make a difference.
If Oracle is the best alternative for software that has become too expensive, it should be clear how serious the situation is.

Bernd

FUD. Pure FUD.

Microsoft is fully invested in on-premises products. The upcoming Windows Server 2025 shows that very clearly as the Azure Stack HCI (on-premises Azure integrated) and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D on-premises) code is coming together.

We're an all Microsoft House and have been since Longhorn. We stake our business and our client's businesses on the solution stacks we deploy which are entirely Microsoft Hyper-V/S2D based.

On-Premises all the way here and have not stopped just because vendors say cloud is better.

EDIT: And based on that code change for the upcoming version I think it will be one of the best selling Windows Server versions short of Small Business Server 2003 that absolutely rocked for sales.

[jasonede]

Although this won't affect backup as ESXi had to be licensed anyway, it seems like broadcom have also dropped free ESXi version. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518

[Steve-nIP]

FUD. Pure FUD.

Microsoft is fully invested in on-premises products. The upcoming Windows Server 2025 shows that very clearly as the Azure Stack HCI (on-premises Azure integrated) and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D on-premises) code is coming together.

We're an all Microsoft House and have been since Longhorn. We stake our business and our client's businesses on the solution stacks we deploy which are entirely Microsoft Hyper-V/S2D based.

On-Premises all the way here and have not stopped just because vendors say cloud is better.

EDIT: And based on that code change for the upcoming version I think it will be one of the best selling Windows Server versions short of Small Business Server 2003 that absolutely rocked for sales.

What if you have traditional infrastructure for storage and have no use for hyperconverged infrastructure? That would require a total refresh.

[tyler.jurgens]

I'm not sure Azure Stack HCI is the answer here. People like VMware because it was flexible - you could use your old SAN, or build you own SAN or whatever you wanted for storage. VMware simply provided the Hypervisor (and of course HCI if you wanted it with vSAN, and all the other VMware products as well). It was really flexible. While HCI is nice, I feel it holds back adoption for some companies (Nutanix still only has 2% of the on premises hypervisor market share), which makes me wonder just how well forcing the entire VMware suite onto people will work in the long run.

Azure Stack is also often 'too big' for many customers. Not to mention, as much as people grumble (correctly) about VMware support, it is still far better than Microsoft support.

[MPECSInc]

What if you have traditional infrastructure for storage and have no use for hyperconverged infrastructure? That would require a total refresh.

Why? There are ways to migrate VMware VMs over to Hyper-V.

It really depends on the existing setup, VM saturation levels, and storage configuration.

It's not that difficult depending on those variables.

[MPECSInc]

I'm not sure Azure Stack HCI is the answer here. People like VMware because it was flexible - you could use your old SAN, or build you own SAN or whatever you wanted for storage. VMware simply provided the Hypervisor (and of course HCI if you wanted it with vSAN, and all the other VMware products as well). It was really flexible. While HCI is nice, I feel it holds back adoption for some companies (Nutanix still only has 2% of the on premises hypervisor market share), which makes me wonder just how well forcing the entire VMware suite onto people will work in the long run.

Azure Stack is also often 'too big' for many customers. Not to mention, as much as people grumble (correctly) about VMware support, it is still far better than Microsoft support.

One can utilize a Hyper-V cluster in a traditional SAN setting. That hasn't changed at all.

[Gostev]

Interesting details on the new VMware licensing > https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/95927
Like a minimum of 16 cores always licensed irrespective of how many cores CPU actually has...

[Steve-nIP]

Why? There are ways to migrate VMware VMs over to Hyper-V.

It really depends on the existing setup, VM saturation levels, and storage configuration.

It's not that difficult depending on those variables.

Yes, but not Azure Stack HCI, which is where Microsoft's investment will be going. I doubt they'll invest much time in the standard hyper-v tools and make them as good as VMware's.

[andreash]

We have just received quotes for what VMWare thinks are the alternative products for vSphere Essentials (non-Plus), i.e. the product for the small scale shops.
Over 5 years the costs will increase by a factor of 5.5 at least, depending on the number of cores. And we have many customers who run their licenses for much longer than that.

Always been strong in favour of VMware as a stable basis for virtualization, but this does not work out.

We started out with ESX 2 and it is very sad to see one of the pioneers of virtualisation going that route.

[brasmussen]

You may also want to check out Oracle Linux KVM. This looks to be the direct continuation of Red Hat Virtualization. Remember back when Red Hat dropped a ball on RHV, I immediately predicted that some other major vendor will pick one up, because "the sacred place is never empty". And Oracle did just that.

Veeam will support Oracle Linux KVM in the next immediate update of our RHV backup capability, which will also be rebranded accordingly.

Any estimates for when this new version of RHV is planned for release?

[Gostev]

In just a few weeks, it's in the final testing cycle already.

[SKratzTS]

You may also want to check out Oracle Linux KVM. This looks to be the direct continuation of Red Hat Virtualization. Remember back when Red Hat dropped a ball on RHV, I immediately predicted that some other major vendor will pick one up, because "the sacred place is never empty". And Oracle did just that.

Veeam will support Oracle Linux KVM in the next immediate update of our RHV backup capability, which will also be rebranded accordingly.

Ugh, Oracle was the first company to embrace the "purchase and gut" technique of making money in the tech sector. While it makes sense for Veeam to branch out to other hypervisors, I know a LOT of IT pros that would turn away from a free 5kilo gold bar if it was stamped "Oracle."

[Gostev]

Well, the data sheet says:

Oracle Linux KVM and Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager provide a modern,
open source, high performance, zero licensing cost alternative to
proprietary server virtualization solutions.

Seems they make money strictly off of Support on this one.

[EricinIT]

In just a few weeks, it's in the final testing cycle already.

Will Veeam require the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager or be able to connect to hosts running Oracle KVM directly?

Eric

[nathano]

the Oracle option is interesting and from what I could find, the support prices are reasonable as well..

[PTide]

Will Veeam require the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager or be able to connect to hosts running Oracle KVM directly?

It will work the same way as our Backup for RHV works - Virtualization Manager is required.

Thanks!

[Kawish]

Anyone heard VergOS ? Verge.io

[nd39475]

Strongly recommend end-users compare "Standard" versus "Foundation" (VMware). Our quote was automatically based on Foundation, which was exorbitantly overpriced. After comparing versions, we re-quoted for "Standard" which is in-line with our historic Enterprise plus pricing.
The only thing I'm awaiting is clarity on "DRS" as we still want/need "Automated Load Balancing".

[coolsport00]

Still unknown is what happens to smaller VCSPs who don't meet that 3500 core minimum.

Previously they billed points per RAM utilization. Now they've flipped it to billing on (host) CPU Cores.

Good ask Tyler!

[tyler.jurgens]

Looks like CSPs that are smaller than 3500 cores are going to need to use a larger CSP (Premier or Pinnacle Partners) that offer White Label services. This means smaller CSP's usage counts towards the larger CSP's core count. So there is a path forward, just different than partnering with VMware directly.

Lots of changes coming down the pipe for all customers, CSPs and direct customers.

[jasonede]

Also previously partners that qualified for internal use licensing or not for retail licensing might not be able to get it again.

[nathano]

Strongly recommend end-users compare "Standard" versus "Foundation" (VMware). Our quote was automatically based on Foundation, which was exorbitantly overpriced. After comparing versions, we re-quoted for "Standard" which is in-line with our historic Enterprise plus pricing.
The only thing I'm awaiting is clarity on "DRS" as we still want/need "Automated Load Balancing".

https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMwar ... -p/3011858

[tyler.jurgens]

That shouldn't be a surprise. Broadcom isn't changing what is included with each license. Eg: Standard Licensing features remain the same. Enterprise Plus licensing features remain the same. What they are changing is the bundling of said licenses. Before you could pick and choose with great granularity what additional licenses you get (Don't want vSAN, don't buy it, etc). Whereas now you get a bundle (don't want vSAN, well you get it anyway).

The choice becomes whether you're going to lean into it and consume the features you're going to be paying for, or not. If you don't, it makes more sense to migrate to another hypervisor, which has its own costs and implications.