Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

> A bill from Broadcom for ten times the sum it previously paid for software licenses was one of them. Beeks's customers also told it that VMware was no longer seen as essential infrastructure.

No real surprise there. As long as the bill for infrastructure remains sane, nobody is going to put in the effort to change out important parts of your arrangement, instead sticking with a "Well, we know this works, and we know how to deal with it..." approach.

If they'd raised the bill somewhat - 50%, 100%... people probably would have stuck with it. But to jack it an order of magnitude, well, now it's worth putting the engineers on the project to find a cheaper solution (that may very well be better - virtio vs what VMWare is using... I certainly prefer virtio for most of my storage and networking needs).

> The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling.

I mean, the writing was on the wall, you don't buy out a product and jack the prices 10x if you plan to actually support it. It's pure "value extraction" at that point. Sad, really, because VMWare has a lot of nice features behind it and has been a well thought out bit of virtualization software throughout the years.

I had the displeasure of having to update a VMWare install on a laptop recently (VMWare Player had been perfectly fine, which was discontinued, Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it, and I just want to run the VM I use to talk to my car, please...). I can't say I'll be considering them for anything going forward.

> The tech team also warned management that the quality of VMware's support services and innovation were falling.

It's worth pointing out that VMware haven't been innovating on their core product for many years. The last major feature they added was vTPM, in 2018.

We're almost in 2025, and they still don't have an identity and metadata service available that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs. AWS had this in 2012, and it's honestly embarrassing that VMware have done nothing about it.

And support has been atrocious since at least 2015. I remember when I had to debug myself driver issues, because the people at VMware put a network card with a broken driver on their "Hardware Compatibility List", and then played dumb for a year of reports that the bloody driver is broken. The hosts kept crashing, or even more fun, silently stopping to process network traffic. And of course nobody at VMware's or Dell's support had any idea what's happening, even though there were abundant reports all over the internet and various forums about this.

> Workstation is now free for personal use, but you have to register with your full physical address to download it

Next time you need to do this, you can also choco install vmwareworkstation :) if you have Chocolatey.

That appears to only work on Windows as the host OS - I was running Windows as a guest, for some GM specific software. I normally use KVM and the RedHat VirtIO drivers for running Windows, but for some reason the VCX Nano doesn't seem to like the USB drivers in that configuration, and VMWare works.

I posted this link in another thread, but AT&T claimed that their VMWare costs were going up 1050%, so that tenfold increase lines up with this one.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/broad...

Pat Gelsinger - CEO of VMware 2012-2021.

I have read few comments that he wasn't great at it (no personal knowledge). Combined with Intel stuff...

> Workstation is now free for personal use,

It's now free period, even for commercial use, and even if you want to pay for support they won't take your money anymore once existing contracts expire. In other words Workstation is probably going on life support and won't have any significant development going forwards.

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...

> that can attest VM's identity in front of third parties, or any way to securely introduce secrets into VMs

The last thing I want is for a hypervisor to handle some secrets or manage identities.

This is OS/app level job, not a HV one.

AFAIK they also discontinued VMX in Workstation, so next versions are just going to use KVM?

My understanding was that he did a very good job. There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose.

> There's a reason VMWare has all these customers for Broadcom to now lose.

Inertia? I was a part time vSphere admin at an MSP 2015-2022 and the solution was overwhelmingly underwhelming, with lots of bugs, rough edges, and some of the worst APIs I've ever seen. There was almost no innovation in that time period, and they even managed to bungle an REST API (which was billed as some sort of revolution, in 2015/2016).

And how does the OS/app prove who it is? How do you get the secret zero inside? You can orchestrate something with your config management tool, but there's no nice way of doing it without having to also handle rotation afterwards.

It works marvelously in AWS, GCP, Azure. It allows for an extremely secure and low maintenance solution to that existential issue.

It's a perfect thing for the platform to handle for you.