Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

They are not the only ones. The company I work for uses a LOT of VMware. Mind you, VMWare has ALWAYS been expensive. To the point that in a lot of cases, you can end up spending more on VMWare than the hardware that runs it. I long ago crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion that unless your workload really does require the kind of exceptional storage, networking, and HA integration that VMware (claims to) provide, you are better off using an open source solution for your VM infra and hiring a couple of extra engineers to manage it.

When it was time for our contract to renew a few months back, our licensing and support quote was 3x the previous year and Broadcom would not budge, even a little. They said take it or leave it. Well, we left it.

There is a big internal effort now to get us off of VMware and onto Kubernetes and OpenShift. Our whole fleet of VMware is still running but we're on borrowed time as we're on our own if any major technical issue comes up.

OpenShift costs as much as post hike VMware

Not necessarily. Red Hat negotiates prices with customers. If your company is paying as much for OpenShift as they would/were for VMware, they need to hire better negotiators.

Hmm no. My $dayjob got quoted a nice price only for them to rug pull later. Also it’s not Red Hat anymore, it’s IBM.

Opex is more though IME with OpenShift

How good is VMware anyway? I’ve only ever “used” VMware in the consumer use case… I think it was a demo version (maybe there was a free student version over a decade ago?). Anyway, it seemed much worse than VirtualBox (the options were less intuitive and the GUI was ugly) but then I don’t think I the user they were targeting (student playing around in Linux).

VMware is amazing. There's a reason everyone flocks to it.

I didn't see the numbers but at our company the savings of moving virt to OpenShift from VMWare were (allegedly) significant. Plus there was something about not having to renew subs for RHEL on the VMs that would be a cost savings as well. So I guess it depends.

> the options were less intuitive and the GUI was ugly

Oh I see you tried our enterprise software. Welcome!

VMware is bananas. One console runs thousands of VMs across hundreds of physicals in dozens of data centres. VMs can, and do, move around at will thanks to vMotion. Need to upgrade this physical host? Just vMotion its guests somewhere else.

Oh and it’ll replicate all of this for you, live. So if one half of your data hall goes down, it doesn’t matter.* Your users don’t even notice.

And many, many other features that Virtualbox can’t touch.

(*Well, someone like me is having a bad day, but you know.)

Was le cloud a la AWS evaluated?

The plan is to go native with our IaaS since they offer a native solution that is comparable to what we had with OpenShift.

We have always been hybrid cloud and I don't see that that would change in the future. Honestly the future will probably be what was always predicted: have a set of "core origin" servers that are on-prem and then a cloud membrane around that.

On-prem might still mean using a vendor for the actual care and feeding of hardware, there's no money in us running our own datacenters.

That's how negotiations work. Vendor makes an offer based on their understanding of your company's needs (usually based on an RFP or initial discussion), your company pushes back on price (if its needs are met) or indicates that it has greater needs and vendors revises the offerings and ups the price. Sometimes they offer a low price to get a potential customer to bite but if they don't accept immediately they withdraw the price because that customer is going to be the kind that demands/needs extra hand-holding. (My current $dayjob does that. If a customer isn't sophisticated enough to take a good price when they're offered it, it means they're going to require a fair amount of extra work so we withdraw the price and the next offer will be significantly higher.)

Also...it's still Red Hat. They're owned by IBM but they're still allowed to operate independently.

But back to the original point: you shouldn't be paying as much for OpenShift as you were for the equivalent VMWare offering. We used OpenShift at my last job and VMWare at the one before it; OpenShift was cheaper than VMWare was before the Broadcom acquisition.

You're leaving out bending the customer over the barrel come renewal time once services are migrated and there's lock-in.

And sorry bud, but the whole "operating independently" thing...I don't buy it. I've worked for too many companies that were owned by someone else and purported to operate independently. It's just a flat-out lie.