Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

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.

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.