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Broadcom loses another big VMware customer

(www.theregister.com)
146 points belter | 3 comments | 03 Dec 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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bityard ◴[03 Dec 24 17:35 UTC] No.42308773[source]▶
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.

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1. bee_rider ◴[03 Dec 24 18:41 UTC] No.42309622[source]▶
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).
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2. bigstrat2003 ◴[03 Dec 24 19:07 UTC] No.42309968[source]▶
VMware is amazing. There's a reason everyone flocks to it.
3. jen729w ◴[03 Dec 24 19:41 UTC] No.42310361[source]▶
> 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.)