VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.

As someone who only knows Broadcom's silicon business: there, they're just used to people having no other choice, with their quasi monopoly in some fields. Are they (mistakenly) transferring that attitude to VMware?

Yes.

Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed.

Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.

I’m curious, why does higher ed need VMWare? Is it because you have some supercomputers that you want to share among your employees?

I’m asking because for $12m I’d just buy all the employees some high end commodity hardware.

It will be for ordinary administration, employees, students, finance etc.

The academic work (including the supercomputer) will run Linux and open source systems for job scheduling etc.

Why does any of this use VMs? Not familiar with the space at all