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

I was running about 1000 machines on VMware in my previous career. It was always a love/hate relationship with them. We were able to achieve a lot of our goals using VMware and it was hard not to be ecstatic about the results. At the same time, they were always a nightmare to deal with, the software was buggy and support wasn't great.

I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.

Microsoft is doing well and you were a small customer for them.

VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.

Doing things that way (virtualization rather than containerization) fell out of vogue specifically because of how bad vmware was to work with. CPU quotas were probably what pushed serious people away from the product instead of machine licenses. I was early in my career but working with vmware products was the bane of our existence because if we wanted to make any sort of configuration change or spin up a test machine or really do anything at all it had to run through accounting which was just an instant non starter. we all started fiddling with alternatives and docker swiftly became reliable at least for spinning up a new web server or testing the latest and greatest whatever. vmware did this to themselves.

The vast majority of containers run on VM not baremetal.

But not on vmware, just zen and/or kvm with various management front ends.

VMware has always been a PITA, even in the late 2000's, we pivoted and bought several thousand physical machines for a new datacenter after they started to play tricks just weeks before we were going to turn up the DC.

They have always aspired to be Oracle like, where customers are hostages. Most people I knew who weren't stuck in the "Enterprise" trap moved to kvm/zen ASAP especially after the Westmere dramatically reduced the vm_exit() latency allowing for databases etc...

That was over 15 years ago, and outside of a very small number of niche use cases, tehre was no real argument to run container hosts on Vmware outside of a (IMHO) mistaken risk appetite.

It is really the fruit that ate itself, as had IT departments had a more data based risk assessment process, we would probably be heavily hybrid-cloud now. But the same Enterprise gravy train that VMware grew under killed them.

Shifting blame at great expense in licensing and agility to an _Enterprise_ solution was their jam...now Broadcom owns them an it is even worse.