New Broadcom sales plan may be “insignificant” in deterring VMware migrations

haydenmuhl

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vjH28jq.jpeg


The rest can be read here without having to go the Nazi Bar:
https://imgur.com/gallery/trust-thermocline-a1sxiIT
Removing the straw won’t unbreak the camel’s back.
 
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We have just completed a Proof of Concept to replace an aging VMware install. The PoC has gone so well we have funding to purchase a new cluster for our lab to continue testing. If it continues on the same path we expect to rip the VMware cluster late next year.

This is also fully backed by our VMWare admin who just 18 months ago had zero intention of moving off of VMWare.

Sad to see such a great product being destroyed by idiots.
 
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ElCameron

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Yes, housing. The rental market at scale is a cartel. Literally.
I’m in that market as a developer. If you want to have an honest conversation about it I’m more than happy to buy you a beer and discuss it. But it is too broad a brush to assume it is a rental market “cartel.” Housing issues we are dealing with stretch back to decades old decisions and changes in urban planning and local laws. Also massive gatekeeping by those that own homes. We can also dive deep into the massive markups in the construction and renovation industries.

But it is far from as bad as healthcare.
 
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Navalia Vigilate

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Broadcom will only hog 500 of VMware's biggest customers instead of 2,000.
Ms. Harding, thank you for that by line. It was all I needed to know and worth a chuckle. I did read the article before posting in appreciation. See that Broadcom will still be holding its customer's infrastructure for ransom.

Dear VMWare/Broadcom, we closed an entire data center, our biggest, that was mostly you this year and less than 10% of your software was re-deployed in the remaining two data centers. We will be re-assessing what is left in Q1 2025 and if pricing does not change it will be impossible to not consider moving to alternatives for the last two data centers.
 
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A-Computer

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2
At this point, even if they made VMware free, I'd still be pushing my company to leave them. Support is such a big deal for production systems and Broadcom's 'support' is unbelievably bad. I'm struggling to find the right words to describe just how bad it is. I've only had to contact their support twice since they purchased VMware. In both cases they did far more harm than good, all while wasting a HUGE amount of my time.
 
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marsilies

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The phase shifts between changes at the supplier, the loss of trust in the customer and the decision to switch, and then the actual switch, are very interesting. Big companies take months to decide to switch and allocate staff and budget to this. My employer used Datadog for quite a long time and decided to switch. After 8 months and many staff on it, the new system was working, and we abruptly cancelled a contract with DD that was worth a ton of money. No point in DD trying to negotiate a deal by then.
What's the new system? My work would be interested in using Datadog, but it's too expensive.
 
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Appalachian

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60
We aren't that big of a shop, but when I said I needed an extra half million $ on top of the normal 5 year planned IT budget, emails began swirling. I gave the Director the "what had happened was" story and he took it personally. He used expletives he does not usually use then lowered his head for a second then looked me right in the eye and asked "How much to walk away from these sharks?". That was last January and we are making the swap to Nutanix the Monday after Xmas giving us a week to tighten it up with minimal users until after New Year's Day.

I don't think Broadcom is even half way through the culling.

RIP VMWare "Shot in the back by Hock Tan in October 2023"
 
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I have maybe a half dozen hosts (depending on the time) and they're noncommercial. I've been using the VMWare noncommercial license or whatever it's called. (I've bought it in the past too.) Now with this kind of douchebaggery I'm looking to transition to something else. These are Linux servers/workstations running virtual under Windows 11. Any suggestions? One requirement is for the machines to be remotely accessible on a LAN, which probably isn't that hard with alternative solutions either.
Proxmox VE (+Proxmox Backup Server if you need backups. Veeam also said they will support Proxmox).
Proxmox likes reliable hardware (it CAN run on total garabage if necessary but quality would suffer), it also have issues with medium-sized clusters (20 nodes are ok, 20-32 - will works likely tweaks would be necessary, 32-50 - you will REALLY want their support contract)
 
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ivan256

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vjH28jq.jpeg


The rest can be read here without having to go the Nazi Bar:
https://imgur.com/gallery/trust-thermocline-a1sxiIT
Good read. At the end he blows it.

The loss of trust happened at the beginning. Not when they "crossed the thermocline".

It's an important distinction. It's the difference between "you can't go back because you crossed a metaphorical barrier" and "you can't go back because you made the mistake ages ago even though you only experienced the consequences yesterday."
 
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bdrram03

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Years ago, I eagerly awaited a favorite show to return from hiatus. A couple of weeks before its return, my satellite provider and the network that owned the show got into a pissing match, and they pulled the channel from my lineup. Until then, I was content to pay whatever the satellite provider asked and didn't think much about it.

Faced with missing a favorite show, I suddenly became curious about what I was paying them and what I was getting for those dollars. When I sat down and figured it out, I realized a lot of my TV watching was from local stations over the air, and the rest came from a handful of cable channels with only a few shows from each channel. When I priced out what cost to buy those shows a la carte, I realized I could get a roof antenna and a TiVo and watch most shows for free, then buy the cable shows for about a quarter of what I was paying the satellite provider.

So, I did that. Eventually, the two parties made up and the channel returned to the lineup in time for the show's return. It took me some time to buy the equipment and hire someone to install the antenna. The first-year cost was roughly what the satellite provider had charged me for a year's service, so there was a one-year bump in costs. But once I decided to ditch satellite, I was no longer a customer even though I hadn't canceled yet and they didn't know it. My longer-term costs also dropped considerably the second year and for a number of years after that.

It taught me that it's a really bad idea to antagonize a complacent customer for short-term gain. Once customers get curious about what they're getting, discover what alternatives are available, and what those alternatives cost, you've lost them for good.
Went through something very similar with my ISP, had them happily on auto pay for years and got both a price increase and notification the auto pay discount would only apply if it was directly from a checking account and not a credit card. Started looking around at competitors just to see what the prices were and found that the same speed tiers were available elsewhere for less.

I ended up switching and even though they tried to offer me a deal when i canceled, I already had the new service up and running to prevent a gap. Had they not messed with it i would have probably never even looked at what else was available.
 
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tgx

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I have maybe a half dozen hosts (depending on the time) and they're noncommercial. I've been using the VMWare noncommercial license or whatever it's called. (I've bought it in the past too.) Now with this kind of douchebaggery I'm looking to transition to something else. These are Linux servers/workstations running virtual under Windows 11. Any suggestions? One requirement is for the machines to be remotely accessible on a LAN, which probably isn't that hard with alternative solutions either.
Just use Proxmox and the community repositories.
 
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raytracer78

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We are actively migrating away from the VMware platform as fast as we can. The transition over to Broadcom was a total fail, to this day we still don't have our entitlements properly setup in the new Broadcom portal. At this point, we're cutting our losses and moving on. RIP VMware. It was a great product.
 
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Smeghead

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Fuck me once, shame on you. Fuck me twice, shame on me. Or something like that.

I am so bloody glad that when we first started playing with virtualisation a decade ago, esxi was already too rich for our blood. It was functionally competent and we played with the free version of vsphere, but we were always going to be too small an outfit for it to make sense, thank baud.
 
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mkendrick_bn

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1
It is the reseller channel that the customers trust not the vendor. when a vendor cuts the reseller out they have a longstanding relationship with the client. the reseller will convince the client that there is a better solution than to stay with briadcom that has been shown to dislike thier customers. Many clients will listen and move away to the solution the reseller proposes.
 
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I’m in that market as a developer. If you want to have an honest conversation about it I’m more than happy to buy you a beer and discuss it. But it is too broad a brush to assume it is a rental market “cartel.” Housing issues we are dealing with stretch back to decades old decisions and changes in urban planning and local laws. Also massive gatekeeping by those that own homes. We can also dive deep into the massive markups in the construction and renovation industries.

But it is far from as bad as healthcare.
How do you square this with the fact earlier this year the bedrock system real-estate developers have used to sell inventory was found to be a system of illegal collusion that had been artificially inflating costs to every home buyer in America for years? How was that not a full-on cartel?

And that doesn't even touch on the modern market-distorting platform approaches investment capital has started using to manipulate available stock and normalize industry-wide pricing both in the buyer market (Zillow, etc.) and the rental market (RealPage, etc.). Honestly, I think this is what the OP was talking about. And you can't just ignore it.

We've all heard the speil, I don't think anyone needs a beer to talk about it. Sure, there's a grain of truth to what you are saying ... but the industry script is also self-servingly myopic and increasingly dated. You guys are ignoring all this other stuff that has actually happened and blaming every outcome on a set of political battles from 20 years ago that didn't go your way. Which, fine, maybe tightening approvals slowed down adding stock to some extent - but it sure as hell doesn't explain half of what we're seeing today.

Here's the thing that jumps out at me though. You're getting sqeezed from both sides by the same damn people and don't even see it. What do you think is driving the massive markups in the construction and rennovation industries? Your partners are bleeding you dry.

In housing, they're keeping things expensive and scarce while they have developers out there raging at P&Z trying to get thier next prjoects through. And developers think it's an act of doing good, because from your perspective, the problem's solution boils down to having more projects in development to add more units (which should be prioritized over stuff like open space and natural habitat because of the pressing nature of the housing crisis). But out in the real world, it will never matter how many units you add while market is being rigged so adding more units does not signficantly altter a dominant pricing signal uncoupled from the dynamics of supply and demand.

When you get to the big money, it seems like largely the same group of people who are raping healthcare. I feel like situations are a lot closer than you think.
 
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Good read. At the end he blows it.

The loss of trust happened at the beginning. Not when they "crossed the thermocline".

It's an important distinction. It's the difference between "you can't go back because you crossed a metaphorical barrier" and "you can't go back because you made the mistake ages ago even though you only experienced the consequences yesterday."
A thermocline is the wrong analogy, what he is describing is more like hysteresis, though that doesn't capture the time delay between the loss of trust and the consequences of that loss either.
 
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ElCameron

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How do you square this with the fact earlier this year the bedrock system real-estate developers have used to sell inventory was found to be a system of illegal collusion that had been artificially inflating costs to every home buyer in America for years? How was that not a full-on cartel?

And that doesn't even touch on the modern market-distorting platform approaches investment capital has started using to manipulate available stock and normalize industry-wide pricing both in the buyer market (Zillow, etc.) and the rental market (RealPage, etc.). Honestly, I think this is what the OP was talking about. And you can't just ignore it.

We've all heard the speil, I don't think anyone needs a beer to talk about it. Sure, there's a grain of truth to what you are saying ... but the industry script is also self-servingly myopic and increasingly dated. You guys are ignoring all this other stuff that has actually happened and blaming every outcome on a set of political battles from 20 years ago that didn't go your way. Which, fine, maybe tightening approvals slowed down adding stock to some extent - but it sure as hell doesn't explain half of what we're seeing today.

Here's the thing that jumps out at me though. You're getting sqeezed from both sides by the same damn people and don't even see it. What do you think is driving the massive markups in the construction and rennovation industries? Your partners are bleeding you dry.

In housing, they're keeping things expensive and scarce while they have developers out there raging at P&Z trying to get thier next prjoects through. And developers think it's an act of doing good, because from your perspective, the problem's solution boils down to having more projects in development to add more units (which should be prioritized over stuff like open space and natural habitat because of the pressing nature of the housing crisis). But out in the real world, it will never matter how many units you add while market is being rigged so adding more units does not signficantly altter a dominant pricing signal uncoupled from the dynamics of supply and demand.

When you get to the big money, it seems like largely the same group of people who are raping healthcare. I feel like situations are a lot closer than you think.
Your view of housing is too short. You need to look back over the last 100+ years. Not the last 20.

There are some fundamental flaws in some of your points that are hard to talk through in this box. Which is the great downside of the internet. Don’t suppose you are ATL based?
 
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marsilies

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Good read. At the end he blows it.

The loss of trust happened at the beginning. Not when they "crossed the thermocline".

It's an important distinction. It's the difference between "you can't go back because you crossed a metaphorical barrier" and "you can't go back because you made the mistake ages ago even though you only experienced the consequences yesterday."

A thermocline is the wrong analogy, what he is describing is more like hysteresis, though that doesn't capture the time delay between the loss of trust and the consequences of that loss either.
I think you're taking about two different things.

The trust thermocline is about how companies can erode trust until it breaks. Trust isn't a binary, but a serious of gradients, There's a certain amount of bullshit people will put up with because they like the service, or because of difficulty in switching, or because all their friends are on the service, etc. So companies can sometimes erode that trust, and can sometimes even build it back. But there's a breaking point, and past that point, a huge mass of customers suddenly no longer trust the service, and never trust it again. It's like a thermocline, where the decline in temp is gradual, until it hits a certain point and just suddenly drops dramatically.

Both of you seem to be talking about a form of inertia, or similar concept, of when, after the trust is broken, past the thermocline, it may take customers different levels of time to actually switch. This is dependent on the service used, the size of the customers, possible contract lengths, etc.

There can be some mixing of these two concepts, since the point the trust is completely broken and irretrievable, instead of just eroded and potentially repairable, can vary per customer, and some can switch faster than others. But the idea is that companies that progressively get shittier over time can find that even though the last shitty move they did wasn't that drastic, it was the straw that broke the camel's back for a large chunk of their consumer base. Not all, mind you, but dramatically more than before, or even after. Undoing the last shitty thing, or even several year's worth of shitty things, won't bring them back because the trust was broken at that point for too many customers.
 
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yopmaster

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I tried to download the free version of VMWare Fusion last week. The announcement on their blog was easy to find, but then I got lost in the maze that their website is (I figured out it is for personal use but won't show up in the product list if you don't have a company account). I ended up buying a mini pc.
 
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Why would it be dying out?

Not disagreeing (I know nothing about this), just asking for clarification.

Virtualization and even virtual machine management is now largely a commodity. There are a number of other options, many of them free. They aren't perfect replacements, but enough for a lot of people. The way vmware was maintaining it's market share was by not pissing anyone off so much they went looking at the alternatives. Broadcom broke that, and now everybody is at least looking at options. And the more the industry moves away as a whole, the easier it becomes for the remaining customers to leave. If you turn around in a few years and all the people you want to hire have experience only with proxmox or opennebula or hyperv because they cut their teeth at startups that weren't big enough for broadcom to bother with, you are going to really question whether you should be a vmware shop.
 
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Mechjaz

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How do you square this with the fact earlier this year the bedrock system real-estate developers have used to sell inventory was found to be a system of illegal collusion that had been artificially inflating costs to every home buyer in America for years? How was that not a full-on cartel?

And that doesn't even touch on the modern market-distorting platform approaches investment capital has started using to manipulate available stock and normalize industry-wide pricing both in the buyer market (Zillow, etc.) and the rental market (RealPage, etc.). Honestly, I think this is what the OP was talking about. And you can't just ignore it.

We've all heard the speil, I don't think anyone needs a beer to talk about it. Sure, there's a grain of truth to what you are saying ... but the industry script is also self-servingly myopic and increasingly dated. You guys are ignoring all this other stuff that has actually happened and blaming every outcome on a set of political battles from 20 years ago that didn't go your way. Which, fine, maybe tightening approvals slowed down adding stock to some extent - but it sure as hell doesn't explain half of what we're seeing today.

Here's the thing that jumps out at me though. You're getting sqeezed from both sides by the same damn people and don't even see it. What do you think is driving the massive markups in the construction and rennovation industries? Your partners are bleeding you dry.

In housing, they're keeping things expensive and scarce while they have developers out there raging at P&Z trying to get thier next prjoects through. And developers think it's an act of doing good, because from your perspective, the problem's solution boils down to having more projects in development to add more units (which should be prioritized over stuff like open space and natural habitat because of the pressing nature of the housing crisis). But out in the real world, it will never matter how many units you add while market is being rigged so adding more units does not signficantly altter a dominant pricing signal uncoupled from the dynamics of supply and demand.

When you get to the big money, it seems like largely the same group of people who are raping healthcare. I feel like situations are a lot closer than you think.
No notes. Well said.

Relentless new construction of multi-family dwellings (i.e., apartments) has resulted in every local rent I've seen going, uh... up. And all the acres of forest around here they've been clearing to build new middle-class McMansions have resulted in prices going, uh, also up.

Not every home buyer is screaming NIMBY from their rooftops. I never asked for my house to be a transmutation spell for turning lead pipes into gold. But I don't see the homeless people at every damn traffic light picking up a new pad in the 14-storey "modern luxury" eyesore downtown, and my girlfriend is paying >$1700 month for a 400 sq ft studio. The lines always go up, must always go up.

Broadcom isn't a market unto itself, but it's a great object lesson about just how much blood you can squeeze from stone that any industry should be learning from. They won't, of course. But they should. A month-to-month lease for her bedroom of an apartment would have been twenty-eight hundred dollars. At what point do these people and places start consuming themselves? I've talked to medical professionals that tell me "no way, I don't go [to the clinic/hospital work for], it's too expensive."
 
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I've often wondered how one squares the cognitive dissonance of doing something so profoundly wrong that pretty much everyone on the planet knew it was a mistake except you. Reversing course in such a short time frame means that you now have some clarity that you didn't before. Do you wonder why you didn't have it before? Or do you just plough along confident that it will be different this time? Also, reason number 1423 why I'm glad I'm not in IT any more.
 
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I feel like Broadcom has already showed their cards here. Even if you are to take them up on this offer it's only a matter of time until they try to turn the screws again. Better to just transition away from this mess while you can.
Yeah. This is a very belated realization that their greed is costing them revenue. You can’t tightly grab a fistful of sand. It runs away, grain by grain.

This reminds me of the greed driven stupidity of a certain game engine/dev kit vendor. But with likely less chance of recovery. Corporate customers of the size that used VMware are less likely to forgive AND will have the resources to migrate.
 
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