What now for VMWare? What now for virtualisation?

Tenfold increase? That's insane. Assume you went all in on cores/CPU if you had a RAM based agreement? How many CPU/cores does that cover?

To be fair we had a really, really good ELA deal prior to this, as in we changed AMs and the new one was shocked at how good a deal we had, so I think we've been hit on multiple fronts. We did have RAM based yeah, and we had a really mixed workload with lots of SKUs that bringing them inline to what they offer now has been very unfortunate for us. We're only at about 20k Cores, so not massive. I've said for over two years we didn't need more and more HVs, but needed to do a large right sizing exercise, but because we're fully self-service to the devs that didn't get buy in, and so many devs don't understand how CPUs/Memory works, so it's hopefully a good methodology to get to do this exercise. It's funny though as 12 months ago we decided that VMware was going to be the main choice going forward as we had concerns around our OpenStack env.
 
Broadcom have come in with the heavy upheaval stick - it's complete chaos - we were due to renew end January and still can't get a proper quote out of them and this is a common scenario apparently.

I can't see it ending well for them. Yes inertia will keep big enterprise with them initially, like most places we have a pool of experience and sunk cost in scripts etc. But bigger enterprises have hardware refresh budgets. We're due to replace hosts, so we'll probably renew with VMware until 2026, repurpose the old hosts to Hyper-V under a 3rd party hardware support contract and use the interval to skill up the team.



RAM? Previous licensing was per CPU, up to 32 cores
Not if you are on the service provider license model.
 
We are 100% moving everything to Azure, planning/discovery work has already started so hopefully we can get out before the renewal.

I am not really sure what Broadcom is trying to achieve by discontinuing the perpetual licensing apart from it being a massive cash grab.

Christ, you can't even get a free eval of ESXi moving forward so home lab users will be stuffed (Proxmox or XCP-NG will be natural type 1 hypervisors to replace ESXi)
 
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Silly move, especially binning the free ESXi option, was great for testing, labs etc which gets people working with the tech and then they are more likely to push the same product when looking at production.

Plus all that free testing and community discussion leads to a more stable release for production rollouts.
 
Cloud is not viable so hello kvm though business really wants something with paid support


I need to look into these a bit more.

Proxmox has paid support available too.
 
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proxmox is fine for my home but all their reports on support are not good. Honestly vmware support has been terrible last few years anyway so i can probably get someone to save 6.5+m in license costs. AVH wont work with netapps from what i read.
 
proxmox is fine for my home but all their reports on support are not good. Honestly vmware support has been terrible last few years anyway so i can probably get someone to save 6.5+m in license costs. AVH wont work with netapps from what i read.

Yep Nutanix want you on HCI so they don't support SAN.
 
proxmox is fine for my home but all their reports on support are not good. Honestly vmware support has been terrible last few years anyway so i can probably get someone to save 6.5+m in license costs. AVH wont work with netapps from what i read.

I think proxmox will become the goto for home, lab and testing where the free ESXi is widely used, added bonus you can cluster it which isnt an option with ESXi.

For production, depends on the products and budget, as infra engineers become more comfortable with proxmox in labs you may see some switch to prod clusters as well.

As for AVH, looks like it only supports iSCSI and NFS etc, I read an article where Nutanix said that with 10gb+ networking SAN etc are no longer needed and wont be supported, which I can understand when building new but very limiting when you have existing infra you want to connect to.
 
Silly move, especially binning the free ESXi option, was great for testing, labs etc which gets people working with the tech and then they are more likely to push the same product when looking at production.

Plus all that free testing and community discussion leads to a more stable release for production rollouts.

Indeed, virtually all of PowershellCLI advanced functionality was developed by people not employed by VMware, or who were offered a job there to do it after their unpaid contributions.

I'm sure that Broadcom will make out of this in the short term, but I think we'll see a gradual decline in VMware's market leading position over the years.
 
I think proxmox will become the goto for home, lab and testing where the free ESXi is widely used, added bonus you can cluster it which isnt an option with ESXi.

For production, depends on the products and budget, as infra engineers become more comfortable with proxmox in labs you may see some switch to prod clusters as well.

As for AVH, looks like it only supports iSCSI and NFS etc, I read an article where Nutanix said that with 10gb+ networking SAN etc are no longer needed and wont be supported, which I can understand when building new but very limiting when you have existing infra you want to connect to.
Maybe I’m just old fashioned but I really don’t like the idea of ‘binding’ your compute resource with your storage resource…I much prefer them being separate.

No doubt they love it though
 
They've added an ESXi import wizard to make things even easier :)


Was coming here to post the same thing, looks like you add an ESXi host and it picks up the storage and VMs and allows you to import.

VM has to be shutdown but could work around and live with that :)
 
We were lucky as we just did a major infrastructure refresh last year and went on a 5 year support agreement with VMWare so in another 3 years/4 years will be looking at its replacement as I expect the cost to be outside of budget but will depend on how much extra we need to upgrade such as backup, storage etc
 
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