What now for VMWare? What now for virtualisation?

LostCorpse said:
chatter still going on about renewals
might be worth a peak for people
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We signed our last renewal in blood a few weeks ago. We were planning on moving to KVM but Broadcom decided to do a little deal with us (we're aren't top 100, but our parent group company is) with the group's leverage. We are still POCing KVM in preparation for a move next year if Broadcom decide to try and **** us again.

We have decent sized compute nodes (144C dual socket) and the core costs were eye-wateringly bad when we first started having renewal quotes. The cost uplift was about 1.2m a year over what we were currently paying.
 
LostCorpse said:
"AT&T has claimed that Broadcom made it an offer to increase prices by 1,050 percent, and may be influencing other vendors to make a migration harder."
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It's one side of the story, Broadcom has not publicly commented. I don't know any details, apart from that there's much more to what is being reported and includes things such as massively out of support products. Not surprising given The Register's history of slating anything related to VMware wherever possible.
 
ChrisD. said:
It's one side of the story, Broadcom has not publicly commented. I don't know any details, apart from that there's much more to what is being reported and includes things such as massively out of support products. Not surprising given The Register's history of slating anything related to VMware wherever possible.
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We are running 7 on all hosts and they still tried to screw us. AT&T's case may be based on specific circumstances, but even a 200-400% increase is still taking the biscuit.

They are trying to **** us and they will keep doing it if their customers fail to migrate to something else and have no choice but to keep paying.

KVM is an ideal long play for us as it dually decreases cost and increases performance. We could probably reduce our compute footprint and still meet our needs on KVM.
 
We've just co-termed all our hardware support and VMware licensing to end in 2026.

Barring something in the meantime, it's almost certain that we'll be moving the entire VMware infrastructure over to Nutanix. Although VMware has always been a little more there was no good reason to go through the hassle of a platform migration. With price rises and a demonstrably poorer support experience, now there is - and using the Nutanix platform offers admin savings too as we won't need to manage the hardware platform/compatibility separately.
 
covenantuk said:
We've just co-termed all our hardware support and VMware licensing to end in 2026.

Barring something in the meantime, it's almost certain that we'll be moving the entire VMware infrastructure over to Nutanix. Although VMware has always been a little more there was no good reason to go through the hassle of a platform migration. With price rises and a demonstrably poorer support experience, now there is - and using the Nutanix platform offers admin savings too as we won't need to manage the hardware platform/compatibility separately.
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What size of a Nutanix solution you going for? Are you buying new nodes or just re-using? Not a viable solution for my place as we have millions invested in block storage already.
 
Throrik said:
What size of a Nutanix solution you going for? Are you buying new nodes or just re-using? Not a viable solution for my place as we have millions invested in block storage already.
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It's a complete new start - the storage and compute are both going to be end of life anyway.

We'll size storage closer to the time, but will start with a 4 node cluster, start the VM migration and buy additional nodes if/when required. We recently got Nutanix to assess our usage and this setup will match and slightly exceed our existing compute power whilst improving storage performance and resilience.

Overall it offers a respectable saving on hardware and licensing and makes both support and scaling out easier. We may make use of their other tools and offer some storage out as CIFS shares, but that's for the future.
 
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covenantuk said:
We've just co-termed all our hardware support and VMware licensing to end in 2026.

Barring something in the meantime, it's almost certain that we'll be moving the entire VMware infrastructure over to Nutanix. Although VMware has always been a little more there was no good reason to go through the hassle of a platform migration. With price rises and a demonstrably poorer support experience, now there is - and using the Nutanix platform offers admin savings too as we won't need to manage the hardware platform/compatibility separately.
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I would recommend double checking that all of your VMs can run on Nutanix.

We did evaluate Nutanix recently and discovered that, whilst KVM is listed as compatible for certain virtual appliances, Nutanix is explicitly not compatible. We only found one vendor (out of 4 that make these appliances) that would support Nutanix and that didn't include any of the advanced hypervisor features - live migration, for example.
 
aaronyuri said:
I would recommend double checking that all of your VMs can run on Nutanix.

We did evaluate Nutanix recently and discovered that, whilst KVM is listed as compatible for certain virtual appliances, Nutanix is explicitly not compatible. We only found one vendor (out of 4 that make these appliances) that would support Nutanix and that didn't include any of the advanced hypervisor features - live migration, for example.
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Almost 99% of our VMs are standard Windows or Unix/Solaris.
 
Some more chatter on this. One of our customers, a household name, are migrating from VMware to Nutanix. They have been mandated by Broadcom that they cannot have any directly or indirectly supplied VMware in their estate by the end of the agreement. Broadcom are going to fall down swinging if you want to migrate away.
 
It's not a great story from a vendor's perspective either. I work for a big OEM so we chuck a lot of business in VMware's direction, we've been developing various features/products that make use of VMware so we've been making use of NFR licensing for years. But it looks like Broadcom are happy to ditch/sour relationships with vendors too. They've listed extremely specific use cases that you can use NFR licensing for and seems we now fall just outside that and either have to purchase licensing or find alternatives.

Doing some pricing research online, for 12 new servers I've speced up to buy, which totals just under 800 cores comes up with a price of around $100,000 a year for vSphere licensing.
 
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