What now for VMWare? What now for virtualisation?


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.
 
"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."
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.
 
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.
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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.

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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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.

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.
 
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.

Almost 99% of our VMs are standard Windows or Unix/Solaris.
 
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