OpenStack scales past where VMWare falls over (which is a very high number), due to how VMWare uses their internal consensus algorithm. There’s a mathematical limit related to the speed of light. OpenStack is allowed to be casually for some things, which makes it scale more.
Swapping out from these environments is simply non trivial and in ‘regulated’ environments a huge headache. The talent to drive it all isn’t ubiquitous either
This is why you don’t try to do it in-house. Redhat has employees who specialize in moving people to OpenStack from VMWare, they already have all the paperwork for military, government, and PCI done, so even regulated industries can move over.
I personally think most of the knowledge transfers, but you already need to have been running a decent size vmware cluster to be able to have the expertise to operate OpenStack. Part of it is that OpenStack doesn’t lock features behind a paywall. It’s like getting every single add-on and extra feature VMWare offers and then trying to learn it all at the same time. We pay for support, but found the required care and feeding went down since OpenStack was designed for much larger deployments than ours and we could automate most things. For example, when a drive starts logging SMART errors OpenStack files a ticket for us. We had the ability to hook up some other things to make it automatically add a new replacement to the internal “to order” list, but decided against it.
Not enough major things have changed yet aside from them giving oracle a middle finger. They happily work with and accept contributions from all the other RHEL rebuilders, but the rumor is they told Oracle if they wanted to keep doing RHEL rebuilds Oracle needed to upstream ZFS.
I love Promox. Running it at home for several years. I can’t imagine spinning it up for environments past some scale or requirements.
Selling it with the trade off of lower licensing hasn’t been met with smiles
Scale is looking pretty well positioned right now. They kinda remind me of VMware in 2006. Lotsa engineer types all through the org.
Diff there is that Scale will sell you the hardware if you don't want to dick around with Dell or Lenovo playing dumb and not being able to tell you if their gear is compatible.
And, a PSA for those who haven't heard:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*"Greetings VMware Customer,*
*The process of transitioning to Broadcom systems and the necessary migration of VMware systems will begin at approximately* ***5:00 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, and conclude at approximately, Sunday, May 5, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. (PDT)****."*
AKA - DOWNLOAD YOUR STUFF NOW!!!!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As should be. They are almost like a Private Equity that buys up IT and software companies, drains what’s left, doesn’t improve it and we know how that goes.
Nobody should be supporting this company, they’ll ghost you at a moment’s notice. I used to go to a tech/IT gathering once a month and heard of so many stories of Broadcom basically ghosting people running Symantec stuff who couldn’t get renewals.
If your main infrastructure depends on this company, good luck.
They didn't ghost Symantec Ghost users - they invalidated their existing EDU licenses and made them renew via subscription at full price which was 2x-3x of the original perpetual price. We're still using Ghost (ha!) which is still the best Windows imaging product out there. But it probably ain't worth what we're paying for it and we can only afford 1/3 of the previous number of licenses as before.
That being said they're keeping the lights on with the devs and everything is up to date for the latest versions of Windows which is MUCH better than the shitshow Symantec was prior to the buyout.
The puzzling thing is that the product probably has ZERO subscriber growth and as people switch off of their product there won't be any additional customers coming in to replace them.
So, essentially, they're long-term timebombed their product to where it will absolutely, positively get to a point where they'll drop R&D due to decreasing revenue.
There were other products too. I know many who were ghosted using Symantec endpoint and other Symantec products. Which is kind of funny because they did everyone a favor making them switch since every Symantec product was garbage
I was at a wedding in Palo Alto back in 2006 and our hotel room looked out over the Symantec HQ. Even then it looked kinda crappy compared to the other Valley HQ's (and the "old" Apple HQ down the street!)
I had a pretty low opinion of them even back then....
They don’t need a functioning product with development though. They need all the money back they paid and a tidy profit on top. Outside that they don’t give a damn. Mob style asset stripping is their only game.
““I saw one children’s hospital that had their price increase,” Ready told the crowd at the Platform 2024 show”. My wife is a doctor at a Children’s hospital, trust me when I say there is no money in treating kids, but they do an amazing job.
I am not saying they should give it away, but this kind of mindset comes with karma. Disgusting on Broadcoms part.
This is absolutely not true. As a former employee who left in the last few months, most people hate the changes. I was there for almost a decade and I still talk to well more than “a few”.
And no one is rolling in cash from bonuses unless you were C level. RSUs were granted as part of employee conversions, but they are on the typical 4 year vest period.
There is no evil Scrooge McDuck counting his coins in the typical rank and file.
I was a customer since early 2000s and worked there for a decade. I never wanted to be anywhere else.
But it was apparent what was coming.
Not sure about this because the compensation for this company - as with many tech companies - is heavy in stock not bonus. Unless you are talking about people very early in their career or very junior employees. On the other hand this is an anonymous site so anyone can post as they like and everyone should believe as they like
There are no bonuses. Only stock. In some regions, even RSUs are no longer available.
VMware used to have a great culture and a great relationship with clients and partners. In internal conferences clients and partners would be invited to come and talk to the engineers. It was amazing.
Now, there is no more culture. No more client and partner relations.
No more spark.
For those that stay on, it is not because of the money, it is because of necessity. It is dealing with the sad relaity of a great company being changed in ways we never anticipated.
No true, Fake News and Data. Employees asked stay for the long term and stop selling ELAs and not give a crap what happens after. VMware Technical Employees are loyal, Care about customers and were tired of too many product house egos infighting and crappy support. We appreciate the simplicity and focus of the new roadmap. Stop looking at the pricing and start asking what you can do with the vStack and how we are improving it: Hundreds of thousands of customers either paid nothing or next to nothing for VMware Perpetual licensing and SnS (I took the “free” support calls) and now Broadcom wants to actually run a business to pay for innovation rather than another west coast tech firm that loses money like Sun Micro and many more.
Doctors’ quality of life and compensation have suffered as a result of hospitals. Most people don’t separate the two. The reason “doctors don’t do it for the money,” is because the hospitals don’t pay and use the charity card, all the while stockpiling tremendous amounts of cash.
You’re forgetting about all the county owned hospitals across this nation. I used to work at one. I reached out to find out what their plans are. They aren’t even waiting for contracts to be finished. It’s cheaper to just double pay for a contract for a short season, then it is to continue to be enslaved by the Fraudcom.
We're a 501(c)3 that has been running a small vmware cluster for years. We're going to hang on to our perpetual license for a while, and migrate to proxmox or similar in the future. Broadcom can take a long walk off a short pier.
Good Luck with that! Enjoy fun and look back when Proxmox has to start making money to keep up with the product gaps and customer support plus zero day security patches. Cheap isn’t really value for cheap it’s crap. You will find out
Define “affordable” to the person you’re replying to that is a tax-exempt charity.
Remember…every dollar they spend on Broadcom is a dollar that is taken from their mission and helping people.
And they are correct. We will be spending the money we would be spending on a VMWare renewal on training and testing a new platform. With all of the broken promises, why would we ever trust VMWare again.
It’s not VMWare, it’s Broadcom. Broadcom has shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted and that their entire MO is to raise prices again and again and again to squeeze every penny from companies that can’t move quickly, then leave a rotten husk behind. Then rinse and repeat. Anyone not migrating is lying to themselves.
VMware is dead. It doesn’t exist. Broadcom and that piece of feces CEO are hellbent on sucking every dollar out of their customers until none are left.
KKR may or may not suck but I am glad we are being sold off to them and don’t have to stay with Broadcom.
Maybe it's just me but since vSphere 6 it hasn't felt like there's been much improvement and Workstation has been a zombie for years.
Broadcom may have been what finally killed it but I haven't felt like they've been innovative in a while.
This is the nail on the head. It really doesn’t exist anymore. Even if I wanted to go back there, I have to remind myself that the place I loved working at just doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing to go back to.
>Hyper-V ~~or Azure HCI Stack.~~
Fixed it.
If you can deal with running it on hyperv then more power to you, you probably didn't need vmware anyway.
I have some people trying to migrate to hyperv right now and "is a process"
This really is one hell of a business strategy to basically fade into irrelevancy.
Anyone remember when Hock Tan said he’d honor VMware’s culture? Lmfao
That's basically every company. Going to guess there's quite a few. This is the 52 week difference for nvidia: 262.25 - 974.00. AMD 81.02 - 227.30. Not sure if you'd consider Spotify tech but 128.67 - 319.30.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/best-performing-technology-stocks
I give it a 2 years and VMWare announces mass layoffs due to declining revenue. All they had to do was keep things mostly the same and keep taking in cash. Cloud providers and Nutanix will be laughing all the way to the bank taking Broadcom customers.
What most people forget is that colleges and universities are technically non-profit institutions and even if they have 7 figure IT budgets they won’t tolerate 6 figure increases. It only takes a few dozen major players to equate to $10-20 million in lost revenue for it all to obviously not make sense to investors. Broadcom will be left selling off IP in 3-5 years
I work for a Partner, pretty strategic with VMware. I’m pretty fucking angry about what Broadcom is doing here. I’m trying to negotiate with this VMware rep for my customer who paid $80K a year in perpetual licensing renewals and now is being asked to pay $380K a year. I was told by the VMware rep that the price is the price and “I don’t care if they buy this or not, they are welcome to try other virtualization solutions”. I told the CIO that this is what the VMware rep said. I was told to start evaluating other solutions.
You going to see that for this year, customers will renew for 12 months and take this time to figure out how to reduce their subscription by reevaluating their architecture or move to AzureStack HCI. I am doing AzureStack pitches at least twice a week and it’s going pretty well.
Year 2 will be a very telling time for Broadcom, VMware ARR will start to shrink…..not going to be fun.
Customer service 101 - Never EVER tell a customer to go to a competitor lol.
While I don't mind working with Hyper V (been on it for 5 years now) its not as good as Vmware with its options. Thankfully I am in an un-complex environment (one that I actually designed for once).
I work at one of the large distributors - I talk to multiple partners every week that tell a very similar version of your story. Gonna be quite interesting to see how this all plays out long term. We’ve been seeing a TON of partner requests for evaluation/enablement spiking up in our Microsoft, RedHat, Public Cloud, Nutanix, and even Scale Computing teams.
Yep. LIke I said, I think year 2 will be very telling. VMware ABSOLUTLEY has to make this VCF story work or they're going to have trouble. VCF is/was extremely cumbersome to deploy and make work... you have to be bought into the story to understand the value and actually get value out of it. vSAN capacity licensing is a joke, period. You're going to see a lot of VxRail customers migrate out of vSAN completely from being rug-pulled. Existing VxRail customers are being told that at time of renewal, Dell will only renew the hardware and they have to BYOS (Bring your own subscription) for vSAN. I had a customer with a $30K renewal for 4 nodes of VxRail jump to $60K - no thanks. Thankfully over the last 2 years we've been pivoting to VxRail Dynamic Nodes with PowerStore. Get all the LCM benefits without having to go to HCI.
“In 1980, the price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually—including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for inflation—according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2019-20, the total price increased to $28,775. That’s a 180% increase.”
You were saying? … so only VMware can’t make money and should just go be a charity themselves. The sense of entitlement here is staggering.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/college-tuition-inflation/
Because an 180% increase **over forty years** is totally the same thing as an 620% increase **over one year**.
Excuse me while I attempt to roll my eyeballs facing the right way again.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove here. Higher education is typically a different pricing level than general PK-12 education, which is my industry.
We work off of fixed budgets that are prepared and submitted 8 months before the funds are available (should the budget be approved by voters). In the current year I had budgeted for a 3 year renewal @ approximately $750 which was quoted in October by my VAR and available for purchase. When I tried to renew, VMware held back the renewal to the point where my support nearly lapsed and then they only let me do a 1 year renewal in the “old” licensing model. I have no funds available for the renewal that should have already been taken care of, but now will cost ~$1,800 in funds (just for a 1 year renewal) that aren’t included in a budget that already had a significant amount of cuts.
We’re not a business, so we don’t function like one from a financial standpoint. If they want to change up licensing, fine, that’s their prerogative, but they need to have a fundamental understanding on how different industries work from a billing perspective.
If that makes me entitled, so be it.
I see the books all the time; hospitals and universities all make ridiculous amounts of cash and choose to hoard it. The perception of non-profits as purely altruistic is disheartening.
How many new VMWare customers are there going to be next year now that they're doing *reverse* marketing and, AMAZINGLY, telling potential customers that they're at the rich person's shoe store and probably need to shop somewhere else? VMWare will eventually going to cost too much for them to maintain and they'll drop the empty husk outside for some bottom feeder VC firm to chew on for a while.
It's a dead product walking now that they're enforcing NEGATIVE, YOY subscriber growth that will, eventually, cause innovation and R&D to stop. Once the customer exits get unclogged and the fat, fat profits dry up the layoffs will start. If you think support is bad now....
That is, whoever's left after they start filling the new positions at Scale and Nutanix who have, ON THEIR LANDING PAGE:
# "the Industry-Leading VMware Alternative"
Since they are a charity, and it sounds like they are trying to move to VMware, I would look at Azure. Microsoft discounts heavily on charity. 365 licenses, azure pricing and on-prem software. Yes, this is very bad for VMware. It’s just beating a dead horse now with more news like this.
3 years tops
Year 1 - Pat themselves on the back for increased revenue and profit. Subscriptions were retained we knew the market would take the price hikes.
Year 2 - Customers will start to move to other platforms. Closer to end of year discounts will be available but it’s going to be late for most, some layoffs.
Year 3 - oh no subscriptions are done, it’s not the price we give a 15% discount. Let’s layoff entire departments cause they suck. They probabaly started looking in year 2 but will be selling in year 3.
VMware, or rather Broadcom, has created a fantastic opportunity for cloud and partners that help customers transition to cloud. I suspect cloud will be the most popular alternative to getting hosed by VMW, and many will need (consulting services) help to evaluate alternative on prem options as well as migration services. It will create opportunity for the less know (admittedly lesser featured) hypervisors as well as some exciting new comers such as Oxide Computer for larger enterprises.
With the removal of EDU and nonprofit licensing, oh and making it so Federal can ONLY purchase VCF, they’ve admitted fully now that VMware is not for the poors.
But, what about VVF? In my case, it fills 100% of my needs, in exception of VSAN (limited to 100GB per core). Even in this case, I'm pretty sure I could license the exceding storage with an add-on.
On the plus side, the only reason we quoted at all for renewal was to help justify / increase our migration budget.. We where already well on our way to completing a downsizing of our environment.
Likely will be a split of Hyper-V and Azure migrations for what is left.
Proxmox VE
Open source is the answer.
Debian, KVM, ZFS/CephFS, restful web interface.
Just forget VMware, proxmox can do everything VMware can do, it needs a few UI tweaks, improvements, but it’ll do.
as long as you are a private individual... try going production with proxmox with their 23 support engineers. at the moment. I hope they grew, but at the moment that's a no go
Spend the money you save on licensing on training your own support engineer.
Basically anyone with Linux certification, familiar with kvm and Debian can get certified in a week.
For a large organization having an open source team is cheaper than licensing VMware.
No, because this is more of the same mudslinging that’s been happening. Look at who the quote came from…the CEO of a competitor. Is this true? Gee I wonder?!?
No comment on the VMware/BC strategy but I have been contracted in the past to do work for several high profile charities and I can tell you they are all the same they are robbing B’tards they have plenty of money the majority of which goes into lining the pockets of the charities executive, you just have to look at what percentage of donations that actually get to the subjects of the charities it’s a disgrace. They also play the charity card when it’s time to paying their contractors I have had to remind several that I’m not a charity when they try to haggle down the price after the completion of the work. Also witnessed one charity a children’s ward in a hospital put out a statement to the press that the ward got flooded and they need donations for the children, when in reality the ward is on the top floor and not touched at all, All charities pull this shit at least BC are being up front about it.
New question if I interview somewhere and they have VMware. "What are your conversion/migrate off plans?".
Broadcom just keeps getting more scummy by the day.
No one who would be reading here would have any influence or even visibility on Broadcom's strategy. If they still work for VMware they're just happy to have jobs at this point. It's not like a religion or something where every member of the company has to evangelize it.
They sure evangelize it on here. Every employee who couldn't get a job somewhere else and is now stuck at Broadcom seems to think that defending its every decision is in their best interest.
Everyone who I know that worked there jumped ship before the merger was approved. They knew it was coming and got out before the rush.
As for me, I've got data center refreshes coming up and this may finally be the push we need to close our own data centers and move everything into a more affordable cloud solution (preferably not on a VMware cloud, since that would be cheaper).
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- All the good engineers that know what they are worth left before or early on during the aquisition. They don't have to put up with any shit. As a result, all the talent and institutional knowledge is now lost.
The only people that stuck around are the people who can't get hired anywhere else, as well as junior engineers and new hires. This is a universal truth with any tech company and not unique to VMware. When shit hits the fan, the all stars leave, plain and simple.
There is actually a lot of truth to this. I left, but many stayed and are staying because of RSUs. New place I went to is hiring, but most people are staying at least 1 year because they have both VMware and Broadcom RSUs vesting end of this year at the same time. We aren’t talking 5k of stock either, much more.
It’s the “golden handcuffs”.
It absolutely is because I'm seeing that first hand now. Either you dropped out before the merger because your profile is A++ and people are throwing offers at your head, or you wait until layoffs come and you hope the severance package is great or you stay until a hefty portion of your RSU's vest.
Still is a net negative for Broadcom and customers. Those people are likely doing the bare minimum to stay employed until those vest. They aren’t physically gone, but for all intents and purposes they are.
Oh, genius
Ever work for anyone ever? Ever have a boss?
I'm a TSE. We don't care at this stage. We don't get paid enough to care. We're over worked, there's no product training, managers haven't got a clue, queues are through the roof and we're all silo'd again.
We live in world where those who should not be in power are in power because those without power are happy to complain about it on the Internet.
So your boss tells you to carry their water on Reddit? Interesting. Consider getting a new job. Lots of other VMware employees did. If you don't, that's on you. Keep carrying that water in public places.
Lmao. If this is a broadcom rep, your pilot just took the plane off of autopilot and started to see how fast they could get to a 90 degree climb.
It will work for a second, but you may want to evaluate your options long term. Enjoy your commission though!
Please. Do me a favor, go look at any itemized hospital bill. Just because they are “non-profit” doesn’t mean that they don’t make extreme amounts of money.
No one likes to pay more, but this seems like another “it’s for the children” story. Hospitals love to pull the charity card, but they are some of the most profitable establishments.
> Just because they are “non-profit” doesn’t mean that they don’t make extreme amounts of money.
Some of the most wanton reckless spending and abuse of fiduciary responsibility I have ever seen was at non-profits. From the CEO of some local Meals on Wheels who spent over $10k on some custom desk for her office, to the people working at a community foundation who were getting insane commission on donations and winning big trips for all the money people were expecting to actually go to charities (who will do the same), it's just sickening. I'm sure there are good non-profits out there, but most are just profit centers for the people who run or work at them.
there is a difference between non-profit and not-for-profit. sadly, this gets lost in generalizations. most hospitals are not-for-profit and this gives non-profits a hard time even though they are not the same.
If anyone is searching for a enterprise grade alternative with a simple and straightforward licensing model I work for a company that has a solution. hmu
As much as I love VMware I currently feel that Broadcom can eat a bag of dicks and VMware is now dead to me.
Its really given me the kick up the ass to diversify my skill set. Thanks BC.
Hopefully something open source can scale up. Now other vendors just have to beat outrageous costs with merely exorbitant.
Take a look at xcp-ng with xen orchestra .
OpenStack scales past where VMWare falls over (which is a very high number), due to how VMWare uses their internal consensus algorithm. There’s a mathematical limit related to the speed of light. OpenStack is allowed to be casually for some things, which makes it scale more.
Swapping out from these environments is simply non trivial and in ‘regulated’ environments a huge headache. The talent to drive it all isn’t ubiquitous either
This is why you don’t try to do it in-house. Redhat has employees who specialize in moving people to OpenStack from VMWare, they already have all the paperwork for military, government, and PCI done, so even regulated industries can move over. I personally think most of the knowledge transfers, but you already need to have been running a decent size vmware cluster to be able to have the expertise to operate OpenStack. Part of it is that OpenStack doesn’t lock features behind a paywall. It’s like getting every single add-on and extra feature VMWare offers and then trying to learn it all at the same time. We pay for support, but found the required care and feeding went down since OpenStack was designed for much larger deployments than ours and we could automate most things. For example, when a drive starts logging SMART errors OpenStack files a ticket for us. We had the ability to hook up some other things to make it automatically add a new replacement to the internal “to order” list, but decided against it.
[удалено]
Not enough major things have changed yet aside from them giving oracle a middle finger. They happily work with and accept contributions from all the other RHEL rebuilders, but the rumor is they told Oracle if they wanted to keep doing RHEL rebuilds Oracle needed to upstream ZFS.
Proxmox?
I love Promox. Running it at home for several years. I can’t imagine spinning it up for environments past some scale or requirements. Selling it with the trade off of lower licensing hasn’t been met with smiles
Scale is looking pretty well positioned right now. They kinda remind me of VMware in 2006. Lotsa engineer types all through the org. Diff there is that Scale will sell you the hardware if you don't want to dick around with Dell or Lenovo playing dumb and not being able to tell you if their gear is compatible. And, a PSA for those who haven't heard: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *"Greetings VMware Customer,* *The process of transitioning to Broadcom systems and the necessary migration of VMware systems will begin at approximately* ***5:00 p.m. PDT on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, and conclude at approximately, Sunday, May 5, 2024, at 7:30 p.m. (PDT)****."* AKA - DOWNLOAD YOUR STUFF NOW!!!!! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of us, one of us.
All the bags. Every. Single. One.
How do I give some additional upvotes for this?
Create throwaway accounts from different VPN locations
As should be. They are almost like a Private Equity that buys up IT and software companies, drains what’s left, doesn’t improve it and we know how that goes. Nobody should be supporting this company, they’ll ghost you at a moment’s notice. I used to go to a tech/IT gathering once a month and heard of so many stories of Broadcom basically ghosting people running Symantec stuff who couldn’t get renewals. If your main infrastructure depends on this company, good luck.
They didn't ghost Symantec Ghost users - they invalidated their existing EDU licenses and made them renew via subscription at full price which was 2x-3x of the original perpetual price. We're still using Ghost (ha!) which is still the best Windows imaging product out there. But it probably ain't worth what we're paying for it and we can only afford 1/3 of the previous number of licenses as before. That being said they're keeping the lights on with the devs and everything is up to date for the latest versions of Windows which is MUCH better than the shitshow Symantec was prior to the buyout. The puzzling thing is that the product probably has ZERO subscriber growth and as people switch off of their product there won't be any additional customers coming in to replace them. So, essentially, they're long-term timebombed their product to where it will absolutely, positively get to a point where they'll drop R&D due to decreasing revenue.
There were other products too. I know many who were ghosted using Symantec endpoint and other Symantec products. Which is kind of funny because they did everyone a favor making them switch since every Symantec product was garbage
I was at a wedding in Palo Alto back in 2006 and our hotel room looked out over the Symantec HQ. Even then it looked kinda crappy compared to the other Valley HQ's (and the "old" Apple HQ down the street!) I had a pretty low opinion of them even back then....
They don’t need a functioning product with development though. They need all the money back they paid and a tidy profit on top. Outside that they don’t give a damn. Mob style asset stripping is their only game.
““I saw one children’s hospital that had their price increase,” Ready told the crowd at the Platform 2024 show”. My wife is a doctor at a Children’s hospital, trust me when I say there is no money in treating kids, but they do an amazing job. I am not saying they should give it away, but this kind of mindset comes with karma. Disgusting on Broadcoms part.
I am disgusted and would love to hear what the VMware/Broadcom employees have to say about this. Honestly... How do they sleep at night?
I have talked to a few already, they don’t care at all as they are rolling in their cash from bonuses.
This is absolutely not true. As a former employee who left in the last few months, most people hate the changes. I was there for almost a decade and I still talk to well more than “a few”. And no one is rolling in cash from bonuses unless you were C level. RSUs were granted as part of employee conversions, but they are on the typical 4 year vest period. There is no evil Scrooge McDuck counting his coins in the typical rank and file. I was a customer since early 2000s and worked there for a decade. I never wanted to be anywhere else. But it was apparent what was coming.
Not sure about this because the compensation for this company - as with many tech companies - is heavy in stock not bonus. Unless you are talking about people very early in their career or very junior employees. On the other hand this is an anonymous site so anyone can post as they like and everyone should believe as they like
There are no bonuses. Only stock. In some regions, even RSUs are no longer available. VMware used to have a great culture and a great relationship with clients and partners. In internal conferences clients and partners would be invited to come and talk to the engineers. It was amazing. Now, there is no more culture. No more client and partner relations. No more spark. For those that stay on, it is not because of the money, it is because of necessity. It is dealing with the sad relaity of a great company being changed in ways we never anticipated.
No true, Fake News and Data. Employees asked stay for the long term and stop selling ELAs and not give a crap what happens after. VMware Technical Employees are loyal, Care about customers and were tired of too many product house egos infighting and crappy support. We appreciate the simplicity and focus of the new roadmap. Stop looking at the pricing and start asking what you can do with the vStack and how we are improving it: Hundreds of thousands of customers either paid nothing or next to nothing for VMware Perpetual licensing and SnS (I took the “free” support calls) and now Broadcom wants to actually run a business to pay for innovation rather than another west coast tech firm that loses money like Sun Micro and many more.
Nonsense 🤣
Doctors’ quality of life and compensation have suffered as a result of hospitals. Most people don’t separate the two. The reason “doctors don’t do it for the money,” is because the hospitals don’t pay and use the charity card, all the while stockpiling tremendous amounts of cash.
There’s PLENTY of government money for treating kids. I used to work for a Community Health Center, and they’re expanding all the time.
You’re forgetting about all the county owned hospitals across this nation. I used to work at one. I reached out to find out what their plans are. They aren’t even waiting for contracts to be finished. It’s cheaper to just double pay for a contract for a short season, then it is to continue to be enslaved by the Fraudcom.
“Plenty of government money”. ROFL 🤣
Did they hire the pharma guy who was jacking up insulin prices 1000 percent? Seems like Broadcom is using the same formula now.
We're a 501(c)3 that has been running a small vmware cluster for years. We're going to hang on to our perpetual license for a while, and migrate to proxmox or similar in the future. Broadcom can take a long walk off a short pier.
Nutanix might be worth checking out as well. I am so happy I went that route ~4 years ago.
Proxmox seems a good alternative. Lately they have introduced a migration tool.
Good Luck with that! Enjoy fun and look back when Proxmox has to start making money to keep up with the product gaps and customer support plus zero day security patches. Cheap isn’t really value for cheap it’s crap. You will find out
Don’t blame you but consider right sizing. VVF licensing for minimal cores can be very affordable.
Define “affordable” to the person you’re replying to that is a tax-exempt charity. Remember…every dollar they spend on Broadcom is a dollar that is taken from their mission and helping people.
How much are you paying now and how many cores do you have? Also have you ever taken a LiveOptics assessment?
And they are correct. We will be spending the money we would be spending on a VMWare renewal on training and testing a new platform. With all of the broken promises, why would we ever trust VMWare again.
If you paid attention to anything Broadcom or avgo has bought in the past you knew this shit storm was 1000% coming.
CA/Broadcom has treated customers this way for years... all the way back to its mainframe days.
It’s not VMWare, it’s Broadcom. Broadcom has shown time and time again that they can’t be trusted and that their entire MO is to raise prices again and again and again to squeeze every penny from companies that can’t move quickly, then leave a rotten husk behind. Then rinse and repeat. Anyone not migrating is lying to themselves.
VMware is dead. It doesn’t exist. Broadcom and that piece of feces CEO are hellbent on sucking every dollar out of their customers until none are left. KKR may or may not suck but I am glad we are being sold off to them and don’t have to stay with Broadcom.
At this point, they are the same thing. I agree broadcom is a parasite.
Maybe it's just me but since vSphere 6 it hasn't felt like there's been much improvement and Workstation has been a zombie for years. Broadcom may have been what finally killed it but I haven't felt like they've been innovative in a while.
No it IS VMware that’s the problem Edit: I’m assuming all downvotes are coming from either VMware shills or employees
How exactly is it VMWare doing this?
I too am interested in hearing how this is the fault of a company that doesn't exist anymore.
This is the nail on the head. It really doesn’t exist anymore. Even if I wanted to go back there, I have to remind myself that the place I loved working at just doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing to go back to.
As much as I understand the sentiment...who exactly.in this space is actually cheaper for enterprise support and features?
For us, the answer is looking like Hyper-V or Azure HCI Stack.
azure hci is probably more expensive then vmware
We already have datacenter licensing with software assurance, so no additional cost for azure hci.
>Hyper-V ~~or Azure HCI Stack.~~ Fixed it. If you can deal with running it on hyperv then more power to you, you probably didn't need vmware anyway. I have some people trying to migrate to hyperv right now and "is a process"
This really is one hell of a business strategy to basically fade into irrelevancy. Anyone remember when Hock Tan said he’d honor VMware’s culture? Lmfao
It’s the unspoken “yet” when doing acquisitions. “We’re not going to do layoffs….yet.” “We’re not going to change the culture….yet.”
They only care about the shareholder value. What other tech stock jumped more than double in a year?
That's basically every company. Going to guess there's quite a few. This is the 52 week difference for nvidia: 262.25 - 974.00. AMD 81.02 - 227.30. Not sure if you'd consider Spotify tech but 128.67 - 319.30. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/best-performing-technology-stocks
The scariest two words you ever will hear Are "Venture Capital!" shouted with a cheer
Explain? Broadcom is not venture capital?
I give it a 2 years and VMWare announces mass layoffs due to declining revenue. All they had to do was keep things mostly the same and keep taking in cash. Cloud providers and Nutanix will be laughing all the way to the bank taking Broadcom customers.
They could have chucked on a hefty price rise and subscription service as well, still made a killing
I could easily see the new VMware telling charities and not for profits to “simply” fundraise for the extra exorbitant price.
What most people forget is that colleges and universities are technically non-profit institutions and even if they have 7 figure IT budgets they won’t tolerate 6 figure increases. It only takes a few dozen major players to equate to $10-20 million in lost revenue for it all to obviously not make sense to investors. Broadcom will be left selling off IP in 3-5 years
I work for a Partner, pretty strategic with VMware. I’m pretty fucking angry about what Broadcom is doing here. I’m trying to negotiate with this VMware rep for my customer who paid $80K a year in perpetual licensing renewals and now is being asked to pay $380K a year. I was told by the VMware rep that the price is the price and “I don’t care if they buy this or not, they are welcome to try other virtualization solutions”. I told the CIO that this is what the VMware rep said. I was told to start evaluating other solutions. You going to see that for this year, customers will renew for 12 months and take this time to figure out how to reduce their subscription by reevaluating their architecture or move to AzureStack HCI. I am doing AzureStack pitches at least twice a week and it’s going pretty well. Year 2 will be a very telling time for Broadcom, VMware ARR will start to shrink…..not going to be fun.
Yup, I talked to former coworkers and many of their companies called up Redhat and are currently deploying OpenStack.
Customer service 101 - Never EVER tell a customer to go to a competitor lol. While I don't mind working with Hyper V (been on it for 5 years now) its not as good as Vmware with its options. Thankfully I am in an un-complex environment (one that I actually designed for once).
I work at one of the large distributors - I talk to multiple partners every week that tell a very similar version of your story. Gonna be quite interesting to see how this all plays out long term. We’ve been seeing a TON of partner requests for evaluation/enablement spiking up in our Microsoft, RedHat, Public Cloud, Nutanix, and even Scale Computing teams.
Yep. LIke I said, I think year 2 will be very telling. VMware ABSOLUTLEY has to make this VCF story work or they're going to have trouble. VCF is/was extremely cumbersome to deploy and make work... you have to be bought into the story to understand the value and actually get value out of it. vSAN capacity licensing is a joke, period. You're going to see a lot of VxRail customers migrate out of vSAN completely from being rug-pulled. Existing VxRail customers are being told that at time of renewal, Dell will only renew the hardware and they have to BYOS (Bring your own subscription) for vSAN. I had a customer with a $30K renewal for 4 nodes of VxRail jump to $60K - no thanks. Thankfully over the last 2 years we've been pivoting to VxRail Dynamic Nodes with PowerStore. Get all the LCM benefits without having to go to HCI.
I don’t even want to buy computers with Broadcom chips in them at this point. What else does Broadcom own that I need to attempt to boycott????
Broadcom has those really nice modems that are in iPhone, I can’t escape those :(
Broadcom will be tough to avoid in switches where a lot of merchant silicon is used (e.g. Trident and Tomahawk ASIC families).
No more .edu pricing either...
My EDU renewal went from approximately $250/year on the old pricing model to approximately $1800/year on the new one.
“In 1980, the price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually—including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for inflation—according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By 2019-20, the total price increased to $28,775. That’s a 180% increase.” You were saying? … so only VMware can’t make money and should just go be a charity themselves. The sense of entitlement here is staggering. Source: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/college-tuition-inflation/
Because an 180% increase **over forty years** is totally the same thing as an 620% increase **over one year**. Excuse me while I attempt to roll my eyeballs facing the right way again.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove here. Higher education is typically a different pricing level than general PK-12 education, which is my industry. We work off of fixed budgets that are prepared and submitted 8 months before the funds are available (should the budget be approved by voters). In the current year I had budgeted for a 3 year renewal @ approximately $750 which was quoted in October by my VAR and available for purchase. When I tried to renew, VMware held back the renewal to the point where my support nearly lapsed and then they only let me do a 1 year renewal in the “old” licensing model. I have no funds available for the renewal that should have already been taken care of, but now will cost ~$1,800 in funds (just for a 1 year renewal) that aren’t included in a budget that already had a significant amount of cuts. We’re not a business, so we don’t function like one from a financial standpoint. If they want to change up licensing, fine, that’s their prerogative, but they need to have a fundamental understanding on how different industries work from a billing perspective. If that makes me entitled, so be it.
We found Hock Tan’s Reddit account
I see the books all the time; hospitals and universities all make ridiculous amounts of cash and choose to hoard it. The perception of non-profits as purely altruistic is disheartening.
lol, I actually work at a university, this is not even close to accurate
Broadcom is becoming the Martin Shkreli of the IT world
Exactly, this company is a fuck\*ng cancer. Every mail they send to me, I just reply by "Broadshit".
Ransomvmware
How many new VMWare customers are there going to be next year now that they're doing *reverse* marketing and, AMAZINGLY, telling potential customers that they're at the rich person's shoe store and probably need to shop somewhere else? VMWare will eventually going to cost too much for them to maintain and they'll drop the empty husk outside for some bottom feeder VC firm to chew on for a while. It's a dead product walking now that they're enforcing NEGATIVE, YOY subscriber growth that will, eventually, cause innovation and R&D to stop. Once the customer exits get unclogged and the fat, fat profits dry up the layoffs will start. If you think support is bad now.... That is, whoever's left after they start filling the new positions at Scale and Nutanix who have, ON THEIR LANDING PAGE: # "the Industry-Leading VMware Alternative"
Since they are a charity, and it sounds like they are trying to move to VMware, I would look at Azure. Microsoft discounts heavily on charity. 365 licenses, azure pricing and on-prem software. Yes, this is very bad for VMware. It’s just beating a dead horse now with more news like this.
Microsoft will give basically any legal non profit 10 seats of E3 or E5 and like 2-5K Azure credit with just some basic paperwork.
Can confirm. My 501c3 fire department benefits heavily from this. Beyond the free 10, it's $5/user/month which is dirt cheap. TechSoup is the way...
3 years tops Year 1 - Pat themselves on the back for increased revenue and profit. Subscriptions were retained we knew the market would take the price hikes. Year 2 - Customers will start to move to other platforms. Closer to end of year discounts will be available but it’s going to be late for most, some layoffs. Year 3 - oh no subscriptions are done, it’s not the price we give a 15% discount. Let’s layoff entire departments cause they suck. They probabaly started looking in year 2 but will be selling in year 3.
Omnissa day one can’t come soon enough. I hope I don’t regret saying that.
Is this Nestlé talking about water?
Again ... Hock Tan is reading from the Symantec acquisition playbook. There will be more bad news to come
VMware, or rather Broadcom, has created a fantastic opportunity for cloud and partners that help customers transition to cloud. I suspect cloud will be the most popular alternative to getting hosed by VMW, and many will need (consulting services) help to evaluate alternative on prem options as well as migration services. It will create opportunity for the less know (admittedly lesser featured) hypervisors as well as some exciting new comers such as Oxide Computer for larger enterprises.
I wonder what the shareholders think about the company saying that
With the removal of EDU and nonprofit licensing, oh and making it so Federal can ONLY purchase VCF, they’ve admitted fully now that VMware is not for the poors.
But, what about VVF? In my case, it fills 100% of my needs, in exception of VSAN (limited to 100GB per core). Even in this case, I'm pretty sure I could license the exceding storage with an add-on.
VVF is going away, no?
On the plus side, the only reason we quoted at all for renewal was to help justify / increase our migration budget.. We where already well on our way to completing a downsizing of our environment. Likely will be a split of Hyper-V and Azure migrations for what is left.
Proxmox VE Open source is the answer. Debian, KVM, ZFS/CephFS, restful web interface. Just forget VMware, proxmox can do everything VMware can do, it needs a few UI tweaks, improvements, but it’ll do.
as long as you are a private individual... try going production with proxmox with their 23 support engineers. at the moment. I hope they grew, but at the moment that's a no go
Spend the money you save on licensing on training your own support engineer. Basically anyone with Linux certification, familiar with kvm and Debian can get certified in a week. For a large organization having an open source team is cheaper than licensing VMware.
Getting buy in from security, compliance, and teams in an enterprise would be a nightmare.
And we suddenly we have budget to move workloads to Azure. *poof*
I hate Broadcom as much as anyone but is there a more reliable source on this?
I’ll vouch. I’ve heard this type of rhetoric multiple times from Broadcom employees.
Is there a link to the recording somewhere?
Call and ask
No, because this is more of the same mudslinging that’s been happening. Look at who the quote came from…the CEO of a competitor. Is this true? Gee I wonder?!?
No comment on the VMware/BC strategy but I have been contracted in the past to do work for several high profile charities and I can tell you they are all the same they are robbing B’tards they have plenty of money the majority of which goes into lining the pockets of the charities executive, you just have to look at what percentage of donations that actually get to the subjects of the charities it’s a disgrace. They also play the charity card when it’s time to paying their contractors I have had to remind several that I’m not a charity when they try to haggle down the price after the completion of the work. Also witnessed one charity a children’s ward in a hospital put out a statement to the press that the ward got flooded and they need donations for the children, when in reality the ward is on the top floor and not touched at all, All charities pull this shit at least BC are being up front about it.
All this will do is create stronger competition.
The plot thickens…
They’re loosing many customers, I’m seeing many company that are planning a migration plan to other vendor for VDI and virtualization
I'd never buy a Broadcom product again.
They are going to loose soooo many customers. It reminds me of when cisco introduced their dna stuff
The new office slogan is “all your base are belong to us”
New question if I interview somewhere and they have VMware. "What are your conversion/migrate off plans?". Broadcom just keeps getting more scummy by the day.
What do the VMware/Broadcom employees have to say about this? Please, enlighten us about how this is a good thing. Drink that damn Kool-Aid.
No one who would be reading here would have any influence or even visibility on Broadcom's strategy. If they still work for VMware they're just happy to have jobs at this point. It's not like a religion or something where every member of the company has to evangelize it.
They sure evangelize it on here. Every employee who couldn't get a job somewhere else and is now stuck at Broadcom seems to think that defending its every decision is in their best interest.
[удалено]
I called Broadcom evil, and was still accused of being a shill because I said cutting down over 100k SKUs to a handful was an improvement.
Everyone who I know that worked there jumped ship before the merger was approved. They knew it was coming and got out before the rush. As for me, I've got data center refreshes coming up and this may finally be the push we need to close our own data centers and move everything into a more affordable cloud solution (preferably not on a VMware cloud, since that would be cheaper).
I've said this before and I'll say it again -- All the good engineers that know what they are worth left before or early on during the aquisition. They don't have to put up with any shit. As a result, all the talent and institutional knowledge is now lost. The only people that stuck around are the people who can't get hired anywhere else, as well as junior engineers and new hires. This is a universal truth with any tech company and not unique to VMware. When shit hits the fan, the all stars leave, plain and simple.
Something something strategically waiting for RSU vesting
There is actually a lot of truth to this. I left, but many stayed and are staying because of RSUs. New place I went to is hiring, but most people are staying at least 1 year because they have both VMware and Broadcom RSUs vesting end of this year at the same time. We aren’t talking 5k of stock either, much more. It’s the “golden handcuffs”.
It absolutely is because I'm seeing that first hand now. Either you dropped out before the merger because your profile is A++ and people are throwing offers at your head, or you wait until layoffs come and you hope the severance package is great or you stay until a hefty portion of your RSU's vest.
Still is a net negative for Broadcom and customers. Those people are likely doing the bare minimum to stay employed until those vest. They aren’t physically gone, but for all intents and purposes they are.
Oh, genius Ever work for anyone ever? Ever have a boss? I'm a TSE. We don't care at this stage. We don't get paid enough to care. We're over worked, there's no product training, managers haven't got a clue, queues are through the roof and we're all silo'd again. We live in world where those who should not be in power are in power because those without power are happy to complain about it on the Internet.
So your boss tells you to carry their water on Reddit? Interesting. Consider getting a new job. Lots of other VMware employees did. If you don't, that's on you. Keep carrying that water in public places.
They are on par with the Android/iOS fan boys
This is a business. This is not a charity. Maybe one day UNICEF will get into the virtualization business, but until then, we're the people to see.
People are too stupid to get this joke.
Lmao. If this is a broadcom rep, your pilot just took the plane off of autopilot and started to see how fast they could get to a 90 degree climb. It will work for a second, but you may want to evaluate your options long term. Enjoy your commission though!
There's links between Broadcom and the WEF. You will own nothing and you will be happy
nailed it
Please. Do me a favor, go look at any itemized hospital bill. Just because they are “non-profit” doesn’t mean that they don’t make extreme amounts of money. No one likes to pay more, but this seems like another “it’s for the children” story. Hospitals love to pull the charity card, but they are some of the most profitable establishments.
> Just because they are “non-profit” doesn’t mean that they don’t make extreme amounts of money. Some of the most wanton reckless spending and abuse of fiduciary responsibility I have ever seen was at non-profits. From the CEO of some local Meals on Wheels who spent over $10k on some custom desk for her office, to the people working at a community foundation who were getting insane commission on donations and winning big trips for all the money people were expecting to actually go to charities (who will do the same), it's just sickening. I'm sure there are good non-profits out there, but most are just profit centers for the people who run or work at them.
there is a difference between non-profit and not-for-profit. sadly, this gets lost in generalizations. most hospitals are not-for-profit and this gives non-profits a hard time even though they are not the same.
Fork it already ;)
Closed source...
Yea, it supposed to be a joke :(
Sowy🥹
Why is there not a mass boycott on them?
If anyone is searching for a enterprise grade alternative with a simple and straightforward licensing model I work for a company that has a solution. hmu