Broadcom execs say VMware price, subscription complaints are unwarranted

Industry groups aren't giving up hope for government intervention.

See full article...

 

[OrvGull]

If only there were a free and open source equivalent.

Oh wait! There is!

https://www.virtualbox.org/

There's an asterisk there. It's free for personal use. If you even download it at an IP associated with a corporation Oracle's salesdroids will harass you about the "license violation" forever.

 

[malor]

And VirtualBox is terrible anyway. It runs, but not very well.

 

[stormcrash]

If only there were a free and open source equivalent.

Oh wait! There is!

https://www.virtualbox.org/

Though parts like the extensions and USB drivers are not open source, and unless it's changed commercial use requires licenses from Oracle

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Well this is a refreshing change. Normally we're told that we're "confused" when monopolists and gatekeepers make sudden changes with major impacts. I'm glad to see they now respect us enough to merely say our complaints are unwarranted.

Oh they still say you're confused. That's why they're here to

help people understand the value of the new VMware.

Such fucking abusive behavior. "You dumb little customers don't comprehend how good we're being to you."

 

[r0twhylr]

If only there were a free and open source equivalent.

Oh wait! There is!

https://www.virtualbox.org/

No. Nonononono. Just no. "No" with a sharp point on top.

I have VirtualBox to run personal VMs from time to time, (and it is FINE for that) but it pales next to ESXi, or any of the roughly comparable commercial or buseinss-oriented open source offerings. Even ignoring the licensing issues of VirtualBox, the interface is absolute shite (looks like icon artwork was from Windows XP), and it lacks the basic functionality that a business needs.

VirtualBox is not a bare-metal hypervisor. The closest comparable VMware product would be Workstation or Fusion. It has no VSAN or NSX (or Nutanix Flow) equivalent, it does not have HA mode, AFAIK it does not have vmotion, does not cluster, or anything else that allows commercial or government IT to run as it needs to 24/7.

In the commercial licensing space, if you have heavy Microsoft investment and expertise already, consider Hyper-V. Otherwise? Possibly Nutanix, maybe Scale Computing. If you're dedicated to open source / free, consider Proxmox. Maybe TrueNAS Scale. Verge.io is trying to make a name for themselves, but I honestly haven't done anything with it yet.

 

[adespoton]

and for those who don't use more than one component, and don't need support?





"We waited longer than Adobe and Autodesk to non-consensually fuck you in the ass while you were sleeping. Aren't you grateful?"

Indeed. I've been IT-adjacent for roughly 26 years now. Guess how many times I've purchased added vendor components or used vendor support, outside the initial purchase agreement?
Close enough to 0 as to be indistinguishable.

With VMWare, people learned how to use the product on personal time or at school, and generally didn't NEED extra support when deploying in the enterprise. And generally, you purchased the components that you'd need up-front.

What Broadcom is saying is that their customers don't actually know what they need, and with this new cloud services model, it will require their support in real time to help you figure out how to use their current offerings.

That's a pretty significant change from "it just works, billing is a fixed expense, and everyone knows how to use it."

 

[Nexus]

We're what I would consider a "small/Medium" shop, 400-500 servers spread across 3-4 clusters (the biggest one 18 prod esxi hosts) and this hit us like a sledgehammer. We got bought by a bigger company (more like 10,000 server environment) and even they are like "We're actually going to explore new VM solutions".

 

[Mrbonk]

and for those who don't use more than one component, and don't need support?





"We waited longer than Adobe and Autodesk to non-consensually fuck you in the ass while you were sleeping. Aren't you grateful?"

This is similar to what Sony has done with The Right Stuff and Crunchyroll after their buyouts and merger. If you want the same member benefits from the old TRS store which was a flat 20ish$ per year, you now have to pay something like 10$ a month now and you only get small discounts a few times every quarter along with a bunch of other garbage you don't want it need like a streaming subscription.

So now it's 120$ a year and you get a fraction of the value you would at TRS Which was 10% off every item you order for 20$ a year. And I actually still had a valid membership after the transition began and just for reference I have only placed one order at the new CR store with that 10% discount and it saved an extra 98$. TRS was a small mom and pop operation in Iowa and they could sustain with no issues for God knows how many years with no issues. And the equivalent with Sony is not even remotely the same value.

But it's not like you have recourse right? In the anime/manga industry the only other store with any kind of prevalence is the much much smaller AnimeCornerStore that has been around a long time. BuyAnime was spun off of TRS's adult items and are slowly getting non adult items. But not much. Luckily a few distributors sell direct but not many. So your choices are supporting big businesses like Sony. Or Amazon.(And all the issues people have had over the years without Amazon chooses to police Anime/manga based on content)And Barnes and Noble. Other big businesses like Walmart/Best Buy/Target only really stock mainstream stuff like Ghibli or Dragon Ball/sailor moon/Naruto at best.

Whaddya gonna do about it? ┐⁠(⁠´⁠д⁠`⁠)⁠┌

 

[Steve austin]

The problem isn't that there aren't a number of solid alternatives to VMware out there. The problem is that an entire generation of IT Professionals and IT Leaders have built their careers and reputations around justifying, building out, and managing large VMware deployments to their board of directors...and if they move to one of the alternatives, their skills and value to the organization goes down dramatically, because they're no longer the experts and no longer in control of the boat.

There is a lot wrong about this, but that concern is so far down the list it doesn’t register. I don’t do “IT” - I’ve been a system software developer (OS, compiler, bare metal, etc.) over my getting too close to 50 year career, and it may be different in IT. But I’ve had to reinvent myself multiple times over that period, and it was expected, because things change. In my opinion, if those “professionals“ and “leaders” are so specialized and locked to one specific product in that they can’t fairly readily move their knowledge to a relatively similar product, then I question if they deserve those attributes.

 

[Legatum_of_Kain]

What do you mean? You just buy companies and charge for everything. Oracle has been doing it, by hell we will as well - Broadcom board

 

[dtremit]

There is a lot of huffing and puffing in this thread, but Microsoft is almost entirely subscription based, no? SAP, Oracle, Slack, SalesForce, Adobe, and on and on. You can make a lot more money doing subscriptions and well companies like Microsoft are fleecing their customers longer than anyone else. Yet, there is this selective outrage at VMWare which doesn't resonate. Hell everyone (bar DHH) has switched to subscription for their entire computing needs which is how Amazon makes most of its money. But no moral outrage.

What is wrong in my thought process?

Three things, I think:

First — a lack of transition. Nearly every other vendor that has switched from permanent licensing to subscription models has done so over time, with plenty of warning, and usually some incentive to switch. Many of them will still sell you support for your permanent licenses long after they stopped selling them.

Take Veeam as an example, in the same space — when they stopped selling socket licenses, they announced it over a year in advance, and extended the date at least once, giving companies a chance to buy as many licenses as they wanted before they disappeared. They still sell support for those licenses. And for companies that did migrate to instance licensing, they provided incentives to switch in a way that prevented big surprises.

Second — sudden, massive price increases. Look upthread for some examples. It's a frog-in-hot-water situation, to a certain extent, but other vendors I've seen move to subscription did it at a price that wasn't all that different from what people were already paying — at least at the beginning. Of course, the price goes up over time, but not in a way you can't budget for. I don't want to think about how many IT budgets have been completely upended by this change in the middle of the year just because of when the company's renewal date happened to fall.

Third — and this is the one that took me a while to latch onto — there's zero upside for customers. For most subscription licenses, there's at least a small benefit of being able to "right size" licenses each year. Cut your staff? You can drop their Office 365 account costs.

Not so with VMware — since you're licensing your hardware, not your usage. If you move half of your VMs to AWS or Azure, the only way you can reduce your VMware bill is to switch some of your servers off. For companies expecting to get five years of life out of their hardware, that's a tough pill to swallow. (And if you're using something like vSAN, it might not be trivial even if the CPUs are going unused.)

If they were accompanying this change with a shift to usage-based licensing, there might not be nearly as much outcry — lots of companies can turn off a bunch of VMs in a pinch. Leaving it CPU-based is a huge middle finger to their customers.

 

[thedood04]

Of course Broadcom is saying this. They're so goddamn out of touch to even think their new structure would be accepted that it makes sense that they'd be blind to the backlash as well.

SO GLAD the company I work for already has a stack of Nutanix boxes just waiting for us to install and migrate all our VMs to. Won't have to deal with VMware at all in a few months.

You should send a photo of the new boxes and another of the deactivated VMware boxes.

 

[Steve austin]

I use VMs only for bringing up legacy systems for testing purposes. That said, while I understand to some extent the pain that would entail in telling Broadcom to get stuffed and switch to another vendor, there are certainly other vendors (and approaches other than locally run VM hosts). As best I can learn, VMware is significantly the largest single VM product provider, but their market share is only about 40%, and that some of their competitors offer fairly direct migration paths, so viable alternatives do exist.

I especially question the European companies’ demands for EU action based on

concerns about Broadcom driving business to the public cloud with negative for the European economy.

Vendors go away and alternative technologies come along. There are alternatives here - both other VM providers and cloud providers. If you cannot deal with either using one of the alternatives (and cannot create your own alternative), asking the government to ”protect” you (I guess by forcing a company to adopt a business model that you like rather than just abandoning that company) doesn’t make me very sympathetic.

 

[prc117f]

The problem isn't that there aren't a number of solid alternatives to VMware out there. The problem is that an entire generation of IT Professionals and IT Leaders have built their careers and reputations around justifying, building out, and managing large VMware deployments to their board of directors...and if they move to one of the alternatives, their skills and value to the organization goes down dramatically, because they're no longer the experts and no longer in control of the boat.

Shitty IT pros then. I have never tied myself to a vendor and was always flexible to move to the better solution. You need to practice your trade and hone your skills. If you are incapable of keeping up with tech and future options then you are a dinosaur.

Not all are like this otherwise we would still be running Novell 3.11 and IPX protocol in 2024.

 

[benjwah]

We’re all used to this kind of behaviour by now. I think if we’re honest, it’s impressive that it took this long for it to happen to VMWare products.

For those of us who can, I think we have some level of duty to do whatever we can to move away from their products.

Some people can’t do that I’m sure, but for the rest of us, if we can at all then we must.

 

[kaleberg]

It sounds like a lot of users don't want support and don't want to pay for it. VMware is violating antitrust laws by bundling, but the laws are only for little people.

The good news is that moving to a subscription opens up the market for companies that are willing to sell their product outright and simply produce new, improved versions. When Adobe went subscription, a lot of people stopped using Adobe products and starting using things like the Affinity suite, Pixelmator and a host of others.

(P.S. Since operating systems change, updating one's OS means eventually having to buy new versions of things. The Red Queen effect means that most people have to buy subscriptions, but mind it less when they upgrade their computer than when they have to pay and pay and pay.)

 

[malor]

Yeah, actually. It would. Netanyahu's government would topple in under a week if his crap leadership resulted in America cutting off Israel.

Generally I think Biden's been pretty OK, but he is objectively terrible on this. The Israeli far-right has gone full-on Nazi and he's just sitting there with his thumb up his ass meekly serving as their lickspittle.

Nothing justifies the actions Israel is taking. Biden deserves every bit of the criticism he gets on Gaza.

Adding reinforcement: genociding an entire population because some of them are holding hostages is not acceptable.

It's just being used as an excuse for to destroy Gaza, cleanse the Palestinian ethnicity, and integrate the land into Israel.

 

[lee_machine]

I'm in my 40's. I have been using VMWare, on and off, since I was a teenager. This whole debacle got me to try out virtualbox as my VMWare sub for this year was ending (but broadcom also killed workstation pro sooo). Network driver issues made me throw it in the bin. So, I fired up Hyper-V and you know what? I think broadcom did me a favour. I'm now saving £75 a year and I get the exact same performance as i did from VMware. Granted, Hyper-V's UI is garbage and accessing the VM's can be a pain but there are ways around it.

So thanks broadcom. you did me a huge favour. now go do one. you greedy, selfish.....................

VBox is good for some VM tasks like building VM images and IaC testing using tools like Vagrant. Development has been slow and stagnant at times since Oracle bought Sun. I was half expecting them to kill the project, but they've kept in on life support.

 

[lee_machine]

We're what I would consider a "small/Medium" shop, 400-500 servers spread across 3-4 clusters (the biggest one 18 prod esxi hosts) and this hit us like a sledgehammer. We got bought by a bigger company (more like 10,000 server environment) and even they are like "We're actually going to explore new VM solutions".

Smaller operation but we are working with our RedHat rep and exploring migrating to OpenShift.

 

[OrvGull]

edit: decided not to encourage this off-topic tangent further.

 

[Auie]

Sad to say, but it's their proprietary product, so they can do whatever they want with it.

Situations like this are why I lean on and support open-source whenever I can.

 

[mr_bond007]

"... that a single license key can be used for all components."

So, they are hoping that people will start using components that they do not have a license for by accident so that when they are audited they are in trouble, or ones that are using usage meter (vspp, the ones hardest hit) get to start paying right away.

 

[LostFate]

"... that a single license key can be used for all components."

So, they are hoping that people will start using components that they do not have a license for by accident so that when they are audited they are in trouble, or ones that are using usage meter (vspp, the ones hardest hit) get to start paying right away.

There's not going to be any auditing. New licensing requires installing a license proxy to ship license usage to Broadcom and you're licensed for all the features. They are going to keep track of the number of licenses you use and charge you overages but that's the only metric they are going to bill you on, cores installed per bundle.

 

[BilTheGalacticHero]

My company is (or actually was) a federal VMWare reseller partner. My customers are A&D prime contractors and I can tell you that they are NOT happy with what's going on. The time is ripe for a credible competitor to enter the market.

 

[mr_bond007]

Three things, I think:

First — a lack of transition. Nearly every other vendor that has switched from permanent licensing to subscription models has done so over time, with plenty of warning, and usually some incentive to switch. Many of them will still sell you support for your permanent licenses long after they stopped selling them.

Take Veeam as an example, in the same space — when they stopped selling socket licenses, they announced it over a year in advance, and extended the date at least once, giving companies a chance to buy as many licenses as they wanted before they disappeared. They still sell support for those licenses. And for companies that did migrate to instance licensing, they provided incentives to switch in a way that prevented big surprises.

Second — sudden, massive price increases. Look upthread for some examples. It's a frog-in-hot-water situation, to a certain extent, but other vendors I've seen move to subscription did it at a price that wasn't all that different from what people were already paying — at least at the beginning. Of course, the price goes up over time, but not in a way you can't budget for. I don't want to think about how many IT budgets have been completely upended by this change in the middle of the year just because of when the company's renewal date happened to fall.

Third — and this is the one that took me a while to latch onto — there's zero upside for customers. For most subscription licenses, there's at least a small benefit of being able to "right size" licenses each year. Cut your staff? You can drop their Office 365 account costs.

Not so with VMware — since you're licensing your hardware, not your usage. If you move half of your VMs to AWS or Azure, the only way you can reduce your VMware bill is to switch some of your servers off. For companies expecting to get five years of life out of their hardware, that's a tough pill to swallow. (And if you're using something like vSAN, it might not be trivial even if the CPUs are going unused.)

If they were accompanying this change with a shift to usage-based licensing, there might not be nearly as much outcry — lots of companies can turn off a bunch of VMs in a pinch. Leaving it CPU-based is a huge middle finger to their customers.

That's the thing, vspp licensing was usage based, that's what we had, we had hardware that was specced for 5+ yrs of usage, but now that its per core, we have had to cut our host counts (50%) to the bare minimum and swapped our all the cpus to lower core counts (75% reduction in cores) to just keep our cost a little higher than before. Our hardware purchases were based upon a usage licensing agreement which they just tore up.

 

[mr_bond007]

There's not going to be any auditing. New licensing requires installing a license proxy to ship license usage to Broadcom and you're licensed for all the features. They are going to keep track of the number of licenses you use and charge you overages but that's the only metric they are going to bill you on, cores installed per bundle.

They are doing that for everyone? I thought that was only for vcf usage with providers.

There will still be audits, the usage meter is a separate vm that you connect to vcenter, you don't want to have something monitored, don't connect the usage meter to it. Not having the usage meter connected doesn't affect anything (yet). Then when it does, you can put it in disconnected mode requiring you to export and manually send usage reports, you just dont (there are ways that could be implemented to fix that too).
So there are plenty of reasons for an audit at the moment.

 

[Nogami]

Sounds like they're starting to get really worried about the number of people jumping ship. They probably thought they had a unbeatable product at any price. The avalanche of people looking for alternatives and the resulting vendors going after them in droves is moving the market away from Broadcom right quick.

Oops Broadcom. Did you just hire yourself a new MBA or something to screw up your business?

 

[DaveSimmons]

A subscription model for software does make some sense for the company selling it. It can even be good for customers in some cases if done right.

A good company can use the steady income stream to put more resources into support, bug fixes, and steady incremental improvements instead of putting too much work into tacking on new features just to add checklist items to sell customers on an upgrade.

Sadly, more often than not (and looking at you, Broadcom) it's more often a cash grab because the product is already as good as they want to make it, and they plan to milk it as long as possible with minimum-effort maintenance work.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Sadly, more often than not (and looking at you, Broadcom) it's more often a cash grab because the product is already as good as they want to make it, and they plan to milk it as long as possible with minimum-effort maintenance work.

Even better, now they have an expensive merger to pay off.

 

[eye776]

This almost has echoes of Ivanti buying Pulse Secure.

 

[Riddler876]

Sounds like they're starting to get really worried about the number of people jumping ship. They probably thought they had a unbeatable product at any price. The avalanche of people looking for alternatives and the resulting vendors going after them in droves is moving the market away from Broadcom right quick.

Oops Broadcom. Did you just hire yourself a new MBA or something to screw up your business?

Your assuming the MBA doesn't know what they're doing.

1 Buy healthy business.
2 force money making change with no notice to stop migrations prior to paying up
3 publish increased revenue numbers from forced purchases
4 put in notice for share sell off
5 profit from inflated share price
6 laugh when people finally migrate 6 months from now because you've already ran off with the money

Edit: it's possible they're losing people so fast that plan wont even work. (but I'd put that at <50% chance). However the plan itself at this point is tried and tested and has a high success rate properly executed. For the executive anyway, the business is toast.

 

[Deleted member 330960]

Three things, I think:

First — a lack of transition. Nearly every other vendor that has switched from permanent licensing to subscription models has done so over time, with plenty of warning, and usually some incentive to switch. Many of them will still sell you support for your permanent licenses long after they stopped selling them.

Take Veeam as an example, in the same space — when they stopped selling socket licenses, they announced it over a year in advance, and extended the date at least once, giving companies a chance to buy as many licenses as they wanted before they disappeared. They still sell support for those licenses. And for companies that did migrate to instance licensing, they provided incentives to switch in a way that prevented big surprises.

Second — sudden, massive price increases. Look upthread for some examples. It's a frog-in-hot-water situation, to a certain extent, but other vendors I've seen move to subscription did it at a price that wasn't all that different from what people were already paying — at least at the beginning. Of course, the price goes up over time, but not in a way you can't budget for. I don't want to think about how many IT budgets have been completely upended by this change in the middle of the year just because of when the company's renewal date happened to fall.

Third — and this is the one that took me a while to latch onto — there's zero upside for customers. For most subscription licenses, there's at least a small benefit of being able to "right size" licenses each year. Cut your staff? You can drop their Office 365 account costs.

Not so with VMware — since you're licensing your hardware, not your usage. If you move half of your VMs to AWS or Azure, the only way you can reduce your VMware bill is to switch some of your servers off. For companies expecting to get five years of life out of their hardware, that's a tough pill to swallow. (And if you're using something like vSAN, it might not be trivial even if the CPUs are going unused.)

If they were accompanying this change with a shift to usage-based licensing, there might not be nearly as much outcry — lots of companies can turn off a bunch of VMs in a pinch. Leaving it CPU-based is a huge middle finger to their customers.

Thank you for the excellent explanation. Completely understand the sentiment in the comments now.

 

[Deleted member 543677]

I'm in my 40's. I have been using VMWare, on and off, since I was a teenager. This whole debacle got me to try out virtualbox as my VMWare sub for this year was ending (but broadcom also killed workstation pro sooo). Network driver issues made me throw it in the bin. So, I fired up Hyper-V and you know what? I think broadcom did me a favour. I'm now saving £75 a year and I get the exact same performance as i did from VMware. Granted, Hyper-V's UI is garbage and accessing the VM's can be a pain but there are ways around it.

So thanks broadcom. you did me a huge favour. now go do one. you greedy, selfish.....................

Wait, they killed workstation Pro ? Fusion Pro too ? (I missed that episode)

 

[Deleted member 543677]

No. Nonononono. Just no. "No" with a sharp point on top.

I have VirtualBox to run personal VMs from time to time, (and it is FINE for that) but it pales next to ESXi, or any of the roughly comparable commercial or buseinss-oriented open source offerings. Even ignoring the licensing issues of VirtualBox, the interface is absolute shite (looks like icon artwork was from Windows XP), and it lacks the basic functionality that a business needs.

VirtualBox is not a bare-metal hypervisor. The closest comparable VMware product would be Workstation or Fusion. It has no VSAN or NSX (or Nutanix Flow) equivalent, it does not have HA mode, AFAIK it does not have vmotion, does not cluster, or anything else that allows commercial or government IT to run as it needs to 24/7.

In the commercial licensing space, if you have heavy Microsoft investment and expertise already, consider Hyper-V. Otherwise? Possibly Nutanix, maybe Scale Computing. If you're dedicated to open source / free, consider Proxmox. Maybe TrueNAS Scale. Verge.io is trying to make a name for themselves, but I honestly haven't done anything with it yet.

For what it's worth, VMWare also produces Workstation and Fusion, and those users are also looking for alternatives.

There are two types of products :

• Big bare metal hypervisor (where the UI is mostly used by sys admins, frequently using CLI / config files)
• Consumer Virtual Machine software (where VMWare has a polished UI, deep OS integration, Guest Graphics acceleration, etc). VirtualBox is crap, Parallel solution is subscription only, and I do not know of any software with a decent UI and similar features to Workstation/Fusion/Parallel Desktop.

The original article is definitely from the point of view of the first category.

 

[tikkoneus]

You can't write fictional stupid as shortsighted as that.

Except all the recent articles about the 1bn+ lotteries mention that almost no one takes the 1bn and instead they take the immediate 500m lump sum. We intuitively don't trust income we might receive in the future and prefer to have it ourselves now and invest.

It seems that as one becomes ultrarich one eventually is in a position to, at will, purchase a winning lottery ticket in the form of a company merger. The calculus is the same: lump sum now and then toss the ticket in the trash.

 

[malor]

Wait, they killed workstation Pro ? Fusion Pro too ? (I missed that episode)

Apparently recent versions of Workstation have been very buggy, and Broadcom is selling off that arm of the business to some VC firm. I would not expect it to prosper. But AFAIK, you can still buy it today.

 

[WarenTester]

A good company can use the steady income stream to put more resources into support, bug fixes, and steady incremental improvements instead of putting too much work into tacking on new features just to add checklist items to sell customers on an upgrade.

Support just costs money, bug fixes are a necessary evil, and new features are only good if your customers want or need them.

 

[Flipper35]

The problem isn't that there aren't a number of solid alternatives to VMware out there. The problem is that an entire generation of IT Professionals and IT Leaders have built their careers and reputations around justifying, building out, and managing large VMware deployments to their board of directors...and if they move to one of the alternatives, their skills and value to the organization goes down dramatically, because they're no longer the experts and no longer in control of the boat.

The only thing we are having a hard time finding a replacement for is Horizon. Their VDI solution is far better than anything else we have found so far.