Would guess that they probably migrated to proxmox

It’s entirely possible that 24,000 VM’s didn’t count as “large” by VMWare standards.

We want to focus on keeping milking our large customers until they can find an alternative to us

Many SMBs will walk away at next server refresh.

VMware is walking dead.

We’re currently testing Nutanix and Proxmox for smaller clients.

Proxmox support is similar (~65%) in cost to VMware licensing, but it’s not likely to pull this sudden increase BS. Plus it’s capabilities are significant for SMB.

yep, my employer is one of them. Only around 200 VMs but my former employer (an MSP with several hundred customers, among them the administration of the city I live in, all schools, all kindergartens and the church) was also in the process of migrating when I switched.

I used to work for a company that made software built on VMware. The biggest customer was using hundreds of thousands of VMs. Pretty sure they’re working on moving off VMware now because of all this bullshit.

But yeah, it’s gonna take a long time to move off.

Nearly the strongest possible language I can imagine being used.

That analyst doesn’t work for Broadcom; it’s a third party. It could say, “they charged as much as they could possibly get away with” but I think “prices just below the pain threshold” is stronger language in a business setting.

To be fair, this is what every single company is doing right now. Stallman tried to warn you!

Because up until Broadcom bought them, it was a good product with a ton of useful features, endless supported integrations with 3rd party software and hardware, relatively easy to learn/use, with good support, all at reasonable and flexible price points depending on your needs.

Of course Broadcom has now thrown all of that into the toilet…

Because if you throw enough money at them, they’ll trip over themselves trying to fix your production critical issue in 4 hours or less, and that’s valuable to business because they get to go “it’s not our fault the site was down and we lost $2 million, it’s our vendor’s support team that was inadequate”

Phase 3: Say you’ve changed to earn some good will

Phase 4: Fucking do it again

What solution are you looking towards? I work in a massive organization with 20,000+ VMs and we’ve been having weekly virtual working groups across the country (our overseas depts have been doing their own) to try and discuss finding other solutions. We haven’t been very successful, as the biggest pitfall we’ve seen is no one offers lifetime licenses so if we don’t renew a yearly maintenance our VMs won’t stop functioning properly. That’s one of the main reasons we’re looking to off board from VMware.

How expensive (or cheaper) Nutanix compare to VMware

i love seed corn

In large scale computing, a server will have VERY powerful hardware. You can run multiple VMs on that one machine, giving a slice of that power to each VM so that it basically ends up with multiple individual computers running on one very powerful set of hardware instead of building a ton of individual.

Pretty much. Isolated environments to run a single service usually, although someone with more familiarity can comment further

Similar to docker, but the technical differences matter a lot. VMs have a lot of capabilities containers don’t have, while missing some of the value on being lightweight.

However, a more direct (if longer) answer would be: all cloud providers ultimately offer you VMs. You can run docker on those VMs, but you have to start with a VM. Selfhosted stuff (my homelab, for example) will also generally end up as a mix of VMs and docker containers. So no matter what project you’re working on at scale, you’ve probably got some VMs around.

Whether you then use containers inside them is a more nuanced and subtle question.

Running a virtual server allows you to run a server application on its own virtual machine, this eliminates the chance that (when running multiple applications from a server) the underlaying requirement for each apllication conflict.

In comparison to docker the full server can offer more native capabilities for some applications, while other applications simply only run on a full OS.

So by virtualizing the servers one large piece of Hardware can be used to run multiple servers and you can (sometimes dynamically) allocate resources as needed.

The backups can consume all computing power put of office hours while the other applications share during Office hours as needed… sometimes a bit more for VM A and sometimes a bit more for VM B.

Off course monitoring overallocation is a thing as you might end up with bottlenecks caused by peak loads that occur at the same time… the issue would be bigger when running on dedicated hardware.

And off course having multiple hardware platforms interconnected allows for a VM to be moved from hardware platform to hardware platform without interruption (license required) meaning you can perform hardware maintenance without an outage.

VMs are for actual isolation. Containers are for overcoming limitations of previous century package managers. They are not the same. =)

VMs provide a meaningful security boundary between applications. Containers (docker, etc) do not.

Kudos for immersing yourself in it!