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Alien1Being 2 minutes ago [-]
Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently
who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
fsuts 3 hours ago [-]
”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom”
For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.
(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
lmm 2 hours ago [-]
Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.
sokoloff 3 hours ago [-]
If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants.
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
fsuts 2 hours ago [-]
It’s ok, UK courts are mainly rigged and likely to favour a home company over a foreign one (see Tesla v bbc as an example).
Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….
malfist 1 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about? Judicial filings in the UK are not generally confidential and when they are it is usually only about specific documents.
throwaway85825 2 hours ago [-]
>filings are private
That's horrific
fsuts 2 hours ago [-]
If uk media were not silenced then yes, everyone would be horrified at what goes on.
bigfatkitten 27 minutes ago [-]
It would be if it were true.
vr46 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
elevation 19 minutes ago [-]
My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to:
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
senshan 17 minutes ago [-]
Interesting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.
nubinetwork 4 hours ago [-]
> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
Fordec 3 hours ago [-]
I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.
d3Xt3r 2 hours ago [-]
HPE's VMWare alternative is Morpheus, and it supports both Veeam and Zerto. So it's probably not them.
cloudie78 3 hours ago [-]
OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.
OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.
Used to do those migration in a previous life.
p_l 2 hours ago [-]
The latter is IIRC rebadged KubeVirt
Flere-Imsaho 3 hours ago [-]
Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.
nick__m 3 hours ago [-]
Proxmox for 40k vm would be surprising also veeam support Proxmox.
proxysna 3 hours ago [-]
I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.
nick__m 2 hours ago [-]
Before my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.
3 hours ago [-]
naturalmovement 3 hours ago [-]
I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.
nikanj 2 hours ago [-]
Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.
Interesting times.
digitalsin 3 hours ago [-]
Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.
proxysna 3 hours ago [-]
Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.
rwmj 3 hours ago [-]
I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.
It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.
There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).
[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]
>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.
I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.
If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.
sokoloff 2 hours ago [-]
The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)
jamesfinlayson 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.
stackskipton 2 hours ago [-]
Sure but whole strategy is "Jack up prices by 500%, cut expenses by 70% and make more money in short term"
What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.
sidewndr46 32 minutes ago [-]
Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy
twoodfin 2 hours ago [-]
I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.
rwmj 1 hours ago [-]
No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.
twoodfin 41 minutes ago [-]
IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.
It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.
bigstrat2003 2 hours ago [-]
Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.
1 hours ago [-]
twoodfin 42 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.
Spooky23 2 hours ago [-]
They make AI crap. The future is Mars.
BLKNSLVR 1 hours ago [-]
But Snickers is Mars with nuts, so it's both healthier and more filling.
The future is Snickers!
Shitty-kitty 27 minutes ago [-]
Broadcom is acting like a VC. Quickly milk as much as you can then sell the carcass.
simoncion 35 minutes ago [-]
> Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.
If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.
They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.
proxysna 2 hours ago [-]
Nice. Thanks for the insight!
jcastro 44 minutes ago [-]
> A lot of work ahead.
Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.
One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.
Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.
driverdan 2 hours ago [-]
As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?
mjfisher 1 hours ago [-]
I can't speak to this particular case, but most of the delay is likely to be organisational rather than technical at this kind of scale.
Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:
* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor
* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime
* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team
* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime
* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire
* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above
to11mtm 1 hours ago [-]
Don't forget any relevant training for employees (e.x. for things like 'how to connect to a virtual desktop'). That can add up in some cases.
GlacierFox 3 hours ago [-]
Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?
remus 1 hours ago [-]
It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.
ternaryoperator 49 minutes ago [-]
Pshaw! Similar behavior by Oracle has not diminished its footprint nor its sales.
laserDinosaur 3 hours ago [-]
From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"
>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"
Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
LastTrain 2 hours ago [-]
Broadcom has paying customers - they sell chips to companies that have no paying customers.
fsuts 2 hours ago [-]
VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?
simonjgreen 3 hours ago [-]
Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible
lmm 2 hours ago [-]
Honestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.
quickthrowman 1 hours ago [-]
Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
windexh8er 2 hours ago [-]
Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s
3 hours ago [-]
Nikhil37475 2 hours ago [-]
extremely effective
eqvinox 16 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Nikhil37475 2 hours ago [-]
effective
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot.
migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.
if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
bijowo1676 2 hours ago [-]
there is no risk since spring boot is open source.
any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something
dzonga 27 minutes ago [-]
support contracts ? if your spring-boot version is 2 releases behind etc. You use extensions that are [VMWare Tanzu Spring Enterprise Extensions]
lijok 3 hours ago [-]
What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?
ickyforce 2 hours ago [-]
Mostly 30 years of people writing code.
nmstoker 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!
xvxvx 3 hours ago [-]
Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming.
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
tjwebbnorfolk 3 hours ago [-]
VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.
mjr00 3 hours ago [-]
... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?
usernametaken29 54 minutes ago [-]
At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.
chatmasta 2 hours ago [-]
If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.
(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….
That's horrific
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.
Used to do those migration in a previous life.
Interesting times.
It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.
There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).
[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]
Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.
Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter
If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.
What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.
It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.
The future is Snickers!
If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.
They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.
Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.
One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.
Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.
Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:
* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor
* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime
* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team
* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime
* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire
* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above
>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"
Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.
if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.
[0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg