Tesco UK supermarket chain removes 40,000 servers from VMware infrastructure, blames 'abusive conduct' from Broadcom
3 days ago by Valuy to c/technology
We were a VMware shop, albeit much smaller deployments. When a vendor increases prices up to 1000% (https://www.ciodive.com/...), you can bet that price is being passed along to consumers. VMware was by far the most popular virtualization platform prior to the acquisition, so it'd be a safe bet that you were affected by this from more than one company you deal with.
Yeah I mean that happens when you extort your customers
Which blows because Nutanix sucks lmao
Its.. okay I mean it could be hyper-v
Same here and it wasn't a fun ride, but I hope Broadcom burns itself into the ground.
What took them so long? Even before the Broadcom purchase, VMWare was enshittifying their product. They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
But other technologies have since come along to make VMs either a lot less important or baked in. For me too it was a sudden transition going from VM farms to docker/k8s, web apps, cloud services, etc. on the other hand that was years ago
People are trying to switch to proxmox too since VMWare continues to go downhill and smart IT planners know you shouldn't trust them long term.
I use proxmox in my homelab so my impression is biased as a home user, but it's nice if you're already accustomed to being a Linux command line user. They haven't fully made everything configurable through the GUI. 90% of the time you can use the GUI but for certain things it's still command line only.
I plan to use proxmox at home also “one of these days”. Currently my lab is a handful of raspberry pi’s and it suffices for what I normally do.
My work experience is mainly medium to large tech companies and none of them have used anything beyond VMware or hyper-v. I sort of assumed Proxmox didn’t really scale up that, based only on where people say they use it
My current company does cloud services, some on k8s and done on other docker. They’ve only talked about VMs if any kind as a temporary cloud transition
Proxmox is still niche and has better hardware support though. For small businesses I think it makes sense to save on license costs and you just use good ol' knuckle grease and brain wrinkles to script and automate your own setup.
They failed to transition from technology leader to commodity product.
Well, Broadcom clearly saw that VMware was on the trajectory to be supplanted by either cloud aligned virtualization solutions or built in operating system virtualization. They failed to really carve out another niche because even in the most dedicated VMware shop, all the advances happened in operating systems by other vendors.
So Broadcom decided explicitly to gouge the hell out of customers too afraid to migrate losing any chance at new customers (which they probably weren't going to get any way) and scaring away current customers (I recall some report they felt they could alienate 90% of their customers and still be happy with how hard they were gouging the remaining 10%).
In short, going exactly according to plan.
Literally the Hock Tan playbook. Buy a foundational technology and jack the price way up assuming the whales will keep paying while mid and small customers fall away. Did it with Symantec, started to do it with Bitnami but backed off a bit due to massive backlash.
They bank on the asspain of switching tech tooling being greater than the financial pain of the price gouging. But hey, that's capitalism for ya.
I have trouble feeling sympathy for any company which didn't greet the Broadcom buyout of VMWare with a firm plan to migrate. Expecting anything other than "abusive conduct" out of Broadcom is like expecting to jump in the ocean and not get wet.
Does anyone else think that’s a lot of servers for a grocery store?
Such ai slop this and the site they link to. Link doesn't even lead to what is promised.
You can practically feel the enshittification drip through your screen when you attempt to use VMWare Workstation for free (which they technically allow you to do).
They make you enter address and identification data when you try to download it. However, they don't actually check whether any of that data is sound, so you can state your location is 42069 Jackoff Ville on the far side of the moon. Ask me how I know.
I understand the need for SLAs but I'm always annoyed to see businesses never consider just using that vendor money to pay for a quality IT team and using something open source like Proxmox or Apache Cloud.
Especially when its something really basic like VMs and not actual cloud infrastructure.
No one is ever fired for buying IBM or Microsoft.
You get fired by saving the company million s with open source alternatives until the day there's an issue and they can't blame IBM or Microsoft.
It reminds me of this story of a company that paid for WinRAR as opposed to using peazip which is FOSS... Their opinion is that paid software is better and more secure...
I can see that argument for UX/UI since paid software is often a fancy front end on FOSS but it still pisses me off. So much for capitalism being efficient lol...
In this case, that are pissed because they already spent the money. Further I'm sure they started the VMware path likely over 15 years ago, and frankly the alternatives weren't great back then and VMware wasn't as crazy unreasonable.
One could think it's not great that they are going Microsoft for virtualization after being bitten, but I'm positive their infrastructure is Windows based and so for them, it makes sense. I can't imagine that being the desired choice personally, but here we are.
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Lol @ a supermarket chain calling another company abusive.
Anyway, are these the corporate customers Broadcom decided to focus on to the detriment of the average user?
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