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Dell Terminates Distribution Deal With VMware After Broadcom Acquisition (theregister.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the trying-to-make-a-point-perhaps dept.
In a regulatory filing today, Dell revealed that it has terminated its distribution deal for VMware products. The deal was made in November 2021 before VMware was acquired by Broadcom. The Register reports: That agreement was struck on the same day Dell and VMware parted ways -- back when Big Mike's Bespoke Computer Barn decided to pay down some debt by making Virtzilla a standalone company. In those far-off days, Dell was still all-in on VMware, which is why their agreement sought to "formalize the commercial relationship between the parties in order to maintain the mutual strategic advantage between Dell and VMware [and] to affirm the parties' interest in continuing to collaborate on solutions and a go-to-market (GTM) strategy."

The agreement added: "With respect to certain technologies and GTM activities, the parties' respective products and services work better together to create advantages and value for customers." Nothing has changed that would make such collaboration less beneficial for customers. Nothing, that is, other than Broadcom's decision to stop allowing manufacturers like Dell to resell licenses for VMware's products -- a consequence of the chip giant's plan to stop selling perpetual VMware licenses and instead insist on software subscriptions that bundle many products. That decision has not been well-received -- neither by OEMs, who lose a line of revenue, nor by customers who quite liked buying bundled licenses with hardware because doing so is often more efficient than buying them separately. Dell's filing cites the original agreement's allowance for its VMware distribution deal to be dissolved after a "change of control" at either party. Broadcom's acquisition of VMware certainly represents such an event.
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Dell Terminates Distribution Deal With VMware After Broadcom Acquisition More

Dell Terminates Distribution Deal With VMware After Broadcom Acquisition

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  • Time for them to go get vWorkspace and Proxmox? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If Dell could help get Proxmox from a circus sideshow to something fully supported 24/7/365, and get app vendors like Veeam to support it, the market that VMWare is running off would flock to Dell without a doubt.

    • There have to be a whole lot of people looking at how they can support Proxmox, surely?

      For a small shop, it's probably ready to go as it is - just add a telephone line and some ticketing. For big installs though, yeah, Proxmox has a way to go yet.

      • >"For big installs though, yeah, Proxmox has a way to go yet."

        Which is why you also look at XCP-NG + XO. Open source, Linux, and commercial support available as well (for both). It is essentially free/open source Xen Server plus all the management tools on top of that. There are lots of reports of it running tons of VM's across tons of boxes in production environments.

        https://xcp-ng.org/ [xcp-ng.org]
        https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/x... [xen-orchestra.com]

    • veeam does have something for oVirt. Proxmox has it's own backup system.

    • Veem is already looking at Proxmox

      Proxmox is a cleaned up Nutanix (Ceph vs internally developed storage subsystem... All other core tech the same, KVM/QEMU/libvirt)

      I suspect proxmox needs investment to grow their support.

    • No need for Proxmox. Linux KVM and libvirt is very stable. You can easily stuff a server with GPU/APU card and pass access to your virtual machines hosted on the physical machine where the GPU/APU cards are. It works very well. Take a look at all these Web UI tools to manage Open Source Virtualization and Containers on Linux. https://www.linux-kvm.org/page... [linux-kvm.org]
      • You do realize that Proxmox is not only a Web UI tool but is also listed on the page you linked as an alternative, correct?

  • It was a good run (for the most part).

  • Big Mike's Bespoke Computer Barn? WTF? (Score:3)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @04:32AM (#64202986)

    Ah, a link from El Reg. Ok, go on then.

  • Broadcom insists on software subscriptions that bundle many products. Kinda like MS doing what they did to Office. I had a permanent license at one point on 2 different computers and some how got canceled out and offered subscription ! NOPE !

  • With luck (Score:3, Informative)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @07:43AM (#64203150)

    Broadcom's revenue will plunge as people abandon VMware. Then their stock will plunge as business dries up.

    People need to send to a message and the best way is to stop buying things when stupidity like this occurs. Cancel your subscriptions when they jack up the price or force bundling of things you don't want/need. Don't buy the 7 oz bag of chips for $4.50. Don't buy the 12 oz box of cereal for $5. Let that Chinese-made item sit on the shelf. Stop buying the overpriced, subpar food from Starbucks or Chick-Fil-A. Definitely don't buy from McDonald's and their egregious prices.

    The faster people stop buying things the faster companies will realize they depend on us for their survival. Not the other way round. They can either get their act together or suffer the consequences.

  • Dumb move.... (Score:3)

    by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Wednesday January 31, 2024 @08:04AM (#64203154)

    Considering the virtualization/container options that are free this is a horrible idea.

    I know everyone is saying "Proxmox"- but you can achieve the same thing with an Ubuntu server.

    When executives take over tech.... episode 476.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      Tech staff costs aren't free. It's fine for big companies to roll their own virt products using Ubuntu and Redhat, but for the smaller guys, the tools and support just isn't there. That's where VMware really came into play. It's not what you can achieve, but how you achieve it, with the support contracts and tools and know-how around it which made VMware so attractive.

    • A simple, single server, no.
      without some significant tech "debt", using the raw APIs to do clustering of virtualization hosts is not fun.
      It can be done, but the modern method using outsourced managed service providers can't do it (looking at you accenture et al)

      Proxmox has done the work to do this and they have a cleaned up, well understood distributed storage system, Ceph.

    • If you're only doing containers, then sure. However, if you use VMware to run a different OS (e.g. a Windows VM on a Linux host), then is Proxmox really the right solution? Maybe it can do it, but I've never heard of it and a quick search doesn't show that to be a prime use for it (if it's even possible). This is what I use VMWorkstation for at home.

      • I am not a virtualization or storage expert. But I know windows VMs can operate on KVM, and a number of vendors for various OSes and security products have KVM deployment options.

        If I had a lot more money and less of a life (or switch from playing factorio) I'd be dabbling with "enterprise" ZFS, distributed storage and FOSS SDDC software like Proxmox.

        • "Enterprise" ZFS is not much different from tossing ZFS on a Raspberry Pi 4. The only real difference might be some secret sauce to allow multiple controllers to access a ZFS volume at the same time, which "vanilla" ZFS doesn't do.

          Distributed storage isn't expensive either. A Raspberry Pi with an external drive formatted with XFS can run MinIO... and from there, the sky is the limit because a S3 client accesses a single node/single drive MinIO server the same way as it would access a multi-petabyte multi-

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you're only doing containers, then sure. However, if you use VMware to run a different OS (e.g. a Windows VM on a Linux host), then is Proxmox really the right solution? Maybe it can do it, but I've never heard of it and a quick search doesn't show that to be a prime use for it (if it's even possible). This is what I use VMWorkstation for at home.

        Proxmox is probably not the right tool.

        It offers 3 main virtualization options, KVM for paravirtualization, LXC for docker containers, and QEMU on KVM but at a huge performance cost.

        Some versions of Windows can run on KVM so long as it is a version there are virt-io drivers available for.
        In fact the QEMU option is often used for the initial image setup, so you can boot the Windows ISO as-is and then inject the various virt.io drivers into the install.
        Once those are in place, the image boots directly on KVM

      • I use Proxmox to host an old copy of Visual Studio 2010 under a WinXP guest. In addition to a copy of Visual Studio 2022 under Win10. Both work just fine. Use SPICE as the display and you get a viable remote IDE host.

        You can also use it to run games. (Although, that requires that your hardware supports such usage. It's typically easier to get that running under a Linux guest than it is Windows. Especially if you have a consumer GPU card. But it can be done.)

    • What Proxmox provides is a control plane. KVM is a solid hypervisor, and technically, Proxmox is not a hypervisor. It just adds useful stuff like live migration, and other management tools that are critical to any real VM environment.

      It would be nice if Proxmox could scale and allow for federation, but I'm sure it will get there if the demand is present.

      • The biggest issue with Proxmox's live migrations though is effectively technical debt.

        They use flat config files stored on the VM hosts themselves instead of keeping them in a database. (Even when the VM's storage being held in a storage server solution like ceph / iSCSI, etc.) This means that VMs are permanently assigned to a virtualization host, which limits when they can be started and makes migration from dead hardware dependent on being able to recover the VM's config file from the filesystem. I.e. N

        • Hopefully Ceph or NFS help mitigate that. I do agree Proxmox needs some work, as it is basically "just" a control plane using existing solutions like KVM, and other items. Proxmox also doesn't have affinity/anti-affinity rules, although this seems to be in a beta as of last year. Affinity rules are a must, otherwise, you might end up with all your directory servers on one host, then if that host goes down, you lost the ability to authenticate [1].

          Proxmox is an interesting place. They need to realize tha

  • FTA:

    Nothing has changed that would make such collaboration less beneficial for customers. Nothing, that is, other than Broadcom's decision to stop allowing manufacturers like Dell to resell licenses for VMware's products -- a consequence of the chip giant's plan to stop selling perpetual VMware licenses and instead insist on software subscriptions that bundle many products. https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

    Oh I see, so SOMETHING has changed. Yellow journalism at its' best. Good grief, no one think

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