Broadcom Is 'Holding the Sector To Ransom' With VMware License Changes, Claims CISPE (itpro.com) 110
couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times.
CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said.
CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."
CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said.
CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."
They don't want you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadcom wants most of the customer base to switch to another platform. The literally don't want you as a customer.
They've already said in public filings their goal is to milk their top 600 biggest clients, who will be unable to migrate for possibly 5-10 years, while providing maintenance only updates going forward.
VMware is dead. We have to move on.
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Well, I can tell them they are getting not exactly their wish. Their single largest customer is migrating off posthaste. This kind of thing never works out for the company. It'll make for a nice bonus this year, but after that?
The 5 to 10 year migration timeframe is laughable.
Re:They don't want you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I can tell them they are getting not exactly their wish. Their single largest customer is migrating off posthaste. This kind of thing never works out for the company. It'll make for a nice bonus this year, but after that?
The 5 to 10 year migration timeframe is laughable.
Yeah, they might be able to milk a bunch of medium-sized companies, but the big companies are gonna be gone at light speed. After all, they can afford to throw a half dozen engineers at the problem full time to get off of VMWare in three months flat.
And in leaving, they'll be blazing the trail and building migration tools that smaller companies can use, and contributing to open source alternatives to bring them up to par so that they'll never have to depend on companies like VMWare again in the future. And then VMWare is as good as dead.
Those who are too greedy tend to lose everything in the end.
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They've specifically stated that big companies are their new bread and butter (those top 600 customers) due to regulatory/compliance hurdles.
Re:They don't want you... (Score:5, Informative)
We wanted rid of Oracle. Paid a team from MSFT to migrate us off, cost about $1m. About the cited 3 month timeframe. Saved $25m in licensing in the ensuing year. So no, not completely insane.
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Obviously. You can also hire people that have real experience with VmWare and the alternatives. My need to pay more and a fat bonus on top, but for larger players that is peanuts.
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We wanted rid of Oracle. Paid a team from MSFT to migrate us off, cost about $1m. About the cited 3 month timeframe. Saved $25m in licensing in the ensuing year. So no, not completely insane.
If licensing was what was wrong with VMWare pre-Broadcom, they would have been dead long ago. Not quite a fair comparison to a company that earns their revenue through litigation rather than sales.
Oracle is a mafia organization at this point. The only insane thing, is trying to believe they’re something else. They’re not.
Re: They don't want you... (Score:3)
Oracle is now chasing companies that runs Java and want those companies to pay license fees based on number of clients even if only a single computer runs their version of Java.
So we have a bit of a circus at work where there's a monthly 'kill list' of computers running java.
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Re:They don't want you... (Score:5, Interesting)
And you sound like you've never had to work on a "our vendor is screwing us, so we're firing them as fast as possible and it's more important than anything else you have going" project.
If an IT department is staring at an 8-figure uplift in expense budget because a supplier decided to get greedy AF, most businesses have no problem reprioritizing to make that budget risk go away. After all, upper management in Fortune 500 companies are often rated on their stewardship of budgets, especially ongoing expense budgets that don't carry big fat tax credits like one-time "capital" expenditures do.
I mean, how many times do you get a project with a concrete ROI measured in low double-digits of weeks that doesn't get approved?
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It's not about the money. IT will get whatever money they need. It's that the typical company has tons of legacy and likely doesn't know how most of it was put together.
3 months is ridiculously aggressive for most companies to do a full conversion, even with super high CEO level push. Most could dramatically reduce their foot print in 6 months and get rid of the rest before the next bill comes due. But all of it in 3 months? Errr... I wouldn't sign up for that job.
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Neither would I. But bringing in an external consultant who has the requisite skills and doesn't want to stay long can help with that. The dudes that did my conversion were eager to get back to whatever they were doing before they were working with us. The filthy lucre and promise of other work in a different area were enough to keep noses at the grindstone and get it done quick.
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3 months is ridiculously aggressive for most companies to do a full conversion, even with super high CEO level push.
Most companies don't even do a lot with VMs. They have machines or they have cloud resources. The companies providing the cloud resources can run away from that sort of problem faster than you could ever believe possible, and the ones who just have physical server hardware don't care. The ones in the middle who are less technical will get stuck for a while.
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The smaller non-Amazon cloud companies I've worked with are lucky to be online at all. The idea any of them could quickly convert their core IT software is fantasy.
Think of a place like Rackspqce in their heyday. Do you really think RS could have switched their hypervisors/vms to something else across their entire customer base in 3 months?
It would take that long to arrange the downtime with their customers many of whom would point at their contracts and say "no, you can't do anything like that until next
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It's not about the money. IT will get whatever money they need. It's that the typical company has tons of legacy and likely doesn't know how most of it was put together.
If IT got whatever money they need, then you would always find a properly staffed IT department who had both the time and resources to not only build everything properly, but would actually know what ALL systems do because it was documented and maintained properly as well.
There is no such thing as a “legacy” system. It’s either a necessary system, or it’s not. Calling it a “legacy” system enables the kind of abuse that ultimately creates the “legacy” problem
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If you want to be ocd about it then sure, a functioning system isn't legacy. But if the technology is old and no one on staff really understands it then how is that really any different than well... what? What is a legacy system, then?
There are lots of necessary systems out there that are running on luck and prayer. What do you call those?
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Separately, you misunderstood what I said about it not being about the money.
In this specific instance when the CEO says to convert everything in 3 months, money will not be an issue. It was not a general statement about the yearly general IT budget.
So, exactly as I said, it is not about the money. That is not what will prevent a 3 months mass conversion to another technology.
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Their willingness to absorb downtime in the quest to avoid expense will, though.
That's really the lubricant there. He'll get a lot of attaboys and the complainers will be told to shut up. For a time.
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I've been on both sides of that one. Some CEO's are like, "Ok, I don't give a shit about anything else, 4 days of down time? Ok, do your best to keep it inside 4 days", while others have been like "What? The ENTIRE weekend for this critical security vulnerability? Can't you just do it in like 30 minutes at 3am on Saturday?"
YMMV, not all CEOs are the same.
Re:They don't want you... (Score:5, Interesting)
Broadcom wants most of the customer base to switch to another platform. The literally don't want you as a customer.
The EU regulators do have the ability to say that Broadcom does Not get that choice, however.
IMO... they should revoke regulatory approval for the merger.
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Why should they pull the merger? If Broadcom doesn't want to sell or support a product... so what?
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Just because you're not smart enough to understand what anti-trust laws are and their relation to products for users and how they apply to mergers not reducing availability of products doesn't that everyone else is as dumb as you.
You really need to change your user name.
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I've worked as a legal assistant at an IP law firm that worked anti-trust cases. You have no fucking clue what anti-trust is for or when it applies.
I'm dumb as bricks but way fucking smarter than you. I love how you constantly take pot shots from under your rock. Go back under. You have no idea what you're talking about. As usual.
Anti-trust is what it actually is, not what you want it to be.
TLDR: you're wrong again.
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> Broadcom does Not get that choice,
They can compel labor?
Gosh some Europeans are so in love with domination.
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> Broadcom does Not get that choice,
They can compel labor?
They can Bar them from continuing to do business while excluding customers And doing so in this manner and Fine them.
So It's not forced labor: It's Prohibiting them from continuing to operate as a business unless they do X.
This is the biggest problem our economy faces (Score:5, Insightful)
40 years ago this wouldn't be a problem. Somebody would just fire up a start up and take over that space. But now the monopoly will either run them out of business by briefly entering the market and giving their product away, or just buy them before they even have a product. And that's *if* this hypothetical competitor could get loans and seed capital to start a business and they'd bother to instead of just taking that money and buying stock in the monopoly.
This is what happens when you pull back on anti-trust law enforcement. It fundamentally breaks capitalism.
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They own 45% of their market. By definition that is not a monopoly. I stopped reading the moment I saw you say monopoly. There was no point in continuing after that as you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Please stop spewing random words you pulled from the socialist dictionary. These words do not mean what you think they mean.
Let me ask you something (Score:2)
Now let me ask you something else, are those competitors publicly traded?
Now, what does it mean to own stock? It means you own a share of the company, right?
Who owns most of the stock in this country? Go on, check. I'll wait...
You saw a lot of the same names over and over again, didn't you?
You think those owners are going to let their companies compete with each other, like how Trump owned two casinos that went bankrupt competing with each other?
Sure, if ther
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> Who are there competitors?
Irrelevant. Use goggle if you care. (It's "their". That is the possessive).
> Now let me ask you something else, are those competitors publicly traded?
Utterly and completely irrelevant to the issue of anti-trust.
> Now, what does it mean to own stock? It means you own a share of the company, right?
See above. Utterly irrelevant when discussing anti-trust.
> Who owns most of the stock in this country? Go on, check. I'll wait...
Still irrelevant to anti-trust issues.
>
Re:They don't want you... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They don't want you... (Score:4, Informative)
Check out the open-source, community-driven XCP-NP + Xen Orchestra. Completely free and yet you can also purchase full support.
https://xcp-ng.org/ [xcp-ng.org]
https://xen-orchestra.com/ [xen-orchestra.com]
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
https://docs.xcp-ng.org/instal... [xcp-ng.org]
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Might be worth a revisit. A lot has been done on XCP-NG over the last few years and I see reports all over the place of it being rock-solid stable and feature-rich. Our experience with it so far has been really good. But, of course, each person's use-case is likely different. And Xen Orchestra has been evolving pretty rapidly.
Why do we care what THEY want again? (Score:2)
VMware is dead. We have to move on.
Says fucking who? Not the product. Not the customers. Not the users.
It’s bad enough that we blindly pretend to have anti-monopoly laws and regulatory bodies in place that claim to be doing their jobs when it comes to preventing hostile takeovers and monopolies crushing (or dismantling) the competition. It’s even worse sitting back and watching Greed pretend they give a shit about laws or regulations by simply giving up and not even raising so much as a minor pushback.
VMWare isn’t some
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The same reason CA did. Note they bought CA a few years back. They were known as the place where software went to die, where it was milked of its last iota of profit. Same here.
The brokenness stems from the expectations of growth. You aren't going to get 10% YoY by just running a business. You get it via pump and dumps or extortionate theft. In that case, why care about the customer?
To fix, you'd need to slam the brakes on M&A, and stop pretending stock-based 401ks can replace actual retirement sa
Re: They don't want you... (Score:2)
All Broadcom want is to reap short term benefits to improve the profit figures for one year, then sell the gutted company as being a high profit company to people thinking that the profit improvment of the previous year will be sustainable.
Pump and dump.
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There is always Openstack. :) It can be a bear to manage, but you won't have some vendor like Broadcom breathing down your neck and trying to shake you down for their vig.
https://www.openstack.org/ [openstack.org]
What platform to move to? (Score:2)
Problem is that there are not any real VMWare alternatives:
Hyper-V is a possibility, but that means having to deal with Windows infrastructure, and possibly CALs.
Proxmox and XCP-ng do a lot, but don't have enterprise scalability, Veeam support, third party support, or 24/7/365 support from the vendor.
Nutanix is great, but not everyone wants to toss all their hardware for their "LAN in a can" setup.
Red Hat had a useful solution with RHV/RHEV/oVirt, but decided to go full Kubernetes with OpenShift (which is g
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> the "nobody has gotten fired for buying this" test
If that's the key feature then pay Broadcom's ransom with company money and remain blameless.
This would never fly in startup culture where every decision can be make or break.
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The ironic thing is "startup culture" is rare. Usually the "startups" I've been at have been have been VC funded, so from the gate, they are flush with cash, and are going with VMWare because that is what they know, and that is what the VCs want.
The days of a startup coming from a garage are long gone, for the most part. Most are VC ventures because publically traded companies who send money to have something started. The company can't do the R&D itself because shareholders would sue them for not mak
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If you are not on the top-tier VMWare licenses (or not using all the features), kubevirt might be a viable option as well... (it does have the Kubernetes complexity though)
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I've been a VCP for over a decade and worked with ESX since you had to configure iSCSI from command line.
This last renewal period for my cert though, I finally made the decision to let it lapse. No employer I've worked for has used the partner benefits and the support has been lacking when there is really an issue (to be fair issues have been very few and far between).
I haven't done a new install of a VMware cluster in just over 4 years. Anyone that is still running it has been letting their clusters die
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"... much more resource efficient technology. "
Except studies have shown that typically containers are grossly over provisioned and as a result MUCH less efficient.
It's the dumbing down effect on IT and DEVOPS
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so much this, the new people configuring dockers and containers hardly understand the lower layers, and end up with so much unoptimized shizzle
Re:They don't want you... (Score:4, Interesting)
Containers aren't a newer replacement for VMs, they're different technologies that could be used to do similar things in some situations. You can't run Windows in a container on a Linux host for example. I'm actually more bothered by the resource waste of using containers instead of just installing a couple of software packages than people using a VM where a container could do the job...
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You can't run Windows in a container on a Linux host for example.
Installing a Windows Virtual Machine in a Linux Docker Container [medium.com]
A Step-by-Step Guide to Containerizing a Windows Virtual Machine â" with RDP Access â" on a Linux Docker Platform with KVM Hypervisor
Learn to internet, son.
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Well sure, you can run any OS on a VM in a container on any OS...
Re: They don't want you... (Score:1)
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I'm actually more bothered by the resource waste of using containers instead of just installing a couple of software packages than people using a VM where a container could do the job...
That doesn't make any sense.
Containers:
* limited resource use
* dependency, package and security isolation
VMs:
* additional memory and CPU overhead
* no benefit over containers
"just installing apps"
* migratory dependency hell (I'm guessing you've never had to do with this)
* more difficult to audit and track
Step into vendor lock-in, blame yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
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It is hard to feel compassion with companies stupid enough to make themselves dependent on one supplier of one commercial software. Happens time and again, and it is stupid every time, because the outcome is so obvious.
Have you managed a data center before? Having multiple vendors for every platform, service, or device is not reasonable and would add tremendous costs and labor overheads.
Re:Step into vendor lock-in, blame yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you managed a data center before? Having multiple vendors for every platform, service, or device is not reasonable and would add tremendous costs and labor overheads.
Yes, and having multiple vendors is a prerequisite for true redundancy based resilience. The "tremendous costs and labor overheads" you hope to save are only postponed to the day when your single vendor squeezes you dry.
Re:Step into vendor lock-in, blame yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
No sane person builds their systems with multiple vendors and technologies intentionally because one day in some theoretical far future a vendor may fuck them. Wildly ridiculous.
The risk/cost of that is low compared to running slower every day 24/7 forever, needing higher skilled staff with skills across multiple domains and tracking down bugs and issues across different platforms. All because one day VMware might get bought by Broadcom and then force us to change platforms when they fuck us over at the end of the contract.
Completed bullshit.
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I was at a telecom company that would get two vendors for voice switches and later MSANs - they are normally divided between different regions, but it does mean that there are people skilled in both products and the vendors can be played off against each other....
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Sure, in an environment like telco where the goal is 100% uptime not 5 nines and they have a team in one region handling technology X and a team in another region handles Y.
Most of the world doesn't have thousands of mini data centers across multiple disparate regions. Most companies have a data center and if they're lucky have a cloud backup. Fortune 100 can afford to do things differently. Some Fortune 500 will. After that... meh, very rare. Right now efficiency is more important when your entire dat
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Most companies have a data center and if they're lucky have a cloud backup. Fortune 100 can afford to do things differently. Some Fortune 500 will. After that... meh, very rare. Right now efficiency is more important when your entire data center team is one guy and his college dorm buddy.
Correct - some scale is needed - enough that two teams are not a lot of extra people.. (ideally most with some degree of skills on both) (likely virtualization teams of at least 10 people)
I wonder how much of a pricing advantage expanding capacity from the cheapest vendor might give... They might try to discount to get that business. (Slowly moving to just one vendor eliminates the advantages though)
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You come across quite experienced. You know there's always someone hungry for a sale willing to do that 1,2,3 year big discount and then get you later at renewal. Sort of like VMware now :-)
If I was a VMware shop that had been asleep at the wheel for years, this would be a good time to take a step back and look at open source options or just simply not using virtualization going forward, depending on what the software stack and load looks like. Maybe it's better to buy a pile a pizza boxes which now outp
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Have you managed a data center before? Having multiple vendors for every platform, service, or device is not reasonable and would add tremendous costs and labor overheads.
Yes, and having multiple vendors is a prerequisite for true redundancy based resilience. The "tremendous costs and labor overheads" you hope to save are only postponed to the day when your single vendor squeezes you dry.
Having multiple vendors to bolster a DR plan is also the way you end up with “tremendous” costs as well, which also increases the risk of your premature termination when the CIO realizes what other companies spend on IT and DR.
True redundancy involves having a backup building and backup people for when the plane falls out of the sky and flattens your primary site. What is the backup plan for Microsoft OS on the corporate desktop if the worst kind of attack comes along, and forces a company to
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Yes, and having multiple vendors is a prerequisite for true redundancy based resilience.
Fantastic! What are you going to do about operating systems? Oh right, there are numerous monopolies that you simply can not plan around.
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Yes, and having multiple vendors is a prerequisite for true redundancy based resilience.
Fantastic! What are you going to do about operating systems? Oh right, there are numerous monopolies that you simply can not plan around.
Funny to see you write such while the company I work for has Linux and Windows servers in production, and Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems for the personnel computers.
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Not only that, but VMware has essentially a Monopoly of virtualization, and many Virtualization features.
Of course there are open source Hypervisor alternatives such as KVM... but the fact is they are much more limited.
Linux or Hyper-V clustering are quite different from VMware HA, for example.
And there is no comparable competing option for a whole slew of vSphere Enterprise Plus features.
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VMware has 45% of the market. Not a monopoly by any definition.
Pay or rebuild your software if you were dumb enough to make your entire business dependent on features unique to a single vendor.
No sympathy for bad engineering and architectural decisions.
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Man you talk a lot for someone whoes user ID indicates they were not even born when i was rolling out my first servers....
This is a poor argument. Anyone with any experience in the industry would know that vmware is the defacto standard since the early aughts. Hyper-V came along later, and is all based on unstable windows. The only thing it has going for it is that its free. So what is the other 55%? QMEU/KVM? get real... vmware is the standard
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That's why I prefer a bespoke system based on Free software wherever feasible. It may be more effort, but it's a predictable effort. Otherwise, all it takes is one greedy MBA somewhere or one vendor having a lackluster quarter to greatly increase cost, effort, or both overnight. For that matter, a product manager with a 'bright idea' can cause that disruption.
Granted, it's not always feasible, but it's always worth looking in to.
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It is hard to feel compassion with companies stupid enough to make themselves dependent on one supplier of one commercial software. Happens time and again, and it is stupid every time, because the outcome is so obvious.
You realize your point would be far more valid if you were not talking about a 25-year old company well-established in the global IT industry, right? Please feel free to share that amazing crystal ball technology that enabled you to know the “obvious” with VMWare a year ago.
One supplier? One software? One could make the same argument about Microsoft on every corporate desktop too. And yet we find no one ready and standing by with alternatives.
DR planning is key in every company, but Shit sti
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Please feel free to share that amazing crystal ball technology that enabled you to know the âoeobviousâ with VMWare a year ago.
It's a proprietary company with the largest market share. There's the crystal ball technology. RMS foresaw it 40 years ago, before VMWare was even a fantasy, and formed the Free Software Foundation as a result.
exit plan (Score:2, Interesting)
We only have around 4000 virtual servers but our VMware licensing prices are going up over 50% if we trade in our perpetual licenses for subscriptions. So I assume that the next negotiations after that, they will really hit us hard. And since they pretty much killed our mainframe with CA licences, the company has PTSD when it name Broadcom comes up.
So it is time to exit the HCI infrastructure, we are getting quotes for storage systems and want our freedom back. and are looking to exit VMware for one hypervi
Agree. We wont save anything at these prices (Score:2)
I dont really have the current numbers for the cost of VMware alternatives. But I know that our savings going from server based, to virtualization based was around 40-50%, so with a potential hike in licensing a lot - if not all - of that saving could easily be gone. If that's the case, the the business case for keeping VMware dies.
Luckily there are alternatives.
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XCP-NG can handle 4,000 VM's. It does have Enterprise scalability.
Watch a YT guy LawrenceSystems that turns out his business does backups for Netflix (was just authorized to say a few months ago). He puts $15,000 to $100,000 + servers together, talks Linux, TrueNAS (within XCP-NP), hacking, home automation and even Mini PC's. I've been watching long videos on XCP-NG and Proxmox for over a year and taken a few notes o
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Proxmox does support live migration. You've just got to be using shared storage to do so - which, coincidentally, is built into the product as a clustered filesystem (cephfs). It works seamlessly.
When does 'popular' require 'government control'? (Score:2)
In both this case and the Apple antitrust case, it seems that the overwhelming popularity of a product gets turned into a call for government control when some decide they don't like the terms under which the product is provided. The idea that a product which gains a significant market share because of its value/utility should suddenly submit to a different set of rules to meet demands by its customers, or by those who sell on that platform to the platform's customers, sure strikes me as conceptually and l
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A product which gains significant control over a market due to its market share is most definitely subject to a different set of rules, to make sure it cannot stifle competition via market share. The most logical way to level the playing field is with compulsory licensing, which will kill off the patent/copyright trolls too
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Monopoly in the US is only illegal if it was gained through nefarious methods. If it was gained by being better than the competition that is perfectly legal.
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Legal, but monitored. Microsoft was not broken up, but Microsoft *WAS* declared to be a de facto monopoly.
Once you achieve monopoly status, a new set of rules comes into effect, known as the Sherman anti-trust act.
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The idea that a product which gains a significant market share because of its value/utility should suddenly submit to a different set of rules [...] sure strikes me as conceptually and legally strange.
And yet, that is the whole basis of anti-trust law. The greater the impact, the more government oversight.
This is not an -unregulated- free market society.
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That is not the basis of anti-trust law. The basis of anti-trust law is when a monopoly was acquired illegally through nefarious methods or the monopoly in one vertical is used to achieve dominance in another vertical.
That's it.
Simply being better and by virtue of being better acquiring market dominance is not at all what anti-trust is about.
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/sigh.
The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
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Yes, that's what I just said.
A legally acquired monopoly is not in and of itself an abuse.
A monopoly making rational decisions such as "we no longer want to support a dying technology" is not an abuse.
Telling current customers "when your current contract expires we will support you for 5-10 years if you really want to but we don't want to, please find another solution" is not an abuse.
It's so strange how I can't get support for my rotary phone or my Apple Neuton or my horse drawn buggy or my 1st generation
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When the EU decides they need some extra money.
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Note how that tends to happen when the vendor sees that the product has become essential and so changes the rules that helped make it possible so they can squeeze their customers dry.
Had the terms not changed other than a modest price increase for inflation, nobody would be calling to regulate anything.
Which European Regulations? (Score:2)
But I can't find any actual related European regulation other than CISPE's own "Code of Conduct" requiring certified providers. Is it just that CISPE managed to interject themselves into contracting language which has resulted in contracts being only able to be fulfilled by VMWare?
Is this just an angry "dumped lover" break-up letter?
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The CISPE post states:
But I can't find any actual related European regulation...
"The EU’s Cybersecurity Act, adopted in 2019, established the legal basis for EU-wide certification of cloud providers, to be elaborated through secondary law by its cybersecurity agency ENISA." (Sourced [europeanlawblog.eu] from a longer blog post on the subject.)
There's fuller documentation on the proposed (?) scheme here [europa.eu]. I'm not going to stick my head any further down the rabbit hole though, too much work to do... ./displacementactivity
Open source applies here (Score:5, Interesting)
We need an open source project to take on the task so that the code can be properly vetted. Obviously you're still going to need a business to create certified plans for some of the government/secure industry work, but the core code needs to be visible to all, which will also neatly prevent this problem from re-occurring.
In the medium term I'd expect Broadcom will be forced to back down. Almost nothing in the EU happens in the "short term".
Or, I suppose the EU could do nothing and watch a bunch of datacenters get sold to AWS at fire sale prices.
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USB has always been a security issue. Many years ago when I worked in a secure govt facility, they physically destroyed the USB ports on all of the laptops, desktops and most servers before deploying.
No USB ports, no problem (Score:2)
Excellent idea in the era before most keyboards and mice became USB, but a useful obstacle to Private Snuffy who it will at least remind not to plug in his porn drive. (Every deployment has those.)
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We need an open source project to take on the task so that...
All that is required is for a bunch of companies to hire developers to actually make the things they want. If they really want it then they should be willing to pay for it.
My Company is Switching (Score:5, Informative)
Re: My Company is Switching (Score:2)
Can you say "Moo!" (Score:2)
This explains the Broadcom... (Score:2)
This explains the Broadcom logo, and what good old Hock has in mind for his "customers" now that he has VMware... Ben Dover.
JoshK.
They're not a Monopoly (Score:2)
No second source (Score:4, Insightful)
with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech
If your business is so dependent on a single proprietary vendor then you only have yourself to blame. For something which is so important you should always ensure you have an exit strategy and/or a second source supplier.
It's no coincidence that the major cloud players are using either their own inhouse tech or open source.
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If your business is so dependent on a single proprietary vendor then you only have yourself to blame.
I had no idea I was to blame for all of the software monopolies. Where did I go wrong with my handling of Microsoft and Adobe?
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VMware are not a monopoly, there are a lot of alternatives.
The presence of a monopoly is one thing, making yourself dependent on one is quite another.
VMware's license changes are only affecting those who allowed themselves to dependent on their products. For those other providers who are not dependent on VMware products (ie all the big ones - AWS, Azure, GCP etc) this is an opportunity to gain some customers.
Burried the lead (Score:2)
The key point is way down in that third paragraph.
What CISPE is really saying is the vast majority of or membership's entire business is reselling a single vendors product. They are utterly helpless if anything up channel changes and if you are relying on them in anyway for your own business without ready replacements you're a fool. You should either migrate to AWS or Azure or get back to hosting your own stuff as soon as possible.
I am altering the deal (Score:2)
Pray I don't alter it further!
RMS Foresaw This (Score:2)
RMS foresaw this happening 39 years ago, and established the Free Software Foundation to try countering it. Even though VMWare happens on a regular basis, people still insist on accepting proprietary software for business-critical functions, and then act surprised when the inevitable happens.
What is the best FOSS replacement ? (Score:2)
What is the best FOSS replacement for VMware?
What are some proven migration strategies?
Ah.. and here we are (Score:2)
Gotta admit that europeans are doing much better with their regulatory bodies than us.
Okay, most people will not like this, but FTC has been wasting a lot of time and effort on Microsoft's gaming merger with ABK. However in that time frame EU's Vestager was able to secure concessions and guarantees in that very same merger (no blocking of third part clouds, no "exclusive" Call of Duty for ~10 years). Yet FTC has nothing to show except multiple humiliating court losses.
FTC should stop wasting our tax dollars