VMware Kills vSphere Foundation In Parts of EMEA

Broadcom has quietly pulled VMware vSphere Foundation from parts of EMEA, pushing smaller customers toward far more expensive bundles and prompting some to consider jumping to Hyper-V or Nutanix. The Register reports: VVF is a bundle that offers compute, storage, and networking virtualization, and a platform to run containers. It's most useful in hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid clouds, but is less capable than the Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. Virtzilla said EMEA customers would need to check with their local dealer to see if VVF was still on sale in their country. "VVF is no longer available in some EMEA countries, but for the majority it is still available," a Broadcom spokesperson said. "Customers will have to reach out to sales reps or partners to determine availability of a given product in their region. These changes were recent."

Our initial tipster said their reseller clued them into the impending change when VMware's new fiscal year started in November. This anonymous customer told us that their hardware fleet boasts thousands of compute cores and without more affordable options, his organization was looking at their annual VMware spend leaping by 10x from around $130,000 to $1.3 million. "We're currently looking to jump ship to either Microsoft's Hyper-V or Nutanix, as we can't eat (that) increase," they told The Register. [...]

For the moment, a Broadcom spokesperson told us it has no plans to ditch VMware vSphere Standard, the basic server virtualization bundle which we're told makes up about 60 percent of the company's licenses and is a lower-cost way to access VMware's hypervisor than buying its full suite of VMware Cloud Foundation products. "We have not announced any changes to the availability of vSphere Standard in EMEA nor end of support for vSphere Standard," the spokesperson said via email. "The product remains fully available across EMEA today. However, Broadcom product availability can vary by region to align with local market requirements, customer demand, and other considerations."

What a lost opportunity for Microsoft

[DesScorp]

Microsoft could be making a killing on ex-VMware customers if they would just improve their management tools on Hyper-V. That keeps a lot of enterprise customers away. MS's management software for VM's is barebones compared to what VMware offers. But Broadcom seems determined to dare their customers to leave. They're pretty arrogant because they're confident most of their customers will pay the bigger bill instead of jumping to a far-less feature-rich solution.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure this doesn't align with Microsoft's long-term agenda. They're trying to eliminate on-premises and private infrastructure in favor of everyone running their workloads in their cloud. If I were switching from VMware, I'd be really cautious about switching to Hyper-V as well. What is stopping Microsoft from pulling the same style licensing switcheroo with Hyper-V in the future?

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[bn-7bc]

I think MS will get major pushback from some real big clients (read some government agencies) if they try to drop on prem completly. I'd imagen NSA an Dod (and their counterparts around the world) won't let go on their air gapped on prem systems for a cloud solution. But what doo i know these systems might not be running MS sw in the first place

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[tlhIngan]

I'm sure this doesn't align with Microsoft's long-term agenda. They're trying to eliminate on-premises and private infrastructure in favor of everyone running their workloads in their cloud. If I were switching from VMware, I'd be really cautious about switching to Hyper-V as well. What is stopping Microsoft from pulling the same style licensing switcheroo with Hyper-V in the future?

You're actually closer than you think. VMware's tagline of late is "bringing the cloud on premises". As in you use their tools

Re:

[sg_oneill]

either that or someone needs to figure out how to get the funding into something like Proxmox to fill out the remaining holes in that stack, cos for what it is , its pretty damn good. Its just missing a few key features that'd make it a real VMWare killer.

Re:

[Gavino]

My experience exactly. I went from VMware to Proxmox, which was a better option that Hyper-V. Some things aren't Proxmox's fault. They have no direct counter to the VMware VMFS. Proxmox relies on the various Linux filesystems, but there's nothing quite like VMFS which is clustered. I really miss that for my directly-attached SAS storage. Also the experience of getting VMFS going on a DAS RAID array was so easy with VMware. The LUNs just showed up on all the hosts in my ESXi cluster with just a scan. The

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[EvilSS]

They eventually want to move everyone from Hyper-V to Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI). I don't see them putting a lot of effort into Hyper-V right now. The other issue with Hyper-V is that MS followed VMWare and made their advanced management tools (SCVMM) a premium feature and most places don't pay for it, making Hyper-V a pain to deploy and manage.

Nutanix scores as VMware kicks own goals

[jezwel]

We're jumping off VMware. I know of many others also.

I guess they really want to get rid of their customers?

Re:

[jhoegl]

Nutanix isnt as mature as VMWare, obviously. But its the best decision/move we have made in the wake of corporate greed.

Support is better than VMWare was, it has been the best response since support was handled by actual developers with detailed information on what is going on and a "here is what we are going to do" list.

If you are looking for an offramp that is the easiest to execute, Nutanix. They have software that moves your VMs from VMWare so well, you can time your migration down time. You prep th

Re:

[keltor]

Nutanix was once super cheap compared to a VMware deployment, they have eroded much of that discount. If they cost 90% as much, it's a VERY hard sell.

Proxmox is unfortunately extremely immature.

For very large deployments, there's options (aka OpenStack - which we've deployed at most Wireless Telecoms now) but for a lot of modest sized companies, there's just limited options unless its very Microsoft shop (where HyperV+SCVMM is fine.)

Re: Nutanix scores as VMware kicks own goals

[d4fseeker]

Morpheus starts becoming a interesting contender with all the money hpe is pouring into it.

Because fuck Broadcom from here to eternity

[Chromium_One]

Remind me to check how Proxmox's new datacenter management tools are coming along.

Well at the office we are diversifying

[Bender Unit 22]

Citris remote apps and desktops are moving to XEN.
The UNIX dept are building OpenShift, more and more new systems are deployed in containers so why not run Kubernetes somewhere else than VMware?
All of it is happening because of Broadcom and the desire not to be dependent on them and their licensing anymore.
So we have shifted strategy from everything under VMware because it is easier to we want freedom to choose solutions even though it might take more resources.

People don't learn...

[maitas]

"We're currently looking to jump ship to either Microsoft's Hyper-V or Nutanix". You alredy got screwed by Broadcom and your plan is to move to another propietary options... AMAZING.

Re:

[reynolds_john]

We moved from VMWare to Nutanix. Is there an open source platform with the same feature set as Nutanix, and support we should consider?

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[maitas]

Axiom number 1 of selling: "Selling is always emotional, and once the buyer is convinced of the purchase, they take it upon themselves to find the technical reason to justify their purchase."

For instance, you can do many things with KVM (RedHat, Oracle and some others sells KVM support), just like with Nutanix. A very common pattern I've used in several companies is for the KVM nodes to mount storage via iSCSI, and then each node performs a DRBD replica of the iSCSI volumes.
For example, at one company, they

Broadcom take a breath

[Neeko110]

Broadcom take breath from killing your company, we are migrating people from your products as quickly as we can......

Some EMEA customers missed the exit

[PetiePooo]

Sounds like there are still EMEA customers who missed the first exit sign and continued down the Broadcom highway. Execs, look up from your spreadsheets. There's a massive pileup a bit further down the road.. take the side streets while you still have the choice!