EU Cloud Lobby Asks Regulator To Block VMware From Terminating Partner Program (theregister.com) 31
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as "ongoing abuse."
Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption.
The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."
Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption.
The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."
Delaying the inevitable. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're still using VMWare then you really only have yourself to blame at this point. Don't get me wrong, Broadcom is being a dick but it's not like it's been a secret. Whoever is still using them has simply ignored that the ship was sinking.
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IMHO they bet on keeping really big customers that are kind of locked-in by using all the vmware goodies although even those customers protest.
I have used vmware starting in 1999 and stopped using it around 2011 to switch to plain qemu/kvm scripts I wrote myself to run my vms.
Nowadays I use proxmox to run about 100 vms now. I might not have all the vmware goodies but if you are able to write your own scripts, it's easy to implement the missing parts you want although things like cluster management, snapshot
Monoculture (Score:2)
True enough but the migration cost is immense
The real problem here is that businesses are overly focused on profits which leads to homogeneous environments that rely on specific products and product-specific integration. It's much wiser to hedge your bets with a more diverse environment in preparation for a product to be unavailable, be it discontinued, "upgraded", or bought. Being forward-thinking isn't free which is why profit-centric businesses won't do it.
TL;DR: Monoculture results in bad outcomes like this "death sentence"; invest in diversity.
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When your licensing costs go from 75k to 500k per annum, you have no choice but to get off. That was what faced central IT. I am pretty sure there is no VMWare left at my University. It all went Proxmox as far as I am aware. I did the slightly craziest in-place switch from Essentials Plus with shared SAS SSD storage to Proxmox, all on the same hardware for the HPC. Though it did require some hardware "upgrades" to the nodes. Things like SAS backplanes and HBA's so I could move the SSD's up the front of the
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It's a university in the UK, so that's in GBP, not USD, making it even worse. So in 2025, pricing for 425k GBP, I could buy 16 Dell 7725's dual 64 cores (from a HPC perspective, more cores and memory bandwidth becomes an issue, might be different for virtualisation workloads) with disk all up the front, new 100Gbps switches, split them across two sites (we have two data centres), and *still* have change.
That is a redundant 1024 cores for VM workloads, which is frankly a way more than a university is likely
Who is still using VMs anyway? (Score:2)
Docker and other container systems + hypervisors solve 99% of the problems VMs were designed for. Other than needing to run stacked OS's on a given machine there are no use cases for VMs that containers or hypervisors can't solve.
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A migration for many organisations would be huge to organise and costly since big bang-style would be out of the question. Lots of migrations that kick off let's say today wouldn't have concluded within 3-5 years. Would not shock me if longer exists as well.
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"What you describe is exactly the use case "
Now yes, 10 years ago? No. People would install a VM - back when it was a lot harder than just spinning one up in the cloud - just to run a particular system that required different DLL versions or a different linux distro.
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First, Docker and other containers are just app virtualization schemes. It's basically the same protections you have that keep your word processor from stomping all over your web browser. It's just called a container because the underlying feature (namespaces) basically lets a process have its own set of PIDs and if you tell a PID it is #1, it is init. So it basically works by letting you run init again. Docker and such are just ways to manage what that init does. As far as the Linux kernel is concerned, it
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I suspect you're speaking from a "company perspective". However, what are individual users supposed to use? What else is as easy to have a Linux base install, install VMware Workstation, and install Windows for those last few programs it's hard to give up (not games) or find an OSS solution for? Please educate me.
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As an individual user VMware is straight garbage. Containers are the superior solution.
There is almost never an actual reason to be stacking full OSes on top of each other. You do not need a full Windows VM to run a handful of Windows applications. You don't need a full VM to run some ancient version of a program.
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Except that comes across as a non-answer, sort like people telling me "it can be done use KVM" and stop there, then I never find out exactly how to do what needs to be done to make it work (which may speak more of my search skills). If you have a better answer, feel free to tell me or better yet point me to a website with the detailed answer.
My understanding (backed by a search) is containers are used when what's in it is running the same OS as the host, which will not accomplish my goal of running a Window
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It's not a non-answer. Just a very board one because it depends.
Yes, a container on Linux cannot directly run Windows, so you will still need a VM layer involved. However, it's probably unlikely that you need a full Windows kernel running. If you really need the full Windows kernel and that many Windows programs, it might be more worth to dual boot. Maybe those programs are an extra hassle. Maybe there's a better Linux distro for you. Maybe there are better Linux equivalents for said programs now. Maybe you
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QEmu is the end-all be-all of emulated systems. It's basically, the Linux of emulation.
While I use it mostly by command line, there are many GUI frontends for QEmu. "Aqemu" is the one I know off the top of my head which is decent. I don't think it has the ability to use the snapshot API, so if you need that then you may need to find another GUI or modify it yourself.
"the realities of the market" (Score:2)
the realities of every market, for quite some time, is that everyone is chasing the pocketbooks of those who have the most money to the detriment of the smaller fish
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True enough & I hope it won't be forgotten.
One of the few good things i have to say about Trump is that he blocked Broadcom's acquisition of Qualcomm by EO.
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What would Broadcom fear most? (Score:1)
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Wouldn't it be funny if the E.U. decided to model legal requirements according to the U.S. car market? For certain software categories, you as the manufacturer are not allowed to sell directly to the customer, but have to go through a local dealership. It would not affect Free Software though, because there, no sale is happening.
The liquor spirits industry in the US is similar. In both cases, it results in higher prices to the customer. Broadcom's move may be bad, but I'm not sure if teh franchise model works. One challenge is franchisers have a lot of power over franchisees, so they could still exit a lot of control and dictate what and how things get sold.
If its not obvious already... (Score:2)
typical communist mentality (Score:3)
Someone does not want to keep doing something - lets use government to enslave them.
Broadcome/vmware suck, but geeze forcing someone to continue to support and sell a software product. That is scary shit..
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That is scary shit.
Yeah. Think of all the video game producers that orphan an old product and the resulting outcry when players want the back end servers and protocols open sourced.
Re:typical communist mentality (Score:4, Insightful)
What you call "communism" is actually called consumer protection.
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Slippery slope. Consumer protection is typically selective and specific, and, above all, exclusive instead of inclusive. As in: you must not utilise substance X, your product must not exceed energy consumption Y, it must not employ material Z etc etc.
Forcing actors to provide a specific service for the convenience of others is bad. Or rather, would be bad, because I don't think this will fly even in the EU.
Nice attempt (Score:2)
Francisco Mingorance also wrote the EU software patent directive. An ex-BSA lobbyist.
He is trying to play the system.