'Negative' Views of Broadcom Driving Thousands of VMware Migrations, Rival Says (arstechnica.com) 51
"One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.
Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said.
During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them."
Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said.
Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said.
During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them."
Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said.
Swiped Customers? Funny! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Swiped Customers? Funny! (Score:4, Interesting)
Essentially, VMWare went to "for everyone!" to "If you have to ask the price, you cant afford it".
VMware was developed to help share server resources and reduce physical server need.
Broadcom thinks you should pay for the physical server without the physical server, not just once, but every year you have their software.
The sad thing is, they sit on patents that they will do nothing with, but charge others for.
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They gave away vmware at the prices before the acquisition. That's the problem. They didn't get big and expensive enough to make an acquisition prohibitive.
Every time we get a great tool that is good, fast and cheap it's bought up by one of these clowns and falls into the 2/3 rule at best. ScreenConnect is another excellent example. DameWare is probably another good example. There's been tons like this.
Now we'll see a ton of money going to AHV, a bit going to hyper-v, and then proxmox will grow exponentiall
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If VMware had not sold to Broadcom but had just let its business continue on its course, it would have gone through round after round of 15%-20% layoffs and they would ended up in the same place - almost no employees left,
This is completely untrue. You don't know wtf you're talking about.
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This is completely untrue. You don't know wtf you're talking about.
Tell us more... I mean seriously. There are plenty of us that follow a bit from the sidelines but have no real interest in the details. If you could give a brief summary with links to evidence or articles about how VMWare would have done well otherwise that'd be interesting. From the outside it seemed to me that the alternative hypervisors were just getting more than "good enough" and so VMWare's customer base was inevitably going to shrink. I've certainly had no temptation to even think about it for many y
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Everything VMWare offered is and was glue and automation over the fundamentals underpinnings that now available to anyone freely in the Linux Kernel + qemu project; or some other places.
As with most enterprise software technologies the value was not actually fundamental bits but that all that glue and management was there so that you:
1) Do whatever you need to do in a supported way
1a) for CYA
1b) for actual technical assistance when needed
1c) to appease audit / risk management / insurance people
2) Do it in
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Thanks. That sounds sensible and doesn't contradict with what I understood.
It is also true the Virtualization space has been comoditized, there may not be a business in maintaining an enterprise class commercial software suite, and Broadcom's strategy of extracting the most revenue they can from a small group of customers who can't or won't transition off until they do eventually sunset the project is the right one
That's the question, though. If VMWare has enough value, and more importantly enough potential to develop more value, they could have sustained the business and wouldn't have had to do layoffs. If not, then the grandparent is wrong. I guess the evidence for that would be in terms of migration rates, previous revenue growth and revenue growth by close competitors. I was hoping the great grandparent had something serious to add. giving
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Broadcom has always been a shit company, from the very beginning.
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After Avago took over and used them as a namesake and skin suit it was all downhill.
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TBH only the willing captives are using VMware at this point.
And those organizations for which the migration is going to take time (often a lot of time) due to the organizations priorities and funding.
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There's also not having enough resources for such a project and having to hire resources with existing knowledge or train existing resources on a new virtualization product.
There's also the fact that resources don't scale linearly to do things faster. Slow migrations allow people to spot the cause of problems and fix them. Fast migrations lead to huge complex troubleshooting where causes are unclear. Sometimes, what's a huge project if done now just happens naturally by the needs of the development team if left for two years.
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I mean, we're still using it, because our perpetual licences still work.
Once the wheels fall off, we're probably switching to proxmox.
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Exactly, it was fortunate that so many VMware products were based on open source releases, which facilitated migration away from Broadcom's "monetization" exercise
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TBH only the willing captives are using VMware at this point
That's not true at all. As much as I love the grassroots support of alternative hypervisors and as much as I see VMware as a villain, we effectively utilize VMware for its performance which other hypervisors are not in the same league of. While Hyper-V and KVM have caught or arguably surpassed VMware for raw I/O on a single server, VMware still wins in distributed I/O and uptime over clustered servers.
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It didn't take a genius to see what was going to happen. That's 100% in line with Broadcom's past behavior with acquisitions (look at the CA purchase). They'll keep gouging the customers who either can't or won't exit the platform for as long as they can. Changing hypervisor platforms isn't rocket science, but it can take quite a bit of time for a large enterprise to get over the static friction and make the move. The instant the buyout was announced, we started planning our exit. We did a single renew
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Look at it from a CFO's point of view. The company will spend a bunch of money migrating and there is then nothing to stop Nutanix pulling the same kind of pricing stunt in the future.
Potentially, it's lower risk to just pay the Danegeld.
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Proxmox FTW (Score:3)
Having been out of the game for a while I'm very surprised and pleased about proxmox and it's functionality gains, especially with ceph instead of big expensive SAN units.
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For our organization, we're hoping automatic cluster load-balancing will be implemented soon in Proxmox. VMware calls it "DRS" and it's a very expensive add-on.
Proxmox already has a vMotion-like migration function.
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There are two issues I have with Ceph:
1) management complexity. Proxmox is pretty easy to manage, very little to surprised a seasoned admin. Ceph, while easy to implement, can be deceptively difficult to administrate if something goes sideways. I usually recommend small businesses avoid it if at all possible.
2) SANs are often faster. Ceph has enough overhead to be noticable.
That said, it is a very nice feature and well worth learning how to administrate if you're already a linux admin. If you are going
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Yes, Migrate from Vmware (Score:5, Informative)
In researching this, the main choices were basically Nutanix or Proxmox. Since Proxmox was free/open source, I went to try that out.
I have replaced 2 of our smaller VMWare systems for Proxmox and like it so far. Ceph integration is basically vSAN, raiding storage across multiple servers, so don't need a SAN or RAID cards. Next will be our main system.
If you're a FLOSS lover... (Score:2)
If you're a FLOSS lover, may you consider this type 1 hypervisor option too:
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/1... [xcp-ng.org]
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>"In researching this, the main choices were basically Nutanix or Proxmox. Since Proxmox was free/open source, I went to try that out."
XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra. It is also free/open source, has a large install base, has been around longer than Proxmox, has optional commercial support, and does have some distinct advantages. Both it and Proxmox are great platforms for many use cases. IMHO, any exploration of FOSS virtualization that doesn't include both Proxmox and XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra is flawed.
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It really depends on the scale you need. Proxmox is really nice, but it doesn't currently scale out very well. In a smaller business, it's perfectly fine though. For a larger enterprise, Nutanix is good and there's always Openstack, which is still growing and is powering some very large commercial and government implementations.
I would agree that ceph isn't for the faint of heart at scale, though there are companies that will provide operational support if you want it.
Broadcom (Score:5, Funny)
It got so bad that I even stopped pirating it!
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Re: Broadcom (Score:2)
Exactly. I was running VMWare workstation pro at home for free, under Win11, for a VM.
2 weeks ago, i installed Proxmox. It not only runs HAOS but also my pfSense router. I have installed several containers as well. It is not easy to setup - definitely not point and click. But far more powerful. And I/O an order of magnitude faster.
There are some rough edges and bugs, though. Like, attaching any USB drive to a VM instantly kills it. But my z-wave stick works fine. ZFS is great. Moving VMs live is pretty cool
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How much is actually backlash of the US company based on e'vile Trump reactions?!
I'm pretty sure the 1000%+ price increases on renewal have more to do with this than Darth Cheeto.
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Truly sad and sadly true (Score:2)
Broadcom's share price has only tripled after closing the VMWare acquisition in Nov '23 -- from $100 to $300
Think of it this way: what does Broadcom do? Make chips! What increases the demand for chips?
- Less virtualisation
- Poorer quality virtualisation
- Forced infrastructure changes
Even Nutanix uses Broadcom chips. As a Hyperconverged Infrastructure provider, Nutanix relies on hardware partners such as Dell, HPE, and Cisco. Their products incorporate various hardware components (NICs, routing silicon) from
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Nutanix's hyper-converged solution is based on Supermicro gear, though they are more recently able to support things like Dell Powerflex as well.
Negative? (Score:2)
Broadcom needs to die choking on pus filled donkey dicks. Is that negative view?
Broadcom's acquire and destroy companies policy is doing far more harm than good. They need to stay in their hardware lane and keep their grubby little fingers off of software companies.
Based on how they treat their own customers, Broadcom deserve to have no customers at all.
XCP-NG is a fantastic replacement for VMWare estates.
Proxmox is good too.
Even Microslop Hyper-V is a good hypervisor. But, using it at scale as you would w
Broadcom knew this would happen (Score:2)
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This. I am amazed at the number of posts I see that are along the lines of "Broadcom are really going to regret how they've mismanaged this" because they have flat out SAID that this is their plan, to drive away everyone but the most valuable customers and extract the maximum amount of revenue possible. This is and has always been a short term play, and anyone with a brain saw it coming even before Hock Tan flat out said it.
The only place they're still playing remotely nice is the EU because the regulator
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Please don't use the word "literally" to mean the one thing it cannot mean.
Broadcom doesn't have customers... (Score:3)
Isn't it on the same platform? (Score:2)
Partner vs. Supplier (Score:2)
They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships
A partner rates how well they're doing by how well you're both doing; a supplier rates how well they're doing by how well they're doing. Is VMware really a partner?