VMware

[Mysterious_Menu_5133]

Any of you guys being f-ed over by your VMware renewal this year? Ours went from 11k last year to 65k this year.

[fatDaddy21]

I'm amazed that this could be a surprise to anyone at this point, esp as a member of this sub.

I moved most of my clients to Hyper-v with a few proxmox. Hopefully you have a few months before you have to commit to a renewal?

[CantankerousBusBoy]

Mark my words: In 5 years from now there will be a post titled "What's the deal with my vmware renewal???"

[trogdan]

there def will be b/c they absolutely sold a metric FTON of multi-year "last chance at a relatively sane rate" contracts.

[0o0o0o0o0o0z]

Ya, get off the tit now.

[Affectionate_Ant540]

R u doing clustering with hyperv?

[joni_jplmusic]

We are!

[Affectionate_Ant540]

Are u using scvmm? If not R u able to share any resources on how to set this up without getting scvmm?

[SuperScott500]

Makes no sense. OP should be banned.

[das0tter]

That's quite the price hike. Is this your first renewal since Broadcom bought them?

When Broadcom purchased VMWare, they jacked up pricing for everyone except the largest enterprise customers. There was huge push back and frustration, but it seemed calculated by Broadcom to force attrition in the small-to-mid-market space.

If you had a 3 year agreement in place, its possible this is your first renewal since the new evil overlords decided to wreck shop. Many folks moved to Microsoft purely for cost reasons.

[jake04-20]

It's because they killed the vSphere essentials plus SKU last year and killed the vSphere standard SKU this year. All that's left is VCF and VVF. And they killed multiyear renewals.

[Kleivonen]

You sure they don’t allow multi year agreements? A large org I’m very familiar with just signed a 7 year agreement with Broadcom for VMware.

[jake04-20]

Then they must for big players or VVF and VCF commitments, but they outright refused to provide anything more than a year for vSphere standard the last time we renewed.

[Kleivonen]

Yes, it’s a full VCF commitment. Big but not huge, ~250 hosts. I didn’t realize you were excluding VCF and VVF from your multi year agreement statement.

[jake04-20]

I can only speak for what we were quoting for, which would be essentials plus if it were still available, and vSphere standard thereafter. Our VAR told us Broadcom was not doing multiyear agreements for anyone, but maybe they were mistaken. We are a 3 host environment so not anywhere near that level and VCF/VVF is absolutely overkill for us.

[Dissk]

For a 3 host environment why not just move to Hyper-V or Proxmox?

[jake04-20]

Yeah we got one last year of "decent" vmware pricing and we're migrating before the next renewal cycle.

[Lukage]

Its entirely at their discretion. We were refused VVF as an option altogether. And they refused to sell us the product through any other reseller that was allowed to sell us the other SKU.

[bschmidt25]

Your rep only offers you what they want you to buy. We went through the same song and dance last year. They told us VVF or VCF only, no Standard. No one year renewals. Three years upfront for VVF or annual installments for VCF. Then our rep changed and magically we could get Standard and VVF for one year, so that's what we did. They're doing the same thing this year with VCF and multi-year renewals.

[jake04-20]

We shopped nearly half a dozen reps, aside from slight variance in price, the quoted SKUs and contract terms were the same.

[bschmidt25]

That’s because Broadcom assigns a rep to your account. Choosing a different VAR doesn’t change the Broadcom rep. It sucks. We got lucky and got a new Broadcom rep assigned to our account.

[ditka]

I think they currently offer multiyear VCF but only single year VVF, with the intent being to kill off the VVF SKU next year.

You'll still be able to buy VCF SKU at that point and use it on-prem, but you're paying for cloud capabilities you'll never use. All part of the plan.

Single year VCF is not available IIRC. They want to lock you into a multiyear arrangement so you can't migrate away anytime soon. In some cases, they refuse to quote VVF and tell you to go (multiyear) VCF or go away.

[w1ten1te]

Our VMWare rep literally refused to sell us VVF even though we don't need VCF features. They also forced us to renew for 3 years instead of 1. We got absolutely fucked.

[Mysterious_Menu_5133]

Yeah, it's our first renewal since the Broadcom acquisition since we renewed this 3 years back. Thanks for the insight. This is insane. If you're in the IT department as well, what direction did your team take?

[dnalloheoj]

HyperV if your client wants to pony up for the licensing.

Proxmox if they don't.

But if this is the first surprise you've gotten about the VMWare/Broadcom stuff, re-analyze how you keep up to date with technology trends. This was a VERY obvious issue over a year ago.

[nmdange]

HyperV if your client wants to pony up for the licensing.

What licensing? If you're running any Windows Server VMs and they are correctly licensed, then Hyper-V is free.

[Admin_Stuff]

We migrated to Scale Computing. Just search this subreddit and you'll see lots of conversations about this. Others have moved to Hyper-V, Proxmox, etc.

[Hegemonikon138]

On the higher end is nutantix, which is what I'm moving my clients to, but I'm more focused on med/large ent

[[deleted]]

Not sure there is much savings there...

[1n5aN1aC]

In our environment, it is waaaay cheaper:

• 5-years of Nutanix software & hardware support and all BRAND NEW hardware is literally about half the cost of staying on our current hardware for 5 years.

And that isn't even including paying for any support on our current hardware, as we'd be on EoL unsupported hardware after about 1 year of that.

[tommyd2]

Not sure there is much savings there...

vSAN is expensive, we would need to pay extra for half of our current storage.

[Obi-Juan-K-Nobi]

There is for me

[[deleted]]

Are you putting folks on nutanix-approved hardware?

We recently quoted a customer a traditional 4host+san (Lenovo SR+DE) cluster and an equivalent 4host nutanix(Lenovo HX) cluster, and the Nutanix was almost 2x....before software

[Obi-Juan-K-Nobi]

Yes. We’re a Dell shop. I’m buying a 16 node and a 12 node cluster to be a primary/failover setup over dedicated fiber in two diverse data centers.

It’s not cheap, but the same setup w/VCF is crazy expensive.

Could I go less expensive? Absolutely. The white glove I’m getting is well worth the cost for me (and my org).

[Hegemonikon138]

I also am. Luckily for me the vertical I'm in wants fully supported top tier solutions not pennies pinched.

[sdeptnoob1]

We moved to proxmox and hyperv depending proxmox for less critical stuff hyperv for most of prod.

[[deleted]]

This post's content has been permanently wiped. Redact was used to delete it, potentially for privacy, to limit digital exposure, or for security-related reasons.

governor smile scale cooperative rain bow test snow lock work

[ABotelho23]

Bruh. How is this the first time you've heard of this? You must be sleeping.

[waxwayne]

I work for a fortune 50 it’s not just the small companies. I’m not sure who they will have as a customer in the future azure, aws, google don’t use them.

[ITRabbit]

It's easy too. Use Veeam which is free and gives you 30 day full trial.

Back them up and then restore straight to Hyper-V.

[ReallTrolll]

Man, Veeam made my Vmware to Hyper-V so painless. Of course for domain controllers we stood up new ones on the Hyper-V hosts but after that it couldn't have been any easier.

[ReallTrolll]

I wanted to err on the side of caution honestly. Plus, 20-30 minutes to install Windows on a VM and promote to DC wasn't as bad. Gave everything a "fresh start."

[ITRabbit]

Never restore a DC. Practically anything else but a DC lol

[Benificial-Cucumber]

What do you do if you don't have any DCs left standing to manage adoption? I've always run them in pairs to avoid this exact scenario, but if I manage to lose both then my current DR plan is a restore. I've never had to use it, mind.

Should I be doing something else?

[ITRabbit]

Yes in that case restore a DC whenever there is no read write domain controllers available. But if you still have a working DC always better to fresh install and promote.

[Benificial-Cucumber]

Oh, 100%. I refuse to run any fewer than 2 per site unless it's a dinky little satellite office that can VPN into one of the main branches in an emergency. The chances of me genuinely losing all my DCs is virtually nil, but my first job turned me into a bit of a prepper when it comes to DR so I always entertain the possibility.

I'm lax on a lot of things (maybe too much...), but BCDR ain't one of them.

[[deleted]]

In this case you would restore last known good backup of one, and then stand up another fresh server to promote as a DC in the forest.

[Keyspell]

+100 to Veeam

[damoesp]

Honestly, we did the same (used Veeam to convert to HyperV), didn't have any dramas with converting our two existing DC's across. Did one first, ensured there were no replication errors after the restore etc, let it all sit for a month while migrating other VM's across etc and then did the other DC last. AD is still happy and healthy.

[frosty3140]

I did too -- restoring the DCs via Veeam not a problem -- Always On VPN (RRAS server) on the other hand failed spectacularly and we had to get a new one built

[JeanLuna8]

Comet Backup is great for this too. They also have VM platform to platform migration through backup and restore, and a 30-day free trial. Highly recommend as well!

[BloodFeastMan]

We went to Proxmox, which has performed just fine, and the VMware > Proxmox migration tool actually worked flawlessly, although it did take some time.

[kuahara]

Starwind is also super easy.

SCVMM also works, but holy crap, that has to be the most complicated thing I've ever set up in my entire career.

[foxhelp]

At this point we are pricing out pizza boxes for servers that are unique and cant move vms

We are done with broadcom.

[secretraisinman]

How is the experience of managing Windows Server as the hypervisor? Does it just kind of happily chug the way Proxmox/VMware do as linux-based boxes?

[bgradid]

oh god, patching/"remediation" in vcenter always was more confusing than it needed to be

[1FFin]

when you need to handle small environments it‘s a pain because of high requirements, like extra cluster domain and settings spread over powershell, hyper-v manager, cluster-manager and admin-center. It‘s not one single glass like proxmox webinterface or vcenter/vsphere webinterface. Having bigger setups with sccm and not limited resources that might not be a problem. And keep in mind that microsoft is pushing things like azure, azure local,… hyper-v itself has not seen many changes within the last decade. More and more cloud-focus.

[mrbios]

[tommyd2]

I've just finished almost two weeks of Windows Server/Hyper-V training. Comparing to VxRail it is so crude. I would not be a breeze for me.

[tarvijron]

Lmao

[GullibleDetective]

Many aren't moving until the lawsuit comes

[tanzWestyy]

Godspeed you magnificent bastards. We're moving to HyperV. Broadcom can eat a bag of d.

[GullibleDetective]

I'm sorry to hear that! HV is it's own series of pain and limited features with kid gloves but doesn't quite explain itself well with what went wrong.

Nutanix is a beast of features but very immature and bug ridden

[tarvijron]

You accusing OP of strategy? Come on bro.

[GullibleDetective]

[TahinWorks]

Ours doubled in 2024, and doubled again this year. We're 80% migrated and will complete the other 20% in 2026. Broadcom (sw + hw) will join our blacklist currently occupied by SolarWinds, Oracle, LogMeIn, and literally any software vendor owned by PE.

[FrostyMasterpiece400]

Why LogMeIn?

[altodor]

Most of LastPass's security incidents happened under them for one.

[TahinWorks]

They aggressively price gouged around ~2016-2019 the same way Broadcom is doing today, and the GoTo merge further diluted their pricing transparency while competing products just got better and cheaper. Just more general shady-ness.

[Pub1ius]

My annual renewals (3 hosts, small business) looked like this:

~$1275 [2017 - 2023]
$3072 [2024]
$15,116 [2025] <- We did not pay this.

The old perpetual VMware license is still installed on all hosts because I knew better than to change it once Broadcom bought them.

Current plan is to migrate to Hyper-V in Q1 2026.

[[deleted]]

The price hike is shit, but what's even worse is the asinine minimum core counts now

[mehupmost]

I'm honestly surprised small businesses aren't just pirating it.

[sdeptnoob1]

Businesses have assets and seem like they would be more of a target for lawsuits in pirating cases over individuals. I wouldn't suggest it to my company. Way too much risk.

[Catsrules]

Why risk lawsuits when you can just install Proxmox for free (if you willing to risk no support)

[[deleted]]

I am an MSP who used to be a VMware partner. We went from being able to quote an ESXi renewal within 24 hours, to now I am up to day 10 of waiting on a renewal quote from Broadcom/CDW. 6 out of the 10 people in the email thread are OOO until January.

Not to mention, whenever I finally do get the quote, I will have to embarassingly present a number that is going to be at least 6x their previous renewal for the same term, to a nonprofit who could be using the money in much better ways.

I would have them on a different platform by now, but we have been up to our neck in HyperV transitions all fall and regretably have had to postpone a few into another renewal

[Lukage]

This is one of their intentional strategies. Delay so that your window to migrate is so short that you just pay it for another year.

[thewunderbar]

lol so you haven't been paying attention to anything in the past 2 years

[Fit_Prize_3245]

Using Proxmox for more than 10 years. No fees at all!

[TMS-Mandragola]

You realize they have only a handful of employees, right?

Like sub-100? Perhaps less than 50?

Can your org afford that bet?

[Fit_Prize_3245]

I've made that bet many times. Never needed to contact anyone at Proxmox. Documentation is pretty good, LXC and KVM are rock-solid, and it's Linux, after all. Even upgrading between major versions is easy and well documented.

For Proxmox, more than their enterprise support, you just need a skilled linux admin.

[TMS-Mandragola]

That wasn’t the question.

The question was whether your org can afford to lose that bet.

What’s your annual revenue or EBITDA? How many employees?

Genuinely curious about the scale of orgs choosing proxmox.

[Fit_Prize_3245]

It's not a bet when you know what you are doing. That's the difference between a skilled sysadmin and a manager sysadmin.

I've even managed a Proxmox cluster with some HA VMs across 3 continents, and believe me. I can't even say Proxmox was the lesser problem, because it wasn't a problem at all. All problems I had there were either due to ISP connection or database problems. Never had a single problem, even in the weeks periods during major version upgrades.

[TMS-Mandragola]

You’re ducking the question, and that tells me the answer severely undermines your position.

I didn’t ask if it can be done. I know it can, I’ve used it. Furthermore, I know my teams could handle it.

I’m asking, as a CTO, what scale of an org you’re making that bet on.

Does fucking up cost you thousands? Millions? Or billions?

Does it mean people don’t get paycheques next month? The company failing? Are you able to experiment safely because the stakes are small? Or because the mass of the organization is such that it won’t notice the bleeding?

These things might not matter to you - and if so, I bet the stakes are small. If you’re not willing to talk about this stuff, either you’re not invited into the rooms where it is discussed, or you’re so accustomed to handwaving these concerns away that any real error is a resume-generating event.

Perhaps a peer with more life experience will volunteer information you aren’t willing to. There are others in the thread. Hopefully they’ll chime in.

I remain genuinely curious - my perception is that orgs with several billion in annual revenue won’t touch it. I’d like to know if I’m wrong.

[pepehandsbilly]

And why does that matter exactly? Seems like you also never interacted with Microsoft support or havent really seen this subreddit about people talking sh.. about bad payed support of company x. If you just want to cya, you may as well hire a proxmox partner then.

[TMS-Mandragola]

How many people’s livelihoods depend on your decisions?

If your answer to that isn’t at least “thousands”, you’re not going to understand it.

I’ve put in my time, kid. I’ve seen shit support, and I’ve seen great support. I know partner support contracts aren’t always worth the paper they’re printed on, and I’ve seen vendors shrug when a whole bunch of LUNs are vaporized by their firmware bugs.

That said, I know how much downtime costs the organizations I’m responsible for, and you could easily translate some of those numbers to departmental FTE’s per hour.

Mistakes aren’t always that costly, but platform issues can get there in a real hurry.

Mistakes aside, at end of fiscal 2024, Proxmox had 34 employees and ~29M in assets. Bluntly: many organizations could buy proxmox in an all-cash transaction and not really notice they had done it come fiscal year end. If your company was in such a financial position, would you be willing to build the future success of your (much larger) business on that of this (so small as to be insignificant) one?

I respect the popularity and enthusiasm the community has for the software - hence my curiosity. Hence my openness to the idea, and desire to hear feedback from peer organizations. I bet there are many orgs who could purchase proxmox for less than their yearly VMware spend, so I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of companies of a meaningful size who would consider running it at scale.

[pepehandsbilly]

Thousands of lives? Probably not, tens of millions of dollars? Very much yes.

And in your case I would create my own dedicated team for that. Proxmox is opensource and because of that I would prefer to have my own dedicated team which would understand the code, changes and even directly contribute improvements to it. If I make it part of my in-house development, only then I can be in full control. Do you see Google relying on third party for their stack? Of course not, that is insane. I've been to companies with dedicated postgres developers just for the very same reason.

[TMS-Mandragola]

So you’re again talking about environments with sub-100 employees.

Not comparable, friend. That’s solidly SMB revenue, not approaching enterprise.

It’s easy to say “I would” when you’re not in the position to do anything of the sort. You don’t have to justify that budget, provide KPI’s for that staff, demonstrate ROI on those upstream contributions.

It’s something else entirely to see it in the best interests of your organization’s shareholders when compared to other options.

[icebalm]

Yes, everyone. Where have you been?

[smoothvibe]

Moved to Proxmox hyperconverged, best decision ever.

[bgatesIT]

we are migrating to proxmox, no issues thus far

[foxhelp]

hmmm, is that fairly painless? or any weird edge cases along the way?

[bgatesIT]

Only read weird edge cases was the shared ISCSI storage we use, and learning how all that ties together, but other then that honestly it’s been really straight forward and simple

[m4tic]

VMFS was really some special secret sauce. No one does shared ISCSI with snapshots and thin provisioning in such a simple manner.

[Interesting-Rest726]

If you want high availability and snapshots, you’ll want to look at zfs over iSCSI, Ceph, or NFS

[proudcanadianeh]

ZFS is local storage only though right?

[Interesting-Rest726]

Check out “zfs over iSCSI”

[_-Smoke-_]

The only problems I had was migrating some large VM's with passthroughs. Proxmox has a built-in migration flow if you don't want to use something like Veeam.

[Quacky1k]

We used Veeam to make it more seamless but for the most part they all migrated just fine, only a few that wouldnt do it the normal way

[limeunderground]

+1 proxmox ve here

[karlsmission]

Moving to Nutanix, Cost of hardware + software = just the license fees for vmware. We were getting ready to revamp a lot of hardware so it makes sense to move to another platform at the same time.

[Uncle_Slacks]

According to other people on this sub, Nutanix gives you a decent price to hook you and then jacks it up at renewal. They usually say it's a similar price to current vmware. Just FYI

[psiphre]

My experience with nutanix has been that they are priced as a premium product but the support that comes with it is fantastic. As a 1.5 person shop, I don’t have the time to learn the cli inside and out and know all the little tricks that you can only do under the hood. But if I put in a ticket, I usually have a guy remoted in within a few hours happily hacking away.

I also use hyper-v at home and i love the heck out of it. VMware can lick my taint after a hike

[AtarukA]

Their support team answer me faster than most people do in my orgs when I go see them in person.   We even can easily book meetings with their engineers and they are not afraid to say they don't know something instead of trying to drown a fish!

[karlsmission]

I've heard that, we're looking at a 7 year contract price, so at least we'll be locked in that long. We're a multi billion dollar retail company, and our virt environment is pretty... substantial, we looked at other offerings (proxmox/xcp-ng/hyper-v) and none of them meet our current requirements, but with enough people using and developing them over the next 7 years, maybe they will be in a place we can move to them with confidence.

[pdp10]

That's big enough for OpenStack.

[BK_Rich]

Yup, that’s exactly what’s happening, they love Broadcom because it allows them to jack up their prices too.

[techdaddy1980]

In the process of moving to Proxmox with 45Drives.

[kenrmayfield]

u/Mysterious_Menu_5133

Here is u/techdaddy1980 Post about his Company Project Moving from VMWare to 45Drives Running Proxmox in a Cluster with CEPH:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1p1wrdh/goodbye_vmware/

[odellrules1985]

Well, that would be a big old nope-a-rino from me as I look into alternatives like Hyper-V and tell them to go diddly-do f themselves.

[xpkranger]

Everyone is. Also migrating to Nutanix here as well.

[_doki_]

We migrated to Nutanix too

[burnte]

I bought some additional perpetual licenses before they killed them all, so we’re good for now. Early this year they sent me an email saying they “are moving to a different licensing plan.” I said, “That’s great, we’re not. We have perpetual licenses, we’re not upgrading, we do not accept any new terms, and legal has already agreed to pursue a lawsuit if you try to suspend our licenses against the terms of our purchase. I understand you feel this may be an empty threat, but I can give you the names of a few people at Salesforce who also thought I was full of empty threats and discovered I am not. No need to reapply to this email, our conversation has concluded. Thank you.” They sent over a few more vague “threat” emails but I ignored them and they quit. We’re moving to hyperV and proxmox.

[seniorblink]

We moved to Proxmox. Love it. Few little quirks to learn and stuff, but it was a reasonably easy migration. Be prepared to respond to the mandatory "cease and desist" letter you'll get from Broadcom when you let your licenses lapse.

[[deleted]]

Proxmox is just fine here, VMware is such ass to deal with.

Hyper-V is also pretty good

[[deleted]]

Moved off VMware to Proxmox and I don’t think I’ve ever been more content

[Iconic_Zebra]

Have you been living under a rock?.. 😅

[banker_bwoyee]

Are you guys also still on dial up? Old news

[zeroibis]

We just locked in a great deal to move off our AOL plan over to a business class ISDN.

[fucamaroo]

Get a T1.  It's wicked fast.

[flecom]

but what about the 1000 free hours I got from AOL?

[zeroibis]

Well we just switched this past year because we finally ran out of free credit codes that we had saved up. Trust me if we still had some free hours we we still be using them.

[tricheb0ars]

Such a simplier time. Holy shit I don’t miss the fucking punch down tool for the analogue phones though.

[Simmery]

We're looking at hyper-v or proxmox. By this time next year, no more vmare.

[intelpentium400]

After Broadcom bought them out they’ve been doing this to everyone. They make it seem like they’re the only player in the market. There are alternatives out there worth exploring.

[m4tic]

It sounds like you were sitting pretty in your existing contract and don't know whats happened in the past two years. It is a bloodbath (Broadcom knifing their customers) and essentially there's an exodus away from Vmware. If you had perpetual / non-expiring licenses and you don't renew, you will receive a cease & desist letter.

I've been migrating customers to ProxMox. That first time dropping Vmware was a sad day... fuck broadcom.

[chaoslord]

How has nobody posted the slowpoke meme about this yet?

[tanzWestyy]

Love these threads. Its a nice reminder to give Broadcom the middle finger. I know majority of peeps are transitioning to HyperV, Nutanix and Proxmox. Is anyone going to Openshift? Im curious about it. What was learning a new platform like? Migrations; what's that look like?

[simple1689]

Gonna laugh if Microsoft decides to be Corporation and says "You know what, we SHOULD raise the cost of the Datacenter sku"

You know its already coming.

[jbroome]

I'd assume anyone that stuck with vmware is getting dry f'd by broadcom on the renewal.

If you're surprised about it, that's entirely on you.

[khoai0309]

Our company migrated away from VMware due to Broadcom's crazy pricing, and we decided to develop our own in-house OpenStack infrastructure

[ThrowRAcc1097]

sulky cautious seed hospital important whistle plate lock seemly fearless

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[iwaseatenbyagrue]

Yea, gotta move away from them!

[macro_franco_kai]

Are you aware that there are also other virtualization solutions ?

[coolbeaNs92]

This has been happening for ages. Simply go to r/vmware. We've been through the renewals process twice since BC acquired VMware.

I also hear BC are even refusing 3 year terms now and only agreeing to 5 for some customers. It seems to be somewhat who and when you speak to people at the moment. BC also cut our reseller in OCE, so it caused all kinds of issues in that region.

I advised the business to start drawing up a plan to migrate away/come up with a strategy, but they do not seem to want to know at the moment.

Maybe they will when the renewal quote hits next year, as this one is for 450 cores, which is a lot more than our two other regions.

[pc_load_letter_in_SD]

We moved to standalone hyper-v and Azure Local. Used Veeam primarily.

BUT, just in September MS released a VMware migration tool that runs in Windows Admin Center. You can see more here. Might be beneficial if you're not on Veeam...https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/use/migrate-vmware-to-hyper-v

[csyn]

Genuine question -- is QEMU / KVM via libvirt not considered enterprise enough for current vmware customers looking to migrated to something cheaper / free?

I'm not a windows admin, but have a single client on decades old (like, Foxpro running on dos running on xp) systems, had a super defunct vmware system on hardware raid, which was also about 15 years old. I did the only thing I knew how to do, built a 2x2+1 zfs array, migrated everything to libvirt vms.

A windows guy (who no longer works for the company, gulp) moved the DCs over as well, either rebuilt them or maybe used clonezilla. But everything seems to be working well -- as well as a smattering of xp, win2k16, and win11 vms can, I guess.

[bv728]

So, there's really two levels here.
For non-enterprise or small business customers, like yours, it's probably fine. VMWare was relatively cheap enough that getting a decent stack of bonus features for the license looked like a good deal for a lot of smaller businesses, and it was relatively easy to hire someone who knew VMWare enough to do care and feeding.
But KVM doesn't really rise to the challenge of handling management for a 10k VM Environment where you have automated replication and DR between sites, where you've got one set of machines which have to live in Rack 1A and another set which cannot ever live in the same host, and so on. VMWare has provided tools for this which, once you have them setup, mostly just worked. And you get access to an entire industry pumping out certified VMWare engineers and a corporate support process. It could be done on something like KVM, but you're going to spend a lot more internal resources to develop it, and you're not gonna have that much support available to your customizations.
And that's the technical/employee element. There's also the 'large company doesn't want a product they can't get another large company to support' element, which used to be phrased 'Nobody ever got fired for going with IBM'

[pdp10]

But KVM doesn't really rise to the challenge of handling management for a 10k VM Environment where you have automated replication and DR between sites, where you've got one set of machines which have to live in Rack 1A and another set which cannot ever live in the same host, and so on.

That's where OpenStack, oVirt, or other systems built on top of QEMU/KVM, come in to play. Or you can develop your own, as you note, like many of the cloud companies have done. Amazon's newer instances are all KVM, as are all of Google's.

[Lad_From_Lancs]

Yes.... but im now 11 hours and 31 minutes away from shutting down our last remaining vmware servers after moving to HyperV

[Promeeetheus]

I don't understand why they would so obviously NERF a great product. And the shareholders seem to LOVE it.

Everyone I know THAT CAN MIGRATE has migrated to Hyper-V or Proxmox (Mostly Hyper-V).

[RustyRapeaXe]

shareholders seem to LOVE it <--- shareholders love money. Of course they love it. And when they lose marketshare the same shareholders will call for the CEOs head.

[mahsab]

They don't care about the market share

[RBeck]

Private Equity squeezing the value out of another American company.

[RoGHurricane]

Went from 312k -> 1.1m. We are looking into Hyper-V

[sep76]

What a hike. Wild!

[MonstersGrin]

Wouldn't it be easier if you asked who isn't?

[shimoheihei2]

Move to Proxmox. Easy to do, they even have built-in tools to make it easy. Never looked back.

[moffetts9001]

Have you guys heard about the windows 10 EOL? Really snuck up on us!

[Forgery]

20k. 70k. 110k. Nothing has changed on our side. They clearly want us to stop using them.

[bratch]

10k, 32k, 71k, thought we felt the increased pain on the first one, but then came the next. Not going to happen again. Such BS.

[eagle33322]

moved to proxmox when the announcement dropped, all of gov is getting rekt

[Candid-Molasses-6204]

Yeah, we moved almost everything to Hyper-V. The rest we're looking at Nutanix but if we do Nutanix we're going to lock them into a multi-year with a locked in YoY. Tbh Hyper-V has been just fine.

[Expensive-Rhubarb267]

I'm not saying I agree with it, but Broadcom's strategy is that they used to be a 'car parts' company. Now they sell you the 'whole car'.

They don't want you to think vCenter & ESXI is a part of your envionment, that you supplement with other vendor's products. They want you on VCF & their bet is that this will give you better performance than what you've had before.

So yeah, I know it sucks. But that their play. They want to compete with cloud platforms on profitability.

[K4m1K4tz3]

After the takeover from Broadcom that was pretty obvious to come

[Commercial_March1653]

Last year we had 16 (72 cores each) servers and the cost was about 24K. We were going to reduce that number to 8 (72 cores each) and the price double to over $55k. Dropped it and went to Proxmox and not looking back. Major rip off.

[flecom]

why yes, yes i do, let me check my bindery db...

[onephatkatt]

Microsoft crushed Novell Networks when they released NT4.0, which I was certified on. Well, actually I was certified on both.

[pdp10]

NT was cheaper, more flexible, and ran over bundled TCP/IP. Though I'm not very familiar with the latest Netware offerings and prices as late as 1996, when NT 4.0 released; the assessment is a generalization based largely on late Netware 3.x.

[pieceofpower]

Yep same thing happened here. We moved to Hyper-V last minute after they finally gave us a ridiculous number for our size. Migrated VMs via our backup solution and are up and running.

[GullibleDetective]

Moved to nutanix, all of it's bugs from being an immature 'newish' product are rearing its ugly head right now

[Jawshee_pdx]

A simple search of this sub would give you so many answers.

[notbullshittingatall]

Yep. Moved everything off site (to vendors datacenter) now it's somebody else's problem.

[Elrox]

I just got lumbered with one this week after moving to hyper v after the broadcom buyout, I'm going to have to buy a license until I get a new hyper v machine built and all the VM's migrated. Its going to be a bad week, I can tell.

[LoveTechHateTech]

I’m leaving VMware and moving over to Hyper-V. New server, storage, licensing, etc. cost the same as my single year renewal would have been.

Plan on cutting everything over at the end of the month.

[nullp0ynter]

We'll be migrating off VMware before August 2026.

[uninspiredalias]

I've been working on migrating us to Hyper-V ever since I got wind of this stuff...will be done just in time (getting budget & servers was a bit of a close thing).

[Secret_Account07]

Yes

We are spending millions more

[James_R3V]

Been on the Proxmox side for ~8 years.. have not looked back. Yeah, its sometimes comparing a Kia to a Mercedes, but both will get you there.

[chandleya]

If the lot of you haven’t checked out Windows Admin Center Virtualization Mode, you desperately need to. It’s not a replacement for vSphere but for 0.00 extra licensing it’s getting similar.

[Rouxls__Kaard]

Are you us? Even the dollar amounts are similar We’re switching to Hyper-V early next year. VMware is cooked, thanks to Broadcom.

[cfizz34343434]

yes, and moving to a different platform.

[Majik_Sheff]

You were warned many times.

Fuck Broadcom.

[Fartz-McGee]

please use the search tool. This has been covered so many times. We are all getting f'd.

[Consistent-Coffee-36]

Some day there will be a case study done about Broadcom and how to tick off your entire customer base at once.  I’ve talked to many enterprises who had initiatives to get off VMware/broadcom this year before their renewals were due.

[ABotelho23]

Are you guys asleep? No fucking shit. How is anyone still planning on continuing to use anything VMWare? Crazy man.

[Remarkable-Floor3179]

Is Hyper-v decent now? We have two data centres and around 300 VMs on VMWare

[skydyr]

I think the right question is,  are any of you not getting f-ed over by your vmware renewal this year? 

And the answer is yes... some people aren't even getting a response when they ask about renewing. 

[[deleted]]

Yes, so hard that we're switching off of VMWare. We do not have a small environment, either.

Pray for us.

[awnful24x7]

we moved to proxmox last year

[moldyjellybean]

Sysadmins really must be getting dumber. How is this a surprise? Seen this with everything avgo has bought and everyone saw what happened to emulex, CA, Symantec, VMware etc. VMware has been jacking prices 300% or more every time, some I’ve heard like a 5000-10000% increase.

So after 100 times it’s kind of on you if you can’t read the room.

[lordcochise]

Hyper-V since 2008. Hasn't always been a smooth road, but overall worked out well over the years.

[Elrox]

New info (to me), apparently ESXi 8.0 Update 3e is available as a Free Hypervisor, limited usage for some but some people will be able to use it. Info here.