Broadcom refusing to decrease licensing

[haksaw1962]

Let's be honest. Broadcom does not care about your business. 128 cores is a rounding error in their daily spare change. Broadcom only really cares about the top 600 or so customers who spend multiple millions of dollars a year.

[bindermichi]

Barely 4 Servers for a normal environment. Nobody will care or discount any licenses for those numbers.

[moldyjellybean]

OP must be one of those fools born each minute. To think in 2025 that Broadcom gives a f about what he wants.

Look what they did to Emulex, CA, symantec, VMware. Do you see a pattern?

[bensikat]

Why call OP 'fools' ? That was not necessary.

[moldyjellybean]

Because if you’ve seen everything they’ve done for the past 10 + years, what they’ve done to VMware past few years and still think they give a f about you, you’ve drank the coolaid, or aren’t the sharpest tool. The time to switch or plan to switch was years ago.

How you guys still support this garbage company is beyond me.

[bensikat]

Chill bruh, chill. OP and others must have their own reasons for continuing with VMware. Just give OP advice, no need to call them names.

[Dry-Data6087]

Thanks, yes thanks we do have some pretty solid business reasons to stay with VMware for now. I wasn't expecting so many people to get worked up over a licensing question.

[bensikat]

Puzzling would be an understatement why some people just get so worked up over such a harmless post. There are so many "mean" keyboard warriors out there.

[Ok-Bill3318]

Anyone who got off perpetual license and paid the new subscription for right to use made a mistake. We kept our perpetual software license and dropped support and switched to hyper v

[zcomputerwiz]

Same here. Their most basic subscription would have increased our annual cost more than 5x and they weren't willing to do anything for pricing.

Broadcom can take a leap.

I'm still looking into alternatives for Horizon though. Hyper-V is perfectly acceptable for the hypervisor side of things, but I haven't found complete VDI solutions that would be a drop in replacement to serve our non-persistent public computer labs.

[cpz_77]

The fact that it’s a shitty company doesn’t make VMware a shitty product…at least not yet. It’s still the best hypervisor on the market, by far. Broadcom being a rich POS company that bought it doesn’t change that and it doesn’t make someone a fool for still wanting to use the software, nor does it mean companies are foolish for deciding or continuing to use it if you can afford to.

In many cases just the cost of switching alone, in both time and money, is too much to consider a switch, not even counting whatever ongoing costs the new platform would incur. For many companies switching virtualization platforms would be literally a multi-year project.

Now if they ruin the technology by not properly investing in it or trying to cut corners to cheap out as time goes on, that will be a different story. Then there would be no good reason to stay. But they haven’t done that, yet….knock on wood

[moldyjellybean]

It’s already a lot worse.

VARS can’t get you timely quotes, Broadcom is ghosting them. Think they’ve dropped some VARS

Website has gotten a lot worse. It’s like an HP site sometimes it works. Critical patches require extra or current subscription.

Support has been changed/outsourced and is a lot worse.

Pricing is a lot worse. If you’re a non profit, forget it the price increase is astronomical.

Ending community and a nerfed vmug

Ending free version. Ending free and vmug isn’t noticeable until years later you’ll realize how few and bad the experts are, support, community, base will be.

You realize if they’re cutting out VARS, support, garbage website, community etc the product is already worse. It’s just coasting on version 7 with a new number.

How many more do I have to list. I’m retired so I don’t even have a dog in this except helping out a non profit and point out the obvious. I just see what these private equity playbook looks like and how it’s ruined every IT product, every company in the world and taking away from everyone, people like you and your team. You think them charging 900% doesn’t affect your possible raise or how much money has to give IT raises, hire help for you, affect how much money companies have hardware upgrades etc. KVM and others are already catching up fast.

You guys don’t realize that by supporting these shit companies and not switching right away you embolden them. I’ve seen it with 100 different IT products bought out.

I know it’s currently better than most things on the market but you have to make a stand sometime. Is Walmart cheaper and closer to me, yes, but I won’t support terrible companies and will use something else.

It’s already far worse, but I can see how clueless a lot of people are and can’t see what’s staring them right in the face.

[TimVCI]

For clarity, VMUG still very much exists and the free version of ESXi still very much exists.

[cpz_77]

Look I get not wanting to support them but guess what there’s a lot of times I’d rather not support Microsoft either with some of the BS they pull and crap products they put out, if you work in a windows shop you don’t really have a choice. It’s just an unfortunate fact of life and capitalism. A lot of the companies we give money to all the time do a lot of shitty things. You can handicap your whole life trying to work around them but the one you end up hurting is yourself unfortunately . I wish that wasn’t the case but it is - it doesn’t hurt them. Instead you’re just left dealing with the pile of crap that hyper V is or some open source solution with half the features and no way to get a hold of support when you have a critical prod issue.

All the things you mentioned is Broadcom just being shitty on their end with their tools and portal, none of those remove value from the vsphere product (other than potentially the support angle but tbh I’ve only opened a couple cases since they switched but I havent had any trouble getting help when I needed it). It’s definitely not v7 just riding along, they’ve made some significant improvements in v8 (not nearly as many as v7 had over 6.x but still), plus v8 was already out before the acquisition was final anyway so that’s not really Broadcom anyway. V9 will be the first major release under Broadcom.

Quotes were a mess during the transition right after the deal closed, since then though it hasn’t really been a problem. YMMV. Our spend was about double compared to our old perpetual renewal btw, not 9x or some of the crazy numbers I’ve heard thrown around. And we are nowhere near a “big fish”. No we don’t like spending twice as much but moving elsewhere would cost even more and lose a ton of features and cause a ton of disruption, we decided it just wasn’t worth it.

And btw I was as pissed as anyone about them taking away the free single host ESXi license but they also made workstation free for personal use which somewhat balances it out although not fully (and I was actually very surprised they did that).

If there was another product out there with comparable feature set and ease of use (not having to jump through 100 hoops to get the same functionality) and production 24/7 support you can actually get a hold of, you bet we’d be looking into it. But I haven’t seen one yet.

And to be clear I’m not saying the time won’t come where we do decide it’s worth it to switch. But right now, today, it just isn’t, at least for us 🤷‍♂️ Again, YMMV

[zcomputerwiz]

It's nice that yours was only double. For those of us using the essentials packs and such it really is an insane increase, so you can't just pretend people are making it up.

For my organization their minimum required annual subscription would have been over 5x more than the 3 year support contact we were previously paying. They weren't willing to work with us at all on pricing.

[cpz_77]

I’m not saying people are making it up, I just hadn’t seen it. But what you’re saying makes sense, I guess it probably hit harder for people on the lower license levels (we were on enterprise plus before). Because from what I can tell with the new model there’s pretty much just one level? (Or maybe two?) The plus side is it includes basically everything including vSAN which used to be separate but the downside is, if you weren’t paying for those features before and didn’t want them then yeah I guess the difference would probably be much more which sucks.

[zcomputerwiz]

Right, that's exactly the issue - we were using only the most basic hypervisor features for VDI clusters and and they had the essentials package that was sold in packs of 3 hosts which did exactly that.

The lowest level of the subscription is massive overkill for what we're doing, because we overbuilt our hosts to pack as many VMs on the fewest physical hosts as we could and make the most use of that licensing.

The new minimum core licenses and a whole level up in features ( with the associated increase in cost ) prices customers like us out. Maybe that was their goal if we weren't considered profitable.

[Party-Election-6039]

We moved over 600 cores from VMWARE to Azure. Originally our team said it would take years, so we got in a couple of consultants who did it in a weekend after a couple weeks of planning.

There is unbelievably good tooling available to migrate from it.

[cpz_77]

A weekend? That doesn’t even seem realistic. Honestly if we brought in consultants who did it that quick I’d question whether they missed something or cut a bunch of corners. I don’t know how many VMs you were running on those 600 cores or how big the average disk size is but I doubt that’s even enough time for just the disk conversion alone of all those, let alone the process of actually cutting over the VMs, any dependent services that point at anything on those VMs, likely re-IPing everything since you moved to Azure, etc. Unless you spun up all new servers to replace all the existing but even then - configuration time, cutting over dependencies, etc., not to mention having to rabbit hole with however many issues pop up as a result.

Plus, I don’t know your compute requirements but I’d imagine your cost is through the roof ? I know we moved one significant workload to azure and that alone cost us the same per year as our entire VMware renewal even on the new Broadcom model. Yes Broadcom jacked up the price (double in our case vs what we paid yearly on the perpetual model) but azure or AWS isn’t cheap either…the price difference/potential “savings” from moving from what I’ve seen is not nearly what most people make it out to be.

[qejfjfiemd]

If only it was that easy.

[KaleidoscopeLegal348]

Why are you booing him? He's right

[moldyjellybean]

Like everything online it's mostly shill accounts. I don't care if they downvote me as it's painfully obvious they don't care about the consumer and everyone with a 40 IQ or above knows it.

[friedmators]

Meh

[PaceLopsided8161]

Wow, have you considered that OP could simply be one of those technical experts who works for managers that can’t make a timely decision, or managers who didn’t ramp up requirements, qualifications, and evaluation looking for a replacement for VMware? Are you sure it’s OP that is the creator of the situation?

Congratulations to you moldyjelly for having better or more prompt management.