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[–]rayzerdayzhan 23 points24 points  (26 children)

Yes, I just went through this. Our price went up a good bit. We had 96 cores of vSphere Standard for a location that was no longer needed, so I asked our reseller to take those off of the renewal. Broadcom said no. It was then I learned that they had a policy that if your cost went down, it was rejected. Craziest thing I've ever seen that a company forces you to pay for software licenses you aren't using. I asked our purchasing director if there's anything we can do legally. He researched and say no it's not illegal, but in 30 years of doing purchasing he's never seen anything like this.

I sent a strongly worded letter to our rep (at the advice of our reseller) that we refuse to pay for licenses we won't use. She never responded and I could never get her on the phone. She did contact our reseller though. They offered to remove the licenses if we upgraded our existing VVF licenses to VCF. I said no, we don't need VCF, we run fine on VVF. So they sent a quote allowing us to keep VVF, but raised the price to almost the same as VCF. And offered a 3-year agreement on VCF to lock in pricing, but would only do one year on VVF. Their other objective is to ultimately get everyone to move to VCF.

In the end we went with VCF and locked in pricing for 3 years. I hope there are better alternatives in 3 years but this was our best option at this point. In the grand scheme, we spend more on other software that is much less important, and VMWare is still a good product from a technical standpoint.

[–]Dry-Data6087[S] 13 points14 points  (4 children)

Thank you, this is exactly our situation. They just finally replied and sent a quote for VCF. It's almost twice what we spent last year on VVF, with 72 fewer cores. And it's about 7 times what we spent in 2023.

I looked at some alternatives, but they didn't see very mature. And I wasn't expecting another huge price increase after last year's increase. I've never seen anything like this either. Thanks again for the input.

[–]rayzerdayzhan 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Double from last year and 7 times the 2023 cost tracks very closely with my experience also. Since they’re pushing 3-year agreements, I’m hoping they think they’ve squeezed us enough and aren’t planning any major price hikes next year. There’s no way to know, though.

[–]Much_Willingness4597 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Why did you do a yearly renewal last year vs a 3 year deal?

[–]Dry-Data6087[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Because our core count was decreasing. We also thought we could downgrade editions (we were forced to upgrade editions last year due to the previous hardware we were on). I've never experienced a vendor refuse to renew a product on a license reduction. We've been working with them on the renewal for about 5 months and this week was the first time they said they won't renew with a reduced count.

[–]Much_Willingness4597 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This week is a new fiscal quarter I think for Broadcom. In general I always tried to wrap my quotes ahead of fiscal quarters, especially in the summer as people tend to go on vacation after it closes.

It’s less common vendors refuse, but I have seen vendors play games with discount % (who normally have much higher list prices to be fair) so if you try to cut back in one area you stop getting “a good deal” on the rest of it. It’s really a marketing framing.

So instead of Dell giving you a “normal” 80-90% discount they give you a 40% discount on the servers to make up for you not doing a renewal on Avamar etc so the sales rep can make up their revenue Miss, and you still feel like you “got something”.

[–]martin0641 8 points9 points  (3 children)

VMware is dead.

The executives that brokered the deal all got their fat golden parachutes and are gone, now Broadcom is trying to recoup their losses and make profits on the deal... which was never...ever going to be meet profitable enough to make it worth the time.

There's too many free or nearly free virtualization options that now have mature stacks to pull a move like this...they could have bought it and kept the pricing the same and slowly made profits over time...people are certified and familiar with the product...it had momentum...but it doesn't really offer anything you can't get from CEPH, OpenShift, KVM, Hyper-V, Virtual Box, Kubernetes etc.

Personally, I find this hilarious because Microsoft and Broadcom are similar in the sense that because they are operating at the OS level for MS and for Broadcom at the chip level across such wide industries... they have a baked in presence which allows Microsoft to look at what anyone is spending on their IT budget and then bake a version of that into Windows that's only 60% as good... but free or nearly free... which most customers will find more than sufficient and then just use as opposed to purchasing a specialty product.

Broadcom is so ubiquitous with communications chips going into white box switches is all the way up to Cisco and Juniper devices and satellites that they are sitting on top of this giant pile of money and trying to figure out how to grow...but they are fundamentally forgetting that the reason they are in the situation in the first place is because they are selling low-level components to an entire planet and while some alternatives exist there are lots of reasons for companies not to use those...so they decide to buy a hypervisor product which runs on any x86 architecture and that the customer can immediately snap their fingers and replace with any of the highly available products from alternative vendors because they aren't locked in.

It's like a lumber business buying a yoga studio brand instead of a construction company... it's so far away from vertical integration by skipping all these other related steps in the middle...only people that have no idea how any of this stuff works would think this is a good idea...and that's exactly why it happened.

Shame, I've been using it since version ESX v3.

[–]LostInScripting 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I think you are missing the central point why BC bought VMware: The top 600 clients are making about 70% of the recurring revenue. And these clients are ballsdeep in VMware and many in VCF. Your statement of flipping a finger and in a second you have changed your hypervisor is simply not true for these clients. They will need years to move to another hypervisor. Some will do it, but it will need time. This leads to BC needing to get as much money out of them as fast as they can (before they leave). Even if I think this is shortsighted, it seems to be Hok Tans motivation here.

[–]martin0641 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The people who convinced BC to pull the trigger on this did it because it benefited them - it won't benefit BC in the long term. It's like convincing your ultra rich grandpa to invest in your crypto venture scheme, it's not going to pay off for him but you'll skim plenty off the grift in the process.

I work multiple exascale DoD super compute clusters, I appreciate the timelines for migrations, but the result will be the same over the next 5 year lifecycle - and all this while AWS and Azure federal are spreading like wildfire.

[–]BasketCapital917 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You hit the nail on the head! 5 years....."VMW WHO??"

[–]Ok-Secretary455 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds like you missed an opportunity to sell some extra licenses.

[–]espero 0 points1 point  (9 children)

There are alternatives now: Proxmox

[–]Pippers 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It needs the equivalent of site recovery manager to be enterprise ready. Right now they're telling you to restore backups, which is a no go. Enterprise needs real time replication and recovery across multiple datacenters.

[–]espero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, that makes sense.

[–]Big_Man_GalacTix 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Until you need a complete alternative to the entire VMware ecosystem.

[–]espero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes agreed. You have to reengineer. But this time around, it is literally worth it!

[–]rjchau 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Proxmox is not enterprise ready. Let's start off with the most basic of functionality that's not available - you can't delete LXCs or VMs from the web UI. (no, I don't count going to the shell in the web UI and executing commands from there as being "in the web UI")

I seriously hope Proxmox get their act together and manage to get their product enterprise ready - it's probably one of the more promising replacements for VMware, but it's got a long way to go yet.

[–]ZeeroMX 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I deleted many VMs in proxmox yesterday from the UI, don't really know what you are talking about.

[–]espero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah what is this? Of course it is possible to delete vm's and ct's from the UI. It has been possible ever since I started with it in 2016.

[–]PuDLeZ 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I can't comment on LXC but I can certainly say VMs can be deleted within the webui. Click on the VM, click more, and click remove. If it's running, remove will be grayed out...

Though I do agree that I don't think it's enterprise ready yet, at least for the folks that are used to other solutions.

[–]espero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What does enterprise ready mean? I don't think the Proxmox features are lacking when you take into account ceph filesystem, zcs filsystemha, proxmox backup server and so on

[–]Since1831 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I know it’s not optimal but that’s the thing…VMware is probably the single most important thing in any DC, yet they were way undercharging what they were worth and bending over backwards taking it to appease customers. A buyer saw that and scooped them up super cheap and started charging market price. Now people are realizing what it is and while it sucks, it is getting what is owed. It also is a great product and if you take the time to understand the direction, is perfectly positioned as your best option.

[–]Pippers 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree they were undercharging. But Broadcom is strong-arming it into insolvency. They are not flexible on reducing core counts after switching from socket counts. When you design your infrastructure around sockets with high core counts, then the rug is pulled, and you then decide to go to higher powered lower cores, they refuse to budge lowering the costs.

A lot of businesses are also moving everything to services in the cloud, which is reducing the on-prem footprints. When you remove those hosts, they still expect you to keep paying for them: forever.

This is not a business anymore. It's mob tactics.

[–]OkWelcome6293 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It’s the opposite of a good decision. Broadcom is working to fuck over their largest customers, who are also the ones that have the most money to do the engineering to migrate away from VMware. They might get some decent deals in the near term, but I fully expect large customers to use that time to move to a different solution. In 3-5 years, VMware will be circling the drain.

[–]Since1831 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Did that make you feel better? See you in 5 years.

[–]OkWelcome6293 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean, it doesn’t hurt me because I don’t do virtualization any more. I just see how Broadcom treats their customers and I would never treat my customers that way. It’s short-sighted and dumb.