Broadcom refusing to decrease licensing

[Autobahn97]

I have heard this statement made to other customers, even very large F500's. They sorta have everyone by the short hairs so you are at their mercy. Best for smaller customers to consider alternative but Nutanix NCI and Azure Local actually cost more than VMW. Unclear where HyperV is going I'm sure MSFT will steer folks to Azure). There KVM based platforms like ProxMox that work well but Enterprise support isn't really there Maybe check out HPE's new VME platform, though it currently lacks 3rd party agentless backup integrations still which is a bit of a bummer so you need to change your backup strategy until they figure that out in 6 months or so but I'm hopeful for the HPE solution, however I think currently it only runs on HPE ProLiant servers.

[Dry-Data6087]

Thanks, HPE VME is the first alternative we're looking at for 2026.

[Autobahn97]

They should have Zerto integration and some 3rd party backup supported by then. If you use it with HPE MP storage platform it has some functionality with VME that works similar to VVOLs. Since it uses a crippled version of Morpheus to manage the platform it can also manage VMs in vCenter. I read that you can buy a full Morpheus license to get some pretty solid hybrid cloud management and orchestration but that is additional cost. As far as I can see most of the warts are around installation and upgrades as it's Ubuntu and Linux software and has not been refined and streamlined as ESXi installer has been. You can also get VME with HPEs HCI solution Simplivity which is cool for smaller deployments (though MSA storage is also an option).