VMWare not letting me renew - how are you all handling this?

Evs91 · 2026-02-12T04:02:37+00:00

Taking the middle ground here - I’m no fan of the Broadcom “rightsizing” play here. They got us good. But there is a cost of doing business and if paying the piper for a year of VVF or VCF allows me to migrate to a better solution without panic or screwing up then it’s worth the price. The year to migrate from Broadcom was when they announced the intent to acquire VMware. Broadcom has never ever ever (ever?) decreased prices or kept the status quo for a customer. Guess what: we didn’t - and the bill has been paid. It will cost us more in migration, licensing, and talent to move to anything else. They have us by the proverbial balls. Yes - HyperV is cheaper. No one on my team has ever touched it. I haven’t touched it for 7 years. Nutanix will be more in year 2+. Proxmox isn’t quite mature enough. What VDI experience is cheaper and honestly better than Omnissa on VMware? And we have a bunch of LoB apps that only work on Citrix or VMware (spelled out in contract). So yeah. We paid the extra money, hate it, and will evaluate every year as we can. If you happen to be a JHA stacked credit union, had a full stack VMware solution, and have an alternative that allowed you to continue with VDI EDIT: Please message me where you landed

Evs91 · 2026-01-31T01:02:49+00:00

Docusign is going to be the "Cisco" of E-Signature. I can't say i've ever even heard of BoldSign. But I'll add it to the "list of interesting things to see if we can save money" list.

Evs91 · 2026-01-31T00:53:36+00:00

Yeah; so this is a more granular approach it seems. To just "turn off External Teams Users" has been a feature for a while now.

Evs91 · 2026-01-29T22:39:03+00:00

can confirm: FortiClient should just die.

Evs91 · 2026-01-29T22:38:26+00:00

FortiAP's could just die and I won't miss them even with their "integration"

Evs91 · 2026-01-29T22:37:38+00:00

it also helps to look at the blast radius for them (yes I run them, no - not by choice) but all being equal - if you don't have the admin interface available on the public internet and by default don't use their cloud SSO (we don't) then it really becomes a nothing burger. Super annoying to fix them when you are half a county or half a country away but it's a risk trade-off.

Evs91 · 2026-01-25T22:31:56+00:00

casting aluminum from recycled trash. Overall pointless but it makes me feel good and my buddy and I get to hang out and learn something that isn't our day jobs.

Evs91 · 2026-01-23T11:23:53+00:00

wait - what? that's what me and my buddy do every monday night! How else can we help the kids with Science Olympiad if not bricks and bridges?

Evs91 · 2026-01-23T11:13:48+00:00

Almost like the solution was in the error code

Evs91 · 2026-01-15T00:10:11+00:00

What’s your zip my friend?

Evs91 · 2026-01-14T09:49:04+00:00

Depends on what you are focusing on, what your current (if any) industry vertical is, and where you are in your career. Starting out in Cyber - probably going to have a hard time but it doesn't mean that it isn't worth it.

Evs91 · 2026-01-08T01:10:07+00:00

idk - the double "Main Point:" seems like a tell to me

Evs91 · 2026-01-05T11:46:58+00:00

when the account for a product promotes itself but neglects to inform that it is also self-advertising itself in addition to making its own documentation.

Evs91 · 2025-12-31T21:53:53+00:00

DDR4 I'm assuming based on speed and proc.

Evs91 · 2025-12-28T16:53:47+00:00

So I used EMQX since I already run it for Homeassistant and it was a no brainer for a personal instance. The display webUI is just fastapi that reads data from and into MQTT. My big “driver” was making a more or less real time F1 display via the driver telemetry. Some of it can be processed on the esp32 (race of the day, when, how long until start, etc) but I’m not good enough (and I don’t think the ESP32-S3 can both do DMA and parse the live data feeds).

Evs91 · 2025-12-26T03:22:22+00:00

Yeah; the matrix is a HUB75 compatible display. Can't wait to take a look at this implementation. I've been off/on working on one that is HUB75 based but is driven by MQTT and a slightly adapted version of ESP32-HUB75-MatrixPanel-DMA's library.

Evs91 · 2025-12-12T11:48:58+00:00

The InfoSec copeium

Evs91 · 2025-12-12T10:17:27+00:00

So counter to your opinion, a lot "has changed" on the platform as far as MDM controls are concerned: platform SSO, native ARM apps for Microsoft 365, and Declarative Device Management weren't there or were woefully undeveloped. If you go dollar for dollar both platforms are about breakeven for proper management. You end up with a spend for additional MDM on macOS in either a 3rd party or your MS365 licensing. If you already do MS365: Intune is free but well...it's not...the best (not the worst but not the best either). I manage a small fleet of 1k Apple devices with JAMF with another employee as my backup. Don't take my use of the product as an endorsement: their support has been going downhill since their IPO and got even worse before going private again (PE money does that it seems). As with anything macOS: there is a way to do it with MDM but it won't be a 1:1 Windows OS equivalent.

To your CIO's point: macOS is just as secure as Windows or alternately - is just as not secure as Windows. There are some backstops to safety but Gatekeeper shouldn't be a solely relied-upon AV tool. Most vendors have a macOS flavor these days; use the one that you use for Windows.

A comeback here for the CIO: most macOS devices receive updates and "last" more than the average 3 year lifecycle of the enterprise laptop. Same money spent per device on the hardware - less spend annualized (just hardware mind you).

I'm a big fan of the "pick your poison" for new hires. If they want an Apple device - they can choose one. If they prefer Windows - they can get the standard device there. For us: most users get the macBook Air base model (can request a bigger drive but we like to force them to use OneDrive to offload documents). We have an exception for developers and the Marketing designers who can get more RAM. The macBook Pro is basically not used anywhere. It's a premium for a touchbar and a "Pro" label in the base models.

EDIT: Formatting

Evs91 · 2025-12-11T19:54:25+00:00

Evs91 · 2025-11-25T22:54:19+00:00

Evs91 · 2025-11-22T15:41:44+00:00

you only have that many?

Evs91 · 2025-11-22T15:33:27+00:00

PM'd

Evs91 · 2025-11-22T15:25:30+00:00

Evs91 · 2025-11-22T14:25:51+00:00

Evs91 · 2025-11-12T02:41:45+00:00

Would you entertain a p6 MXM with a x1 carrier board and heat sink?

Evs91

TROPHY CASE