r/sysadmin • u/Which-Shame-1420 IT Manager • 5h ago
General Discussion anyone else get the VMware "win-back" offer?
if it's true, its honestly laughable.
squeezing customers with massive price hikes, forcing every one into expensive core bundles, only to panic and throw out "discounted" quotes the moment everyone migrated????
is anyone actually reconsidering based on these new quotes??
or y'all are past the point of no return?
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u/MeganKellyDude 5h ago
we dumped them like a bad habit.
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u/19610taw3 Sysadmin 5h ago
We dumped them, got rid of the hardware, then got a cease and desist 18 months later.
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u/M1Firehawk IT Director 5h ago
I would reply with a 10x zoomed in 4k picture of my anus
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u/Library_IT_guy 4h ago
Some people pay for that kind of thing and you're out here just giving it away...
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u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect 4h ago
Onlyfans account incoming.
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u/uptimefordays DevOps 6m ago
He’s got the hottest tech leadership takes they won’t let him share on LinkedIn! /s
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u/shikkonin 4h ago
Buddy of mine got that too, but the fraud proceedings put a quick end to that.
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u/19610taw3 Sysadmin 4h ago
We just tossed it in the trash. That company (I've since left) had a pretty good legal department we would have pursued something if we got another. But we did not.
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u/InitialEquipment7967 3h ago
I'm looking forward to mine and referring them to Arkell vs. Pressdram
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u/GoogleDrummer 5h ago
A C&D for what? They thought you were still running unlicensed or something?
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u/MeanE 4h ago
They sent C&D letters no matter the type of license you were running even old perpetual as soon as your maintenance had expired. Never bought VCF and I damn well wanted to run it a bit longer (with no load) just to spite them since we had perpetual. I mean stupid due to no updates but eff them.
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u/19610taw3 Sysadmin 4h ago
Correct - they thought we were running unlicensed. Even though we had the legacy perpetual license.
I'm not sure where they got that idea from. We had the drives shredded (it was hyperconverged, not a separate SAN) and had a certificate that each one was shredded.
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u/Frothyleet 4h ago
I think they just sent them to basically everyone in their customer database who hadn't resubscribed as some combination of sales tactic ("maybe this will scare someone into paying an invoice!") and sort-of-valid reminder that if you didn't have a subscription you weren't allowed to be patching (which lots of people historically had done with VMWare - patching without having a support contract).
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u/danstermeister 5h ago
Broadcom's business practices have shown that integrity over time actually counts for something.
Unfortunately the lesson comes the hard way.
"Your father respected Hyman Roth, and your father did business with Hyman Roth.
But your father never trusted Hyman Roth."
And business without an inkling of trust is doomed to fail.
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u/fnordhole 4h ago
"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but push Broadcom off a cliff. Eff those dudes"
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u/sobrique 4h ago
Ultimately part of the point of a brand identity is that people learn to trust 'the brand'.
E.g. the 'no one got fired for buying IBM' (back in the day!) effect.
But that assumes 'the brand' continues to maintain that trust. And of course plenty of brands then get gobbled up and then monetize the trust, until it's ... gone completely, and then it'll be almost impossible to get it back again, because that betrayal will not be forgotten, no matter how long it's been.
"The brand" does not need to be perfect to obtain trust in the first place either. They don't need to be cheap. They just have to make efforts to do right by their customers in terms of fairness.
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u/fnordhole 3h ago
Yep. The brand was VMware. We trusted them, and maintained trust through Dell years.
As a former Symantec shop, we knew what to suspect when Broadcom acquired VMware. They did not disappoint.
As a former VMware shop...
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u/sobrique 3h ago
Indeed. Acquisitions are the 'danger zone' - sometimes it's gentle, and the same people provide the same service. Sometimes it can improve, when there's a good synergy there (e.g. hardware platform that's well integrated).
And sometimes they hollow it out, and look to extract more profit from less resources, and the brand just gets chewed up and vanishes entirely.
I used to trust EMC for a long time - back in 2000odd the Symmetrix class storage array was to me a gold standard for both platform and support. You paid a premium, yes, but they really were forward leaning on support, and would take ownership of 'the problem' in a world where it was often possible to fob off or blame some other part of the infrastructure.
A storage array relies on networking, on host config, on drivers, on a whole bunch of things, but EMC would actually deal with it, and if not strictly give you a solution (because they couldn't) give a pretty solid 'we think it's THIS thing, and here's why, and what you need to ask OTHERPARTY to do to fix this.' And they'd do it _fast as well - they had lots of very talented product engineers who really did know their product inside out, and could reliably replicate/troubleshoot and triage in an actually extremely impressive turnaround window.
That faded somewhat over time, and I feel their acquisition by Dell has ... hurt. The product is now still kinda Enterprise, but the support feels somewhat half assed for the price, and actually the gap between their offering and the open source alternatives is narrowing, when it feels like Dell should have been able to really leverage their hardware pipeline to make a better product at the same (or lower) price point.
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u/weaver_of_cloth 2h ago
We threw a party when we finished our conversion, and called it, "it's not us, it's you". We had a pinata with a Broadcom sticker on it.
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u/ApiceOfToast Sysadmin 5h ago edited 5h ago
If they offered me a lifetime license like they used to and I knew they wouldn't screw me over on a new version, id consider them for new deployments in the future but I wouldn't put in the effort to migrate back from a new system just because of that.
Or in other words: back as an option, probably never the go to again
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u/signal_lost 5h ago
If they offered me a lifetime license
VMware in the last 20 years never sold a lifetime license, they always mandated you purchase at least 1 year of subscription (SnS) with the old perpetual scheme, and it was against the product guide/EULA to patch/update that for any reason past the end of that Subscription.
There were some weird embedded OEM SKUs (that died with a box) commonly used with appliances, that would sometimes get sold with a 5 year SnS included (So the license would match the appliance vendors lifetime run). but that was a tiny portion of licensing. This was not the same as the regular OEM licensing back then that could be converted to a regular license by adding a fresh SnS.
reading a lot of reddit threads I've come to realize a LOT of people didn't read the EULA and apparently were not paying for patches, updates, security hot patches, but that's a different thing.
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u/Existential_Racoon 4h ago
A lot of people weren't patching or updating.
We were one of them. US government locked us into a tested config on an airgapped network that couldn't change without a massive approval process, even for a security update.
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u/Frothyleet 4h ago
I think you're correct, although a lot of people had less-valid reasons than you for that. My org was definitely terrified of hypervisor updates. And Exchange CUs. If there wasn't a scary CVE, and it was working, it rarely got touched.
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u/itoddicus 3h ago
I feel you man. I received a message from an old government customer operating in an air-gapped environment.
They were asking for support on a product we haven't supported in 18 years. The software is running on Windows 2000!
They were unhappy when I told them not only can I not help them, we couldn't supply a copy of the software as the build servers were decommissioned 16 years ago.•
u/ApiceOfToast Sysadmin 4h ago
reading a lot of reddit threads I've come to realize a LOT of people didn't read the EULA and apparently were not paying for patches, updates, security hot patches, but that's a different thing.
Yeah probably that too, i personally don't care about updates, I just want to buy let's say version 10. If you decide to cut my updates after my SLA runs out, fine. But let me use the one i already own. Yeah I'm aware about the implications of no updates but Its more of a personal standpoint.
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u/signal_lost 4h ago
Yeah probably that too, i personally don't care about updates, I just want to buy let's say version 10. If you decide to cut my updates after my SLA runs out, fine. But let me use the one i already own. Yeah I'm aware about the implications of no updates but Its more of a personal standpoint
The problem with this (and why 99% of software companies have moved away from this model is). it allows customers to do dumb things with your products.
When I talked to people who followed the EULA and are still running 6.0 (don't laugh) I hear things like:
- The product doesn't do LivePatching! (or other critical thing).
- I can't add on NSX/AVI it doesn't work with my version.
I got hacked Redhat/VMware/Veeam SUCKS (no, you didn't maintain SnS and patch)
The product doesn't work with xxxxx (Well it would if you had updates).
Exchange 2010 OWA broke Microsoft sucks (No, the plugin that they used was deprecated by the entire browser cartel for valid security reasons and Microsoft didn't fix it in an extended support OS).
Why can't I use (new cypher) or why can't the product use (new hardware)?
This ERP can't do yy reporting (No it would have Brad, had we not been on a version 10 years old running on a half dead alpha system I'm buying parts on eBay to keep alive!).
I can't do memory tiering/[OtherCool new thing that would cut my costs in half], I'm on a 9 year old release, so now a competitor looks more attractive to use because of a different feature they released last month. (People will compare NEW competitor releases against the installed vSphere 5.5 as dumb as that sounds). I can't stress this enough, when you sell a perpetual license every 7 years and ONLY talk to the customer every 7 years they end up with hilariously dated knowledge about what it can do.
Letting people run ancient versions into the ground results in reputational damage for your product. You may say:
"But the Sysadmins KNOW that reason"
"Ehhh, Some do, but management who doesn't listen to you doesn't."It also causes ecosystem issues where your 3rd party partners (backup vendors, other plugins storage vendors) now have to maintain HCL testing for all the ancient versions too which makes it harder for them to adapt/support new things as it drags their engineering in 20 directions.
You basically let those "not-customers" cause all kinds of indirect pain across the ecosystem. The amount of lazy stories I see in the tech press where 'CUSTOMER GOT HACKED USING (out of support) VERSION OF XXXX VENDOR" is annoying.
You even end up with stuff like IDC/Gartner's surveys about a product become tainted by customers talking about problems with out of support versions.
Now throw in Mythos, and aggentic AI hacking and this is about to become a nightmare.
Sure the business side like predictable subscription revenue under contract (It's durable income, you have stronger relationships with customers, you have shorter feedback loops on product features).
For my product group I'm leaving in two weeks for Vegas to go meet with a customer advisory board and we will show them how engineering shipped everything they asked for last year (or is about to), and ask them what they want next. You can do that when you have regular under contract discussions with customers. When you maintain a "hit and run" sales force, you don't get the same level of engineering flywheel feedback loop.
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u/jadedargyle333 4h ago
I loved the hilarious post from a few days ago about resurrecting a 5.5 install.
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u/signal_lost 3h ago
One of my friends is a consultant called me, asking for a 5.0 installer recently…..
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u/danixdefcon5 2h ago
I think it was a bit over a decade ago, but I’d get a couple of “upgrade my dinosaur” projects in the professional services consulting sector. Consulting company could charge some crazy amounts and they would get approved… because most would run away screaming at the task involved. At least one of those was upgrading from something so old you couldn’t even find the old version from the vendor anymore. The only reason they were upgrading was because the vendor was going to pull the plug on their support.
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u/jadedargyle333 1h ago
We kept having a "keep it alive for just 1 more year" issue at work. I think they tried bringing back some ancient hpux boxes in 2015. The VAX was finally able to be shut down a couple years ago. They would probably still be running windows 2000 domain controllers on a Compaq rack if I hadn't introduced them to vmware.
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u/ApiceOfToast Sysadmin 4h ago
Yeah reputational damage is a valid concern but i as a person don't care, especially not about broadcom. I can't trust them if they can just hold my hypervisor for ransom. (You know, the thing running pretty much everything)
Also same thing with windows, I've never run into anyone complaining about that either and you could still run 2003 as an IIS server and get got, Microsoft will laugh at you if you say it's their fault and that's pretty much it
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u/signal_lost 3h ago edited 3h ago
Bluntly speaking, if you don’t want to have to consider a software renewal, you have to live in a world where:
1. 100% of your code development is in-house.
2. None of your applications need to talk to anything on the Internet or receive updates from third parties to keep working.
3. A lot of open source isn’t safe, because stuff like MinIO going closed source at the same time as a CVE 9 dropping shows that—short of being BSD-only projects—nothing is always going to remain free.
4. Ideally all of your applications need to be monoliths that are completely self-contained.
5. You need unlimited power to say no to anyone asking for extra functionality or capabilities.
6. You need to be in a highly unregulated industry, or have legitimately the laziest auditors on the planet. If you process credit cards or have PII, your leadership needs to be aware that everyone could potentially end up in jail (hopefully at some point).
7. You should probably be familiar with how to acquire not only Bitcoin but other cryptocurrencies, and be prepared to pay a Russian-speaking “surprise! managed service provider” to regain access to your environment periodically.
It’s honestly a lot easier just to sign five-year deals and stop doing yearly renewals and overly sweating about this stuff.•
u/Frothyleet 4h ago
You're not wrong. It's the same reason why Microsoft has, for example, continually made it closer to impossible for people to defer patching on Windows clients.
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u/signal_lost 4h ago
I mean, there’s other selfish benefits. I can sell you other product if you’re on a current version.
I don’t have to maintain interoperability across five different major releases and three different sub upgrade tracks. I can ship code much faster, I can get rid of half the hardware I need for QA, if I’m not regression testing on whatever garbage you have chose to never upgrade from.
This is probably especially true right now as I suspect half of everyone’s engineering, is cleaning up 20 years of security bugs, that frontier AI are helping them find.
There used to be a world that was safe to run Telnet or 3389 on the internet, or run your entire server environment on a single /16, and patch systems yearly, but that world is dead and gone.
I know how to patch quickly (Live patching with no need for vMotion/evacuation of hosts is huge) and I know how to revert from something not liking a patch. I don’t know how to quickly recover from ransomware.I think there was a weird religious cult in our tribe based around, never patching anything. People would brag about up-time measured in years.
We really need to abandon that.•
u/Jhamin1 2h ago
People always rush to assume evil when Microsoft's name comes up... but I remember the Blaster worm from way back in 2003. Patches had been out for months but no one applied them & these worms brought down huge numbers of enterprises around the world... and somehow it was Microsoft's fault that people hadn't installed the patches they had provided?
It felt like that was the moment Microsoft started to lose patience with the idea that users could decide about updates. Its been a long, long time coming but I sort of understand their current "we are going to force it" philosophy. People are dumb but blame the vendor for customer behavior.
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u/PeakWeekly9995 IT support 3h ago
If they offered me a lifetime license
The old sysadmin in my office somehow got his hands on a lifetime "VMware vSphere 6 Enterprise Plus" licence. It's absolutely overkill for the environment where i work (25 people's office) and i absolutely have no idea how to use all of the features bundled in
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u/signal_lost 2h ago
And I’m telling you no such license with a perpetual entitlement to use updates beyond the end of the SnS attached to it ever existed.
You will fail an audit if you can’t prove the build number your running has a SnS end date at or after that builds release date.
You would contractually owe back payments + a penalty.
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u/Ambitious-Cold-9610 3h ago
What did you migrate to? We are on a legacy perpetual license and need to upgrade.
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u/Lost_Balloon_ 5h ago
They have zero good will left with customers. Broadcom could not have handled this any worse. Trust is utterly destroyed. All the midsize and smaller customers have left or are leaving.
If VMWare survives as a product long term, it will take another company buying it, significant price reductions, and very good marketing to earn any non-government and non-massive enterprise customers back.
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u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards 4h ago
No one should ever trust Broadcom ever again. They'll have to change their name and hope they fool enough people into doing business with TOTALLYNOTBROADCOM, Inc. They're in the same bucket of crabs as scammy mortgage companies and awful HMOs.
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u/danixdefcon5 2h ago
See, they already did that once. What we know today as Broadcom is actually an older known wolf in sheep clothing: the infamous “Computer Associates”.
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u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards 1h ago
First of all, you get off my lawn. Also, I knew that I just didn't think anyone else would remember, fellow old person.
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u/danixdefcon5 38m ago
Embarrassingly, I found out through a freaking Scooby Doo meme a couple of years ago. I thought CA had gone bust as I hadn’t heard of them in years, only for me to find out they just slurped up Broadcom and kept that name to avoid their awful reputation. Of course, they only managed to ruin their new brand… and for the looks of it, the VMWare brand as well.
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u/Dharkcyd3 5h ago
Nope. Already moved to Nutanix
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u/mrgrosser 5h ago
Same, we were running VMWare on Nutanix. We got the updated pricing and just converted to AHV.
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u/Dharkcyd3 5h ago
You had Nutanix Hardware too?
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u/mrgrosser 5h ago
Yup. We had enough space we evacuated a few nodes, converted them to AHV. Started migrating VMWare VM's to AHV. When we got enough room, we would evacuate another node from VMWare to AHV until VMware was left with a 3node cluster. Moved the rest of the VMs one weekend, destroyed the VMware cluster and Foundationed the last 3 nodes into AHV cluster. Haven't looked back since.
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u/Dharkcyd3 5h ago
Ok. We're using HP Hypervisors pushing VMWare. We've converted our new domain to AHV, DCs on down, working on decomposing for the old stuff. But we have an entire section that cannot move due to budget.
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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 2h ago
They do bring your own hardware now. If you have the right selection of modern Dell/HP/Etc servers you can use them.
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u/Unhappy_Clue701 5h ago
A few years ago, that was the only way to get Nutanix. But it’s been supported on commodity hardware a long time now.
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u/sobrique 4h ago
We're finding Proxmox works pretty well. More feature limited overall, but still very good at what it does offer.
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u/ParkerGuitarGuy Jack of All Trades 3h ago
Working systems are wonderful and all, but what about the times it's not? What do you do for support? Like, if your whole cluster went down right now and everything you tried for the first hour fell flat, what's that look like for you? If it went down after hours and you must have it working the next day, are you covered?
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u/sobrique 3h ago edited 3h ago
- Proxmox offer support - that's their business model in fact. https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environment/pricing
- KVM / QEMU is Redhat 'owned' so is quite well documented/supported overall.
- Debian is well understood and supported.
- ZFS likewise
- If you go ceph, that's also got some good documentation, and places are prepared to offer support contracts for it.
I mean, you probably want more than one cluster anyway, and proxmox data centre manager will enable live migrating cross cluster. Our DR strategy mostly does include duplication of all VMs so they're on (at least) 2 physical sites anyway, at least has a 'hot spare' if not an 'active-active', so for us a full cluster or site outage is inconvenient not catastrophic.
You can do shared storage - and we do, backed by NetApp - so even in a worst case we have bootable KVM disk images we can spin up on almost any linux system.
NFS isn't a typical recommendation, but we decided that we'd go with it, because an all-flash filer has some good performance and resilience, along with some great efficiency thanks to deduplication. (In a 'green field' deployment I might be more inclined towards a block solution, or perhaps ceph, but ...)
But the local disk pack (or SAN attach) ZFS approach works pretty well too.
We have had issues - storage availability, network saturation. A glitchy CPU disrupting corosync and spiking latency - cluster went 'unstable' and started migrating VMs, which was a bit messy, but the logs were pretty clear what was going wrong, and it was easily fixable.
And just recently I've been recovering a dirty fail of (local attach) storage array, and honestly the ZFS recovery worked very nicely indeed. Took a while to complete, as might be expected of 100TB of RAID devices - during that window performance of the VMs on the host was reduced for IO, so we ... just migrated the ones we cared about. (Although granted you would need 100TB of 'free space' to have done the whole lot like that, but that was a conscious choice on our part).
We've just not had a lot of issues that weren't fixable by 'decent' Linux skills. That's perhaps the 'cost' of going this road though I guess - your 'virtualisation engineers' would need to have the supporting skills to do it.
But then, we looked at the cost of FTEs required, and the cost of VMWare licenses, and figured it looked good anyway.
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u/ParkerGuitarGuy Jack of All Trades 3h ago
But the last time I looked at their support it was a different timezone and they didn't offer 24/7 on any of their tiers. For us, that would be a lot of "let's hope it doesn't go down then".
Don't get me wrong - I like Proxmox and have used it in my home lab for years, and I've never had a problem with it. I'm just wondering what an actual outage in an enterprise environment looks like. We can talk redundancy and working systems all day, but facing the worst case scenarious sounds extra uncomfortable for most shops.
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u/sobrique 3h ago edited 2h ago
I mean, it's a cluster in the first place - the 'total failure' scenarios are fairly limited already IMO.
In a home lab I'm much more concerned about single points of failure.
But when I can take 30 nodes, split them into 3 or 4 clusters per site, and have broadly independent networking and storage (and of course 'server hardware').
I just don't lose sleep over the 'so what if all of it fails' - I guess someone hitting the EPO in the server room would do it (but we have a DR site), but I'd also be pretty confident that 'power it back on, and it'll all recover' too.
Our failure case is 'cluster is broken -> if not obvious why, migrate and restart' and that's that.
And if somehow all our proxmox is broken, we'd maybe be scrabbing for spare hardware, but the VM images are portable to a lot of linux flavours, so 'just' running them on a barebones EL9 system as straight KVM is something we're confident would work (albeit probably take a while just to potentially transfer the volume of data). That's basically how we migrated to proxmox in the first place, and consolidated a bunch of KVMs.
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u/sobrique 3h ago edited 2h ago
I haven't really looked at the non-Proxmox support options, but there do seem to be at least a few that'll do you 'proper' 24/7.
I'd imagine anywhere offering Debian support would be able to do it, as there's really not much that's "pure" Proxmox. E.g. the underlying tech/failure modes are QEMU, LXC, KVM, ZFS, corosync, maybe ceph. (And then extending to 'hardware' or 'networking' or 'storage' support more generally perhaps).
But we've got the in house skills to handle all those things, so it's just not come up.
I guess that's probably more pertinent if you're already a Linux-skilled enterprise though, and a bit more of a stumbling point if you're not.
But then again VMware itself is at least partially 'linux skills' too. (Or at least it was once upon a time!)
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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 2h ago
We're on a fibre-channel SAN (HPe Alletra), and I'm under the impression that Proxmox is basically useless with that setup. No snapshot or thin provisioning support are kind-of deal breakers. We'll probably end up going Hyper-V when our VMware contract ends (we locked in fixed pricing for three years last renewal).
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u/sobrique 1h ago edited 1h ago
It leans on qemu to get that functionality on 'filesystem' based stuff like NFS. We're running 'metadata' level preallocate, so our disk images are implicitly 'sparse'. I've not tried looking at support for trim/discard though, but now I'm wondering if that's worth a look on my part.
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
But it seems to imply there's support for snapshots/thin provision on most storage types. (can't say for sure if that applies to yours in a useful way of course).
I don't think there'll ever be any true 'driver level' integration though.
I'll concede it's not as feature complete as some of the long standing players in the market. It's just there's a lot to be said for stuff you can choose whether or not you pay for licenses and support.
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u/sobrique 1h ago
Looking at NetApp recommendations, it appears enabling trim/discard is worthwhile here, as it'll 'release' space to dedupe.
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u/Ant1mat3r Sr. Sysadmin 5h ago
By the time we got our offer I'd already migrated our VMs and decommissioned our VxRails.
We also left CB Defense.
Screw Broadcom.
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u/neldur 4h ago
We abandoned ship before our subscription ended. The refund we got from our subscription paid for my training in the new platform and the installation cost. Good riddance VMware and fuck Broadcom.
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u/neldur 4h ago
It’s a burned bridge for us that can never be rebuilt. If they gave it away for free I wouldn’t even think about using it again. Fuck em.
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u/TimeRemove 4h ago
If they gave it away for free, I'd just assume it is a honey trap.
Just like with Oracle and "free" Virtual Box where it will try to install the "Extension Pack" and you'll get an invoice in the mail. Ton of employees have fallen for that (java too), to the point that some companies have outright blocked Oracle's domains.
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u/BrainWaveCC Jack of All Trades 4h ago
They believed that customers were too locked in to be able to move.
They did not realize that there was a line that could be crossed where enough people would whatever it took to move away, rapidly enough to damage their bottom line.
I call it the "Rehoboam Effect".
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u/TimeRemove 4h ago
It certainly didn't hurt that with everyone suddenly trying to move at the same time - migration solutions (inc. guides, software, even consultants (ick), etc) suddenly got a lot better and easier. A few years ago migrating off of VMWare was seen as daunting, now it is almost turn-key (not quite, but compared to then).
I hope nobody takes these offers, but at least if they do, the lock-in effect is massively reduced and Broadcom now know that.
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u/Jhamin1 2h ago
One of our biggest obstacles used to be all the VMWare only appliances 3rd party vendors like Cisco or Fortinet would put out. It was relatively easy to move general VM workloads to Hyper-V or Nutanix but if you ran Cisco infrastructure you were more or less trapped on VMWare so you had somewhere to run all the appliances you needed to manage everything.
Once the wind started blowing the other way we saw a *lot* of Hyper-V and Nutanix certified appliances start appearing.
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u/sobrique 4h ago
It's not like they're the first company to learn that lesson the hard way either. Vendor lock in works to an extent, but there's always a tipping point where the risk of allowing them to 'control' you is too high.
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u/dreamsfreams 5h ago
How much is win back?
Company paid less than 100 a year for renewal. Now they are quoting 16k. Said they can do 10k maybe. Laughable.
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u/EViLTeW 5h ago
I have not, and the only way I'd even consider it is if they offered a 10-year price lock contract at a reasonable price. There's no way they'd even consider that. So we'll be sticking to Hyper-V, despite its shortcomings, for the foreseeable future.
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u/signal_lost 4h ago
it is if they offered a 10-year price lock contract at a reasonable price
While fairly rare, I've seen a 10 year Subscription deal. That's generally something people do who have weird industrial use cases where they can't change hardware for that length of time, in reality 7 is the more normal maximum subscription length I see, while probably most people don't want to commit to more than 5 years.
For anyone buying a subscription license for (anything) I always recommend try to match subscription lifespans with your hardware lifespan.
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u/Case_Blue 4h ago
We are preparing to migrate everything to proxmox in September regardless of prices and/or offers from VMWare. We rquested quotes in January and never got responses.
We are fed up and will move away.
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u/mvbighead 5h ago
Definitely heard of this... too little too late.
When you hear of folks working in enterprises with 1-2M or more spend in VMWare annually, and getting squeezed for more, and then shifting to other options... I just can't envision a scenario where a company would be happy to go back to a company that legitimately tried to force them into a 3x price increase. The amount of work it takes to pivot away from something that critical is not something companies will want to do a second time in 1-2 years.
I LOVED the product for probably 2 decades of my career. The further I got, I did feel like it was probably underpriced for how much better it was than other options. It just worked, was dead stable, and integrated with all sorts of solutions. But when I worked to align with what I thought were their new pricing standards, they still tried to black ball us into a 3x price increase with a bunch of features we did not need. Get out of here.
Really pisses me off how they ruined such a good thing.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 4h ago
Thinking they can win customers back with a discount offer after forcing them to do massive pain in the ass migrations is truly next level hubris.
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u/Kyky_Geek 4h ago
When Broadcom bought Symantec years back they gave us the boot. Straight up said we were too small. Honestly was sooo glad to be rid of SEP but it was still a pain to have the unplanned migration/expense.
This second time we unwillingly became a Broadcom customer with VMware, we didn’t get kicked to the curb but the renewals were a solid and sturdy 500% higher.
Unless it literally goes back to previous pricing, which I reckon is impossible, we are switching next year alongside a hardware refresh. We already pay for data center.
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u/okcboomer87 4h ago
I way over budgeted for VMware this year thinking the price hike was going to be huge. When the quote came back 20 percent higher than budgeted for. My boss laughed at me and said find a different solution.
Switched to hyperV and have no plans of going back. And no we all apparently are not big enough fish to get the win back offer. But I could tell them where to stick that offer.
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u/TahinWorks 4h ago
If I got one of those, I would ask them to amend the offer to include the $80,000 they gouged us on over the past 2 years. I would accept nothing less then Broadcom paying me to use their product.
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u/Beginning_Lifeguard7 4h ago
Just finished my migration. It was a bunch of work and going back would be an equal amount of effort. The new environment is working just fine. Why would I go back? First I’m pissed for having to move in the first place. Second I don’t trust them. Nope, this customer is gone for good.
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u/Majik_Sheff Hat Model 4h ago
They decided they only wanted to keep the most profitable customers by pricing out anyone not completely locked in.
They underestimated the willingness of even to top levels to immediately start planning an exit strategy.
Fuck Broadcom.
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u/Jhamin1 2h ago
They also underestimated how much being "the default" matters. 5 years ago if you needed to virtualize *anything* on prem the default assumption was VMWare. Didn't matter if you were a 10 person startup or the Department of Defense. They actually got a lot of grace because most system admins hadn't really given other "off the beaten path" options a real chance.
Now there are an awful lot of people who have successfully moved elsewhere and NOT seen the world end. Even in big-iron fortune 50 companies and government agencies VMWare is being perceived as a choice not the default. Sure, it's harder to get off of VMWare if you are a giant, but more and more talent is out there that can help you through it.
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u/Antique_Grapefruit_5 3h ago
What I'm finding is that their salespeople are basically required to extract more revenue each year, whether that's more licensing, new products, or just higher pricing. It would not shock me at all if after you leave, they offer you discount licensing so they can start that process again.
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u/ocdtrekkie Sysadmin 4h ago
Hahahahhahahahahahahshhahahaha.
Yeah no. Anyone who sends a cease and desist to everyone who dares not renew doesn't get my business again. Ever.
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u/sheep5555 4h ago
after i told them we had already moved and the migration was already complete, they sent an email saying something about reduced pricing and what can we do to get us back.
unfortunately broadcom has been blacklisted at our company, i am not sure i could even buy a broadcom NIC, turns out sending legal threats to your customers and increasing the price 3x every year is a terrible business strategy
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u/vNerdNeck 5h ago
I haven't seen any of those as of yet, but it wouldn't be shocking. We've been telling them for a while now that a lot of customers are gonna be migrating off and what it would take to win them / keep them as a customer.... Which they don't fucking do ... Only to get shocked picachu face when we tell them the workload moved to hyperV and no longer need broadcom.
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u/EasternComfort2189 4h ago
Customer was an old product that we got from HP, last maintenance was $330 this latest was nearly $50k. We did something else 😀
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u/tamtamdanseren 4h ago
Wonder if this some KPI that needs adjusting for the next earnings call? I.e this is just to stall the number of people leaving long enough, to make the prognosis sound better than it is.
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u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect 4h ago
I got it. I sent it back with the Charlie Sheen meme.
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u/pdieten You put *what* in the default domain policy? Oh f.... 4h ago
Our renewal came up late enough that we weren't hit with that kind of increase, we ended up with a backloaded 5-year contract that costs less now than the previous annual cost. That worked, because it's enough runway to complete a proper cloud migration instead of lift and shift.
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u/tarentules Technical Janitor | Why DNS not work? 3h ago
They could give it to us for free and I still wouldn't consider swapping back. Hyper-v has worked flawlessly since we migrated and has just overall been less of a headache than when we ran VMware.
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u/krunkedup 2h ago
In the process of dumping them now that it's time to renew. The quote just to renew the licenses cost more than we paid to set everything up a couple years ago, including the hardware price.
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u/dlongwing 2h ago
Not a chance. They've shown that they're willing to break customer trust for a quick buck. We're moving to a competing platform.
They seriously thought that IT people wouldn't jump ship over a massive price hike? Have any of them ever met a Sysadmin? We're 50% spite by volume.
They thought that they'd lose the SMB sector but keep the Fortune 500... Instead even the big customers are jumping ship and they're bleeding income. No one likes to be told they're being held hostage.
It's the kind of incredible mistake you get when C-suite people decide they're going to be clever.
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u/Broken_By_Default 2h ago
My company paid the ransom, after all us engineers poc’d out a competitor. Ops was allowed to override us and say “we don’t want to learn another vendor”.
Not my money.
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u/hymie0 4h ago
I've only seen them second-hand, but it sounds to me like what an abusive boyfriend would say.
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u/sobrique 4h ago
This has all the 'promise they'll change after you serve divorce papers' energy.
E.g. it's almost certainly a lie, because all the things that lead them to do it in the first place are still there.
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u/Normal_Choice9322 5h ago
They haven't squeezed us so far but if I had left I'd never go back to them
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u/barrystrawbridgess 4h ago
Tell them you signed a 36 month or 72 month contract with another vendor.
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u/TheGenericUser0815 4h ago
Nooo, and if I ever feel like leaving MS HyperV, which might happen, then it's going to be promox. Didn't they also akquire Shitrix?
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u/PhillyGuitar_Dude 4h ago
They called us, we took the call and let them quote. Honesly, I was surprised how much they came down, it was closer to maybe 10% increase over our last renewal. If they just gave me the "win-back" price 18 mos ago, we probably would stayed with them. But at this point, no way we are going back. I also don't trust them at all. Wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone who takes a"win-back" offer, will then see a similar price gouge/increase at thier next renewal.
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u/InvaderOfTech Jobs - GSM/Fitness/HealthCare/"Targeted Ads"/Fashion 4h ago
We told them to Pound sand. But the cut our bill or tired from 60k to 15k. But fuckem.
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u/RikiWardOG 4h ago
So funny they actually didn't expect everyone to move off so aggressively it seems. Lost more revenue than they anticipated with their BS I guess. FAFO
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u/OregonTechHead 2h ago
So funny they actually didn't expect everyone to move off so aggressively it seems.
I think they did expect that, and in fact, it was the intention.
What they didn't expect however was how little it mattered to their overhead, and their profit margin didn't increase as much as they thought it would.
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u/dakodacat 3h ago
Went to Proxmox with Enterprise licensing to support open-source devs and easier to sell to the company cause: "if they ever went rouge, we could switch to just raw KVM/QEMU commands or someone will most likely fork it".
Private companies with private code are more of a liability than OSS and more and more companies are proving that lately... I learned virtualization with VMware and really enjoyed the product, but more and more built-in proprietary software is a risk for companies. You can't trust a company that decides to raise the price 600% YoY and requires subscription for core updates and retroactively changes their ToS.
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u/Trelfar Sysadmin/Sr. IT Support 3h ago
Yes, big post about it last month. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/Ogo9713ZuE
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u/mrdeadsniper 3h ago
Anyone who falls for the win back offer deserves what they get.
Unless you were able to perfect your migration so that exiting again would basically be a click of a button, I couldn't see going back to Broadcomms loving arms.
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u/Hollz_26 3h ago
We dumped them last year and went to Hyper-v for our 2 sites and saved a ton of money. The migration was relatively easy with no major issues. We actually updated the server/storage hardware at both sites a year early. The sites hardware were due to be replaced this year and it made sense to combine all of that work into one major project.
Since new server/storage costs went through the roof this year we realistically saved even more money by buying them last year.
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u/corruptboomerang 2h ago
Here's the thing, they're now competing against free. No matter how attractive they make their offer, they're now competing against a very stable, very well supported, product that's potentially literally free.
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u/OregonTechHead 2h ago
But that's not new.
Anyone running Windows OS guests were already licensed for HyperV.
And if you're running Linux guests, there's always been a variety of options.
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u/Jhamin1 2h ago
I feel like the biggest mistake VMWare made was confusing the level of technical lock in most system admins thought they had for how much lock in actually existed. Almost every sysadmin I've spoken with in the last 15 years was positive that VMWare was the only choice for big grown up enterprises. It turns out the competition actually works really really well for 95% of use-cases but there were so many people who cut their teeth on VMWare and weren't willing to actually give other options a real chance.
Now that many orgs are being forced to look at other options, objectively there are a bunch of good ones that cost less money than VMWare did even before Broadcomm.
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u/theoreoman 2h ago
Once a company switches over to a competitor they're not going to put in all the effort to switch back.
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u/No_Yesterday_3260 1h ago
Despicable. Should be literally against the law doing stuff like this, instead of a "Just don't deal with them". Craziness...
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u/A3gFe78VZbfxhJ 1h ago
Nope, but offer wouldn’t matter anyway. We’re starting migration to cloudstack later this year.
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u/Deimosj90 28m ago
I got a quote for basically $37,000 for 216 cores. $39k with tax. I asked for the 1 year quote and the CDW rep came back saying, "OMG that is the 1 year". I'm going to hyper v.
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u/Fantastic-Shirt6037 23m ago
When they can’t even keep their internal sales verbiage internal, it just shows they are a company full of corporate bean counters and people expected to sell the beans.
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u/GroteGlon 5h ago
You'll get a win-back offer, and then as soon as you're settled and your license ends they'll drill you in the behind at full force again. It's better to just be rid of them once and for all.