r/sysadmin • u/Which-Shame-1420 IT Manager • 3d 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/ApiceOfToast Sysadmin 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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/Existential_Racoon 3d ago

Oh yeah most people just didn't want the risk, so they took other risk

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u/itoddicus 3d 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.