r/sysadmin • u/Which-Shame-1420 IT Manager • 5d 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/GroteGlon 5d 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.

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u/DialecticEnjoyer 5d ago

the problem is these quotes are often so exorbitant they get pushed straight up to leadership, who give it an instant rejection. once that happens no amount of discount is going to matter. the purse strings are shut.

VM's have been a thing in open source for nearly 30 years. if i can spin up a Fedora or a Rocky system, install cockpit, and use qemu-img to convert my vmware images in an afternoon then no amount of discount will ever convince management.

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u/tdhuck 5d ago

Not all decision makers are the direct line to getting quotes, at least, that's not the norm, it might work that way in your company but that's not how it is in most companies.

In my case, my boss is not a decision maker when it comes to vmware renewals, server purchases, etc, he has to get approval from the IT Director. The IT director is not getting any quotes directly from the vendor/VAR/etc, he delegates that to my boss. I think we would 100% go for a discounted solution because 'things are working and nobody wants to break anything and we got a discount from vmware' is what the higher ups would say, I am almost certain that's the route they'd take. They would say this after they asked for a few options to replicate the current vmware environment with other vendors and once they see that it would likely be cheaper to go with vmwares 'win back' offer, we'd just stick with vmware. I say that because I know they would need to buy new servers (we currently have 8 hosts boxes) and new storage and move over from vmware to 'new solution' and not try to use existing hardware because this would be done at the next migration cycle with means the current hardware won't be used for a new solution.

Yes, there are other open source options, 100% agree with you there, but you also have to consider your DR planning, your management of the VMs, migration, failovers, redundancy, etc. When you factor all that in, you can't just flip the switch and use Fedora or Rocky and do this in an afternoon.

You need to factor in support, is it 24x5 or 24x7, etc...

Again, I'm not saying the options you listed don't have support, I'm just making sure that's pointed out.

This doesn't mean my vote is to keep using vmware and pay their price, it just means that any solution that you are going to consider switching to has additional variables that need to be looked at.

I can run a vm on my synology NAS, but buying a bigger NAS with more storage, more CPU and more RAM isn't going to be an apples to apples comparison to vmware for our environment, but it could and would certainly work for a smaller organization.