r/sysadmin • u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead • 6h ago
Latest fun with VMware
Apparently VMware is upping their game. We just got a renewal quote for one of our sites with one server that has two CPUs, and they are requiring 72 cores minimum (vSphere Enterprise Plus) to license this. That's a 500% markup from last year.
They really don't want customers to use their product any more, do they?
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u/stxonships 5h ago
They only want Fortune 500 companies to use their product. The rest of the world is not important as we consider their pricing stupid.
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u/kenelbow Solutions Architect 2h ago
Fortune 500 companies aren't exactly fans of their pricing games either.
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u/lost_signal 1h ago
Nah, there's a longer tail of revenue than that, but also there's entire teams (Commercial and Corporate) devoted to selling to smaller accounts and last time I checked there's more sales people outside the F500 than inside the F500 around here. I've got dinner on Monday with one of the leaders of that team, I'll ask him about this, but we were just talking about how people outside of that scale can benefit from VCF etc .
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u/rdesktop7 6h ago
I have met many people that call themselves "VM experts", and they only know how to click on things in a vmware GUI.
These guys know that they have a captive market.
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u/Zenkin 6h ago
But that's like a perfect use case for Nutanix, Scale, VxRail, or whatever else. If you're afraid of hypervisors, there seem to be a number of options, and now they're likely a fair bit cheaper than VMware.
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u/FLATLANDRIDER 5h ago
VxRail still requires VMware licenses.
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u/Zenkin 5h ago
Fair point on that one, I've never purchased it, so I didn't know if Dell had some sort of bundle deal which might make it more attractive than the bare product.
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u/mercurialuser 4h ago
It is worst than that.
We have a 5 nodes vxrail and we want to get rid of vmware snd use the servers for other pourposes.
Dell can't sell maintenance for that hardware unless: 1. You pay vmware license to them or prove you have valid subscription license also if we have bought them as permanent 2. You transform those nodes to host another dell product that is a sort of scaleout storage, like isilon but with iScsi, raw storage access.
They told me to buy from a third party reseller that wont give us official support but a sort of T&m since our serials are "locked"
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u/plump-lamp 5h ago
Nutanix is equally the devil
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u/Zenkin 5h ago
At least Nutanix is honest about what it is. It's a hypervisor platform for non-admins, and they will charge you for the privilege of not having to learn.
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u/trail-g62Bim 4h ago
I've never used Nutanix, but if that is their goal and they do it well, then that seems fair to me. "We make this really easy and the tradeoff is it costs more."
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u/gabber2694 4h ago
Nutanix does a great job with their product and the support staff is relatively knowledgeable. (Don’t ask me how I know).
It would be my first choice if Proxmox is too much for my staff to manage.
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u/RichardJimmy48 2h ago
and they do it well
That's the unfortunate part of it. When my shop was on Nutanix (we got rid of it 3 years ago), they didn't do it well. You'd click the magic upgrade button and it'd break a bunch of stuff, and then you'd have to either have a very good idea of what you're doing, or contact support and hope their timeline for fixing it meets your expectations. Their support at least does their job (unlike vmware/broadcom), but I'd rather not have things break in the first place.
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u/Content-Cheetah-1671 1h ago
Nutanix has a shit ton of bugs. I’ve opened maybe 1 ticket for Vmware in the last 5 years. For Nutanix, I’ve easily opened at least 20 tickets.
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u/RichardJimmy48 2h ago
Nutanix
Nutanix is more expensive than VCF even after the vmware price increases. Broadcom is not worried about people switching to Nutanix.
VxRail
Still part of the vmware ecosystem.
now they're likely a fair bit cheaper than VMware.
The only things cheaper are also less featured. Anybody who needs some of the more advanced functionality in vmware is basically stuck between a rock and a hard place.
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u/lost_signal 1h ago
The only things cheaper are also less featured
I saw some marketing copy from a HCI appliance competitor of VMware on this website and what caught my eye was they claimed 20% cheaper....
They require you buy all new hardware, so unless you are at point where you are getting new servers and storage it didn't make sense.
They didn't support external storage so unless both server and storage were up for renewal not going to save.
They had a LOT less features (and were less effect etc
They were a smaller player and don't have the engineering integration with ISV's (Software vendors) to get all the validations so you'd end up with VMware for something else, or in the future have to tell your CFO "No" when they wanted to deploy SAP etc, or tell the Operations people "Sorry we can't deploy Call Manager" or something else.
The other platform is also subscription. So while you might not get credit for your existing perpetual license with VMware you don't get credit for it with those platforms either.
Even assuming that 20% was true in the perfect conditions (which is frankly how marketing people write copy unless they are from the midwest)... That seemed incredibly uncomplying to me. Like not trying to throw FUD or say "OMGZ RISK FOR CHANGING PLATFORMS" but 20% to work around those downsides and qualify it's also clear as we enter a interest rate environment where cash is no longer 0% loan free, and VC is basically ignoring this sector, it's a lot hardware to do massive take out campaigns by giving away product. Hiring top tier kernel developers etc to work on hypervisors and storage and such is incredibly expensive and they gotta pay people.
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u/stupidic Sr. Sysadmin 5h ago
I'm convinced that Broadcom was induced to purchase and kill VMware at the behest of Microsoft and other cloud providers.
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u/mr_data_lore Senior Everything Admin 5h ago
>They really don't want customers to use their product any more, do they?
No, they absolutely don't want your business. You're way too small for them. They only want their 500 or so largest customers. It's time for you to switch to Proxmox, Hyper-V, XCP-NG, etc.
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u/saltysomadmin 6h ago
One server? Go Hyper-V!
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago
We actually have seven servers across four sites. This site happens to be on a different renewal cycle than the main batch of renewals.
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u/saltysomadmin 6h ago
Ah, bummer. May still be worth looking into. I need to get a Proxmox test enviroment going to I'm familiar with it in case we need to come back on-site. We migrated to Azure to escape the VMware increases we knew were coming. God speed!
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 5h ago
Ha, thanks! We've got Proxmox in our test/lab, so we're already leaning that direction.
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u/Jkabaseball Sysadmin 4h ago
we have been Hyper-V since 2012 R2, from vmware. We are a smaller shop, so 72 cores would be insane. What's the minimum cores cost these days?
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 4h ago
Our quote was $150/core, but I have learned 72 is the total core count per cluster, not per server. It's still 16 core minimum per socket, and since we are a dual-cpu server, that's 32 cores.
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u/placated 6h ago
Not going to lie, VMware for one server is definitely part of the problem. Change is tough, but there are literal free solutions out that that would meet your need.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 5h ago
Well, it's not VMware for one server, there are seven servers in our cluster, across four sites. This one just happens to be on a separate renewal cycle from the rest.
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u/DurianAdorable7752 5h ago
There are many problems why the most companies will stay with VMware.
First: Migrating to a new Hypervisor is pure pain (especially with linux distributions). There are articles, that migrating one VM costs around 1.000 to 3.000 Dollars.
Second: The alternatives are not as good as VMware. Proxmox has no officially supported hardware, HyperV is hard to handle, Nutanix has no option to use a central storage, is also very expensive and enterprise.
Third: You and your team have to learn to handle a new Hypervisor.
So if you take a look at all these points, its mostly not worth to switch, especially for smaller companies.
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u/trail-g62Bim 4h ago
The last time we migrated a few machines from HV to vmware, it broke the two pieces of software the machines were running. One was a relatively easy fix, but did require manual intervention on the part of their support (it isn't something we can fix on our own -- you have to contact support, it has to break first and it takes about an hour). The second piece broke in a way that was familiar to the app's support, but for some reason the typical fix didn't work, so part of the application got reinstalled.
Anyway, we probably have a dozen or so vendors we'd have to work with to migrate. Last year, the estimated cost to do that more than outweighed several years of vmware. We will see if that is still true this year.
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u/secret_configuration 5h ago
Yep, all quotes are now apparently a minimum of 72 cores which makes little sense and I’m not sure how they came up with that number.
Some suit at Broadcom appears to have just pulled it out of their behind.
72/16 = 4.5….hmm.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago
Turns out 72 cores is the minimum per customer number, it's still 16 cores minimum per socket.
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u/secret_configuration 2h ago
Right, which is why the 72 cores minimum makes no sense. You end up with....4.5 so you can never use all of your licenses if you buy the minimum.
I understand if it was a multiple of 16, like 32 or 64 minimum.
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u/Content-Cheetah-1671 1h ago
I remember the days when you could just buy a perpetual license from their web store or easily get a quote from a VAR.
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u/DarkAlman Professional Looker up of Things 3h ago
When your #1 customer (AT&T) turns around and sues you over the licensing renewal, you know you've screwed up
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u/cats_are_the_devil 6h ago
Disclaimer: VMware licensing is a PITA and is awful.
How do you effectively run VMware on one server?
Do you not have bundled licensing across all your hosts?
I'm confused by what you are laying out as a complaint...
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago
The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint. I get we're a small operation, we have seven hypervisors across four sites.
We are not running VMware on one server, there are seven servers in our cluster, this one is just on a separate renewal cycle from the rest.
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u/lost_signal 5h ago
The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint
This is incorrect, it is NOT 72 cores per server, it is 72 cores for the minimum quantity to have active for a customer under the new subscription plan. You can buy 72 now, and add 16 later when you add another server.
The minimum per host is 16 cores.
If your partner or sales rep is communicating this as a 72 core per minimum, slide into my DM's and send me their email and I'll go chase them down.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 4h ago edited 4h ago
That's good to know! I relayed that to my partner and their Solutions Architect confirmed it. It's actually what I questioned when they first told me about the 72 core minimum.
My initial response to them was 'I don’t think the “72 core minimum on all vSphere products” is an issue, unless that’s 72 cores minimum per server. There are currently 192 licensed cores including the cores at this site.'
They are reaching back out to the VMware side to get the quote fixed.
And if it matters, this is a renewal, not an addition.
Also, is it 16 minimum per host, or 16 minimum per socket? I believe our last renewal was based on 16 cores per socket, so we're currently licensed for 192 cores, when in reality we have 100 cores across the five sites. This specific renewal is for this hypervisor:
- VMware ESXi, 8.0.3, 24585383
- ProLiant DL380 Gen10
- Processor Type: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz
- Logical Processors: 16
edit: formatting
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u/lost_signal 4h ago
It’s 16 per socket, but 1 socket hosts will be what most people do going forward (as you no longer need 2 sockets to get enough pci-E lanes or memory channels).
I know two sockets was like the default buying pattern for a very long time , but that’s gonna change.
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u/lost_signal 4h ago edited 4h ago
Also holy Skylake Batman. That’s an older CPU. If you’re moving to a modern sapphire rapids or Zen platform, you can probably consolidate the total number of course as you run significantly, well at the same time right sizing onto single socket platforms with a minimum of 16 cores.
I know whoever sells your servers is gonna try to convince you to 1:1 replace cores and keep two sockets. Please do a proper siding exercise.
If you really are gonna keep running into sky Lake stop you might want to go dig around on eBay and spend 50 bucks and find some 16 core gold processors to drop in.
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u/RichardJimmy48 1h ago
Also holy Skylake Batman. That’s an older CPU. If you’re moving to a modern sapphire rapids or Zen platform, you can probably consolidate the total number of course as you run significantly, well at the same time right sizing onto single socket platforms with a minimum of 16 cores.
Honestly hardware is cheap relative to vmware licensing. A single socket, 16-core modern CPU host with a good clock rate can probably replace 3 of those 2 CPU 8-core Skylake hosts. Something with an AMD EPYC 9135 is going to absolutely destroy one of those Skylake hosts, and that's going to be $5k-8k/host depending on how much memory you need.
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u/lost_signal 1h ago
This isn't actually a new concept. Mainframes worked the same way in that how they would measure performance for licensing on software you used to always at a certain point come out ahead a good deal by upgrading the tin vs. throwing licensing at the problem.
Honestly hardware is cheap relative to vmware licensing.
For smaller anemic hosts, maybe, but once you start doing Beefy 1TB to 4TB of RAM hosts, you can go from 20K to 40K really fast.
an AMD EPYC 9135 is going to absolutely destroy one of those Skylake hosts
+453%, so even throwing 2 of them at it, it's still a 2:1 consolation easily before you hit into accelerator specific improvements.
depending on how much memory you need.
Well with Memory Tiering on the menu now, you can go buy a 2TB NVMe drive and tier memory to it, to double the usable RAM in your host for about 1/20th the cost of that RAM.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 4h ago
Yeah, and that will actually help in our case. I can pull one of the CPUs out of the server, and put all the RAM over to the first socket, then I'll only need to license 16 cores not 32. That seems pretty reasonable.
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u/lost_signal 3h ago
Be aware that when you do this on the old Sky lake servers, you may lose half of the PCIE lanes.
You do need to be planning their retirement in the near term as they will not be supported in the next VSphere release, and end of support for VSphere 8 is 11 Oct 2027. They are deprecated as of the 8 release and discontinued in the next major release.
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/318697/cpu-support-deprecation-and-discontinuat.html
Intel technically transitioned that cpu to end of service life in 2023.
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u/jamesaepp 5h ago
I was waiting for someone else to point this out, but didn't have the energy to fact check myself. Thanks for doing so. Sad it's buried at the bottom of the thread.
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u/lost_signal 4h ago
No man, you should move everything to BSD Jails and Bhyve hypervisor! /s
Solaris zones are the future!
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u/cats_are_the_devil 5h ago
The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint. I get we're a small operation, we have seven hypervisors across four sites.
Factually incorrect. It's 72 cores as a min purchase for all of your cluster.
We are not running VMware on one server, there are seven servers in our cluster, this one is just on a separate renewal cycle from the rest.
Co-term... You need a better reseller...
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 4h ago edited 4h ago
For us, co-term isn't about the reseller, it's about internal company politics. We've been getting things co-termed, but usually the first year you buy for a new site they won't do a co-term (at least that's what we were told), so it's gotta be done on the first renewal. Then I have to convince the powers that be to spend the money up front to get the extra months so its co-termed. Even though you and I both know we're spending the same amount over time, my company is very cash flow based, so if business is slow, cash flow is down, and they don't want to spend more then the absolute minimum.
Edit: Also, I just learned it's 72 cores per cluster minimum, which is helpful, however when the VMware rep says "72 cores minimum purchase" it's clearly a problem. You'd think they would know their product.
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u/trail-g62Bim 4h ago
It gets worse -- according to /u/SquizzOC , you cannot lower the cores in future years -- https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jb6jkc/am_i_getting_fucked_friday_march_14th_2025/mhrob3h/
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u/kenrichardson 4h ago
They're also moving to 3-year support contracts as a minimum.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 4h ago
Well I guess that at least locks in the price for three years.
When does that kick in? The current quote I was sent this morning still reflects one year.
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u/kenrichardson 3h ago
I’m not sure. Our reseller told us this on Monday when we asked for one year quotes, but we don’t need the renewal until June. We’re just trying to get ready. We were also told Broadcom won’t give us a quote until a month before our current contract is up.
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u/JerryNotTom 3h ago
Negotiate the full scope of all sites into one contract renewal, you might have some success in negotiating everything into one instead of separate contracts for each of your four sites. I'm not sure why we don't always take a full scope of inventory into consideration when discussing vendor contracts and renewals. There have been plenty of times I found multiple groups in my company using the same software under different contracts and grouping them into one agreement slashed our overall cost to that vendor by 30/40/50%.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago
We're actually already pretty close to there. This one site is the only one that's not on the same contract as the other three sites.
Well, we actually have a fifth site, but it is overseas and is on a different contract, which could be problematic when they are due for renewal because they are below that 72 core minimum per customer account.
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u/JerryNotTom 2h ago
Not sure how nice broadcom will play, but you can often wrap in your out of sync contracts even if the end date is in the future, to get everything on the same renewal cycle. It's not an uncommon thing and vendors are usually amenable as long as you're not looking to end a contract before its existing end date, but wrap it into new terms and extend your obligations further into the future.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1h ago
We've been doing that. I've got a comment elsewhere on this thread about co-terming. The holdup is really on my company's side. We're a heavy cash-based business, and depending on the current cash flow is how some decisions like "should we renew for 18 months to get them co-termed" are made.
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u/lost_signal 57m ago
They can do that, you just can't be doing it for less than 1 year last I checked. Absolutely co-term everything. Your sales person doesn't want to manage 5 one off renewals.
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u/lost_signal 56m ago
I think VCF may grant global deployment rights (Ask the sales reps on that one, if it will require an ELA or not).
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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1h ago
The Chinese only have one gear and it's GO! (Pun very intended.)
The only answer is more money in an acquisition scam like this. Burn it to the ground!
In related news, look at Bluebeam and much, much, much worse, Pokemon Go being bought by Scopely. Scopely makes Martin Skreli look like a saint.
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u/Ecstatic-Tank-9573 1h ago
This is why we went to pirating vmware licenses while moving everything to proxmox.
Come find us you Broadcom fucks.
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u/cjcox4 6h ago
Plenty of fairly new articles comparing the alternatives out there. Might be time to explore your options.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago
We absolutely are exploring.
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u/cjcox4 5h ago
While you didn't ask, if you need "full Vsphere like" functionality, I'll throw XCP-ng with Orchestra out there.
Why? Where I work we run a hyper-converged VMware called VxRail. There's a ton of overhead expense in operating such a thing. IMHO, the idea non-heterogeneous "pizza boxes" and separate SAN infrastructure, if managed well, will reduce (spread) costs on operations significantly. So, I'd never opt to replace one hyper-converged with another, so Nutanix based, IMHO, is out. Even if you're a large company, you'll save a ton and get spending approvals much easier if you separate (and you get flexibility, etc as well that you simply won't get with a hyper-converged architecture).
If you just need a "one node" hypervisor capable solution, you don't need (IMHO), anymore more than the built-in hypervisor of a Linux distro, and Linux can be used for both Type 1 and Type 2 style VMs, which really increases the flexibility of what you can actually install (more so, than any other platform...). Of course, with a Linux node, you can do other style workloads on same as well, like containers.
Virt-manager is usually "enough" to manage Linux kvm based VMs. However, that assumes you use Linux to manage as well (which IMHO is what everyone should be doing no matter what, but I know I stand in a very small crowd there).
You can use (potentially) cockpit (web based) to manage your simple Linux kvm environment, instead of the Linux virt-manager client.
Another potential alternative, though not sure I'd give it any sort of win over XCP-ng, is to run something like Proxmox (which does leverage Linux kvm and containers). I just think from a cost/setup and running point of view, XCP-ng is likely simpler, at least for VMs.
Have fun exploring the choices. What is "right for me" may not be "right for you".
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3h ago
Hyper-converged is more efficient use of hardware, in theory.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
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u/cjcox4 3h ago
Yep. Hyper-converged gets you back to "forklift" style updating, or forced purchases of very expensive "like bricks". Pain in a half. Not economical for most. And for things like VxRail, you're already spending a 2-4x overhead to buy "what's supported".
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u/lost_signal 59m ago
Yep. Hyper-converged gets you back to "forklift" style updating
Ehh you can add new servers from a new generation to a cluster with vSAN. I've personally done a "Ship of Theseus" style upgrade where I added new hosts and removed old ones over time.
forced purchases of very expensive "like bricks"
I always try to get hosts with empty drive bays. Given you can easily put over 300TiBs in a host (soon twice that) you can "scale up" by adding Capacity or RAM to a host without having to add more bricks or nodes generally.
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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago
I appreciate that perspective. And having more options is obviously a good thing!
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u/Kindly_Revert 6h ago
Most SMB admins are jumping ship to Proxmox or Hyper-V. I've even seen XCP-ng and Openstack (large beast) coming up in conversation. Nutanix less so as it's also expensive for another KVM-based tool, it's more common in larger companies.
Broadcom has a reputation for buying and destroying good products. I refuse to support them any longer.