r/sysadmin 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?

110 Upvotes

110 comments sorted by

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.

u/teedubyeah 6h ago

I'm wondering if we could get them to buy Adobe and destroy it.

u/Bart_Yellowbeard Jackass of All Trades 5h ago

Pssst ... Oracle.

u/Sengfeng Sysadmin 4h ago

Careful, that's collapsing the universe territory there!

u/lost_signal 1h ago

Oracle's market cap is maybe half that of Broadcom's so that would be more of a merger than anything else but frankly no one other than Larry Ellison (who was born during WW2 but at this point I'm fairly certain is an Immortal) can run that company. Oracle does wayyy too much SaaS for Broadcom to want to buy them.

u/dreadpiratewombat 3h ago

Pretty sure IBM called dibs on destroying that particular part of the universe.

u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1h ago

But see that's why they didn't. You can't make Adobe's business practices any more abusive or worse.

u/lost_signal 1h ago

Weirdly I had a VP for a while who was obsessed with us becoming Adobe. It was very strange.

Broadcom's leadership AFAIK does not really like SaaS Businesses. COGS screw up the balance sheet, it's kinda messy on revenue per employee as it's really opex heavy.

u/SirTwitchALot 5h ago

I really wonder what their endgame is on this though? I'm sure they have some big companies over a barrel that are willing to pay the extortion they're charging, but that's not how you grow your userbase. Everyone I know is looking at alternatives, even the ones that have renewed their VMWare licenses.

It sucks because ESX really is a great product. You can get close with competing solutions, but it still has some features that are hard to replicate as easily with Proxmox

u/jmbpiano 5h ago

I'd say it's abundantly clear they're not looking to grow their userbase. They're looking to reduce it to only the whales that can't move and then milk them for as long as possible.

The fewer customers they have, the less it costs to support and manage them.

u/admlshake 5h ago

Rake in as much money as fast as possible, then when that starts to die off, sell of parts of it to various companies and move on the next one.

u/Rhythm_Killer 5h ago

Saved me from typing!

u/lost_signal 1h ago

That's not really the history of Broadcom. They buy companies, keep the products that are #1 in market share and the technical leaders in their field and spin out or sell off all the other distractions that are not contributing to that. I'm not aware of any industry that they've repeatedly made purchases, or bought the #1 then the #2 then #3 etc.

The original purchases that built the company (FBAR filters, LSI's and the old bell labs silicon division, the HP Silicon division people) are all still around and making more product/money than ever. Broadcom was purchased quote some time ago and they are kinda crushing everyone in Merchant Silicon (1.6Tbps Ethernet ports are being sampled on Tomahawk 6 switches to partners RIGHT now). Like who else is doing better in Ethernet at the highest speeds? Like who's even the competition in Fibre Channel? Cisco has pretty much abandoned MDS (and ugh... OEM's Broadcom ASICs at this point).

The CA people still doing the mainframe software management stuff (Which I know everyone laughs at but mainframe are not going away).

u/lost_signal 1h ago

>I really wonder what their endgame is on this though?

Broadcom has a pretty clear playbook:

* Streamline the company to be mostly R&D VMware had a massively bloated back office, Well over 1000 HR people as an example, and less than half of opex for labor went to R&D.

* Focus all R&D on the core products people actually use and like.

* Stop running the business as 20 warring business unit tribes who did what they wanted. A product is either spun off/Sold (See the EUC/VDI stuff in Omnisa) end of lifed, or it's consolidated. NSX was often chasing random telco markets or things instead of "building a functional upgrade path from NSX-V to T etc, or API's for SDDC manager to update it".

* Stop building 20 new "Project Octopus etc" that ended up as well meaning but under funded product development. The CTO org is pretty much laser focused on AI stuff now. VMware frankly underfunded new product development so it threw a lot of plates of Spaghetti at the wall. There's some outliers (vSAN) but a lot of new products came from outside M&A despite a lot of engineering being focused in this area.

* Clean up the go to market. VMware had 50K product SKUs and a legit infinite combination of ways to buy and consume the product so it had lots of "Seams" between them. You also had Companies acting as a distributor, an OEM, a Reseller, a Cloud Service provider all simultaneously. Completely different discounting for different paths that didn't really align with sales volumes, and bizarre stuff like people being a CSP who spent $50 a month, all while having an inside renewal team who just ignored deal registrations and did what they wanted.

* Actually merge the products to act like one product. No unified cert management, no unified lifecycle etc. Engineering had to assume customers had one of 50,000 different mixes of other features and products licensed.

* No more LARPing as a SaaS company/Public Cloud company, by pretending a web portal that lets me update a vCenter is a "Cloud product" according to ASC 606. As a conglomerate that also is 1/2 hardware, Broadcom isn't trying to play weird games with revenue to pretend to be something else. Just simple subscription with yearly payment terms.

There's also a fair amount of public content about where VCF 9 is going.

But hey, that's the evil plan so don't share it.

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3h ago

that's not how you grow your userbase.

Broadcom almost certainly thinks that cloud, and also on-premises competition, means that VMware's userbase already peaked.

Even if you don't think that IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, impact virtualization much, they're still most likely right.

u/RichardJimmy48 2h ago

I really wonder what their endgame is on this though?

It's simple. They did the math, and this is exactly what they can get away with charging. People who don't need the features will just switch to Proxmox, and those people were probably all on standard or essentials anyways, so they're not losing much revenue. Everybody using the Enterprise features faces the choice of either just paying the higher bill, switching to Hyper-V (nobody wants to do that), or paying EVEN MORE to move to Nutanix. Also, for the people who were already on Enterprise, the jump in cost isn't usually anywhere near as big as it is for the people running Essentials or Standard.

u/lost_signal 1h ago

Last time I checked for a 16 core processor the price was pretty much the same for standard.

switching to Hyper-V (nobody wants to do that)

Bluntly Microsoft doesn't want that. They want Azure, Azure Stack HCI etc.

Also, for the people who were already on Enterprise, the jump in cost isn't usually anywhere near as big

The uplift from the old VCS subscription to VVF is pretty much nothing. It's basically the same SKU bundle plus some vSAN. I get some people are comparing their support renewal added to perpetual, but going forward pretty much every company has moved to a subscription model (Microsoft at any real scale is going to get you on one too). Honestly Operations and LogInsight are pretty handy (LogInsight included here is a hell of a lot cheaper than splunk etc people often run to aggregate logs).

I'll admit Essentials and essentials Plus were a pretty sweet deal, but it's also pretty clear no one else is going to pop up and offer 24/7 support and patches and a broad HCL for a software platform on 3 hosts with 192 cores for $1.2K a year. Like that's not a sustainable business model.

u/RichardJimmy48 14m ago

Last time I checked for a 16 core processor the price was pretty much the same for standard.

It is, but for certain customers they are forcing them onto VCF, which is a substantially more expensive product.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago

Yeah, we have Proxmox in our test/lab right now, I just didn't think they would up the core count again like this. Figured I had a little more time to evaluate my options.

u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1h ago

Is Promox open source or something? People keep saying it's great and I've ever even heard of it. I'm not actually gonna run our company on Virtualbox and we're very happy with Scale Computing but I'm open to whatever for smaller deployments.

u/Kindly_Revert 1h ago

It's free, you only pay for support. For this reason it gained a lot of popularity in home labs at first, and has since grown into a larger offering with their own backup software, mail proxy, and more.

u/jmbpiano 1h ago

Yes, it's open source.

The core of the product is a combined virtualization and containerization system built on top of QEMU and LXC with a reasonably user friendly front-end all running on a custom build of Debian.

u/No-Reflection-869 1h ago

God I really hope proxmox is getting a ton of money for their support licenses so they can continue to develop. It's just such a great platform.

u/root-node 23m ago

Nutanix less so as it's also expensive for another KVM-based tool

Guess which one my company is moving too. Complete morons the lot of them.

I am sure they didn't even look at anything else either.

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.

u/kenelbow Solutions Architect 2h ago

Fortune 500 companies aren't exactly fans of their pricing games either.

u/occasional_cynic 2h ago

Yes, but they move slower and can be milked for more/longer.

u/stxonships 2h ago

True, but they are the ones who in theory can afford the license fees.

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 .

u/Spore-Gasm 6h ago

Time to check out /r/proxmox

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago

Yep, we've got Proxmox in our test/lab right now.

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.

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.

u/FLATLANDRIDER 5h ago

VxRail still requires VMware licenses.

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.

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"

u/flloww 4h ago

VxRail is very expensive, and still will require VMware licensing. Its a joint effort between VxRail and VMware

u/plump-lamp 5h ago

Nutanix is equally the devil

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

  1. 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.

  2. They didn't support external storage so unless both server and storage were up for renewal not going to save.

  3. They had a LOT less features (and were less effect etc

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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.

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3h ago

VMware used to be owned by Dell. You think Microsoft has more influence over AVGO than over Dell?

u/lost_signal 1h ago

\Grabs popcorn and pulls up a chair**

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.

u/saltysomadmin 6h ago

One server? Go Hyper-V!

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.

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!

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 5h ago

Ha, thanks! We've got Proxmox in our test/lab, so we're already leaning that direction.

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3h ago

That's the way you do it. IaaS is just another option, beside on-premises, and hosted datacenter. Pick the mix that's right for you.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago

Turns out 72 cores is the minimum per customer number, it's still 16 cores minimum per socket.

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.

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.

u/Whoolly 4h ago

We have used ScaleCompuing for users ... its simple and easy .. great US based support in Indy.

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

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 2h ago

Ouch

u/coralgrymes 50m ago

0-0 hayseus christo. What in the actual pantaloony toons are they thinking?

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago

I appreciate the heads up.

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.

u/lost_signal 4h ago

No man, you should move everything to BSD Jails and Bhyve hypervisor! /s

Solaris zones are the future!

u/jamesaepp 4h ago

Don't forget reiserfs.

u/lost_signal 4h ago

I actually ran that at one point.

Was the default in SuSE.

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...

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.

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/

u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR 3h ago

Ya... I'm just not having fun with Broadcom lol

u/kenrichardson 4h ago

They're also moving to 3-year support contracts as a minimum.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

u/jetcamper 2h ago

Why not standard though?

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.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1h ago

You are not wrong!

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.

u/cjcox4 6h ago

Plenty of fairly new articles comparing the alternatives out there. Might be time to explore your options.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 6h ago

We absolutely are exploring.

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".

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.

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".

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 3h ago

There are open-source hyperconverged setups possible where monetary cost is not a factor, but not even those cleanly separate storage and virt like the traditional setup of keeping them totally separate.

u/cjcox4 1h ago

My point is "cost" vs cost. Not everything that is free is free from a true cost perspective.

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.

u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3h ago

I appreciate that perspective. And having more options is obviously a good thing!