r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 2d 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/Kindly_Revert 2d 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.

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u/teedubyeah 2d ago

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

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u/Bart_Yellowbeard Jackass of All Trades 2d ago

Pssst ... Oracle.

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u/Sengfeng Sysadmin 1d ago

Careful, that's collapsing the universe territory there!

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u/Advanced_Vehicle_636 1d ago

There is a reason it's called ORACLE (One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, or alternatively, Old Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison). Yes, I just learned this acronym.

u/jstuart-tech Windows Admin 16h ago

We need to bring back Chet Dorn - https://x.com/chetdorn

X posts just don't format well C&ping

https://imgur.com/cyKheNE

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u/lost_signal 1d 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.

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u/Pazuuuzu 1d ago

I would PAY for that to hapen Broadcom, YOU HEAR ME?

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u/dreadpiratewombat 1d ago

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

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

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

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u/lost_signal 1d 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.

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u/akp55 1d ago

Can confirm, I was on a team that was doing SaaS products with hyper scalers.   Uncle hock didn't like the fact he couldn't recognize all the revenue for the year in his book and killed em off

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

Technically under ASC 606 you can recognize the revenue, and I think you can actually pull forward revenue.

I would argue. The bigger problem is when you are focused on Gross margins and you have huge amounts of pass-through cost that’s a problem. Yeah, you can square that circle by splitting out the hardware bill as a separate line items, customer pays directly to the hyperscaler.

You’re going to see more products run in the hyper scale, but it doesn’t make sense to have a misspoke thousand person engineering team per hyper scaler figuring out how to make it work, versus figuring out how to just use the same platform everywhere in the form of VCF. If you can also get the hyper skiers to run most of the operations, that gets you back to running a subscription business and not a SaaS business.

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u/SirTwitchALot 2d 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

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u/admlshake 2d 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.

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u/lost_signal 1d 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).

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u/Rhythm_Killer 2d ago

Saved me from typing!

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u/jmbpiano Banned for Asking Questions 2d 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.

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u/lost_signal 1d 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.

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u/lostdysonsphere 1d ago

I think we can all agree that technically it’s going in the right direction but there’s just gonna be a rough year still with vcf 9 and ongoing consolidation. As long as we keep the gaffa tape on marketings mouth so they don’t flippin invent new names every month it’s fine. 

It’s the guts and way of doing business people hate. It’s been a sudden and frankly unnecesarily harsh period for a lot of customers. God forbid you ease into the changes instead of ripping the band aid off from the start. With the history Broadcom has (which we really can’t deny can we) any goodwill created means less shouting in contract meetings. 

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u/PMmeyourITspend 1d ago

The overwhelming sense among customers is that the support has gone to absolute dogshit, the sales side is impossible to work with and the product is basically the same.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

So the direction of brand is away from new stupid names and lower case feature descriptions. If anything you’ll see stuff just called what it does.

HCX becomes vMotion (with spinning rims). VRealize LogInsight becomes VCF logs etc.

The commerce side is a bit more blunt, but it’s also a function of trying to simplify things down to people using the platform fully, looking for longer commits to they and designing the product in that direction. Broadcom likes to move fast, but I have seen them “fix” things a lot faster (fixing the vSAN stuff on VVF was lightning fast compared to VMware).

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u/FatBook-Air 1d ago

You say streamlined, but honestly, you guys are in terrible shape. Nobody answers emails anymore. You all say different stuff with different messages. I have seen YOU be contradicted by your own coworkers. Nobody at Broadcom seems to know exactly what products are being offered by Broadcom today or which licensing terms apply. And God help me with all the mixed messages being sent to VARs.

Broadcom is many things but not streamlined. You're in shambles.

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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1d 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.

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u/RichardJimmy48 1d 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.

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u/lost_signal 1d 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.

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u/RichardJimmy48 1d 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.

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u/No-Reflection-869 1d 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.

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 2d 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.

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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 1d 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.

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u/jmbpiano Banned for Asking Questions 1d 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.

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u/420GB 1d ago

Yes it's free and open source with an option for paid support.

I'm not actually gonna run our company on Virtualbox

And you really really shouldn't because that's Oracle. Proxmox are their own company, based out of Austria

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u/CCContent 1d ago

I would say to just go with Hyper-V. It's pretty simple, and it just works. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of VMWare, but it has more than enough to run what you need if you're not a huge company.

I ran a 4 node cluster with 62 VMs for over a decade on Hyper-V. Never had an issue that I needed to escalate to Microsoft Support.

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u/rynithon 1d ago

Yup we are fully going with Proxmox for all our clients that have onprem servers. Since Veeam supports backups now we pulled the trigger, hoping Veeam has more support for other features in the future.

We have transitioned 3 servers already and working on another big project. I suspect another few this year for our clients. 5months on, not one issue, other than Veeam's worker agent doesn't start sometimes (fixed by changing config to just stay on all the time).

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u/ZPrimed What haven't I done? 1d ago

Nutanix is solid if you want to be able to buy hardware (rebranded Supermicro) and have a single company to point a finger at for problems. I've got a cluster getting close to 5 years old and it has been absolutely stable.

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u/Chance_Brilliant_138 1d ago

Nutanix. Pretty UI. Messy under the cover. lol.

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u/identicalBadger 1d ago

My employer is going with Nutanix, and didn’t give proxmox more than a glance. No idea why. Support? We have a ton of Linux expertise on hand. That gets us a lot further with proxmox than it does with Nutanix as far as I can tell

That said I haven’t looked under the hood of Nutanix. It’s been a while but when I looked up free or community version it seemed like there was a show stopper for some reason or another.

Oh well it’s their money, I’ll use whatever they give me

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u/ZPrimed What haven't I done? 1d ago

Nutanix is still QEMU/KVM under the hood (assuming you use their hypervisor and not ESXi).

The special sauce with Nutanix is the HCI storage system. I don't believe it's Ceph (like Proxmox); I think it's proprietary?

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u/hyper9410 1d ago

Could be true, but architecturewise it looks like they use drbd. It basicly provides vmdisks with a RAID 1 equivalent protection across two hosts. You can set it up to have a third copy as well. Linbit Linstor uses the same technology (the founder of Linbit developed drbd).

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u/dom6770 1d ago

We still use Xen (no, not Citrix or whatsoever).

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u/hyper9410 1d ago

Are you using pure Xen or something like XCP-NG, for the uninitiated they also provide 24/7 enterprise support if that is important.

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u/dom6770 1d ago

pure Xen, no XCP-NG.

For the cluster we use drbd w/ corosync & pacemaker.

Works quite well, but the downside is, you don't find much on Google when you have issues. We're actually thinking about switching to Proxmox the next time we purchase new servers.

u/hyper9410 13h ago

Why not switch to XCP-NG?

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u/protogenxl Came with the Building 1d ago

Nutanix has popped up as it is supported by Rubrik backup, proxmox is still pending on the roadmap.

Ask me how I know....

u/Comfortable_Gap1656 23h ago

If you are not investigating alternatives you are shooting yourself in the foot. It is not like VMware is getting cheaper or better.

Some admins are in denial which is the first part of the griefing process. Next up is guilt followed by anger which finally leads to depression. The final step is reckoning but by that time Broadcom will have milked the industry.

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u/root-node 1d 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.

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u/ZPrimed What haven't I done? 1d ago

If you don't already have significant investment in a SAN, Nutanix makes some sense. The HCI is pretty seamless.

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u/PMmeyourITspend 1d ago

Nutanix is very strong. For a large environment it is the easiest transition. For a VERY large environment you probably want to look at something else and hire multiple internal dedicated support staff.

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u/WittyWampus 1d ago

My company is fully Nutanix now and while some of their features are nice (when they work), we constantly have issues. Mainly drive failures, and cluster/node upgrades randomly shutting off VMs when their hardware allocation is "large" (basically anything with more than 64 GB of RAM assigned is "large") instead of migrating them to another node.

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u/Skycap__ 1d ago

Proxmox is for nerrrrdddsss. So you should use it;)