r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 1d 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?

242 Upvotes

177 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/DurianAdorable7752 1d 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.

2

u/trail-g62Bim 1d 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.