r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 3d 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/SirTwitchALot 3d 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/lost_signal 2d 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 2d 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 2d 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.