The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.
They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.
(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
"Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well."
Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….
Show me the uk website.
Oh what’s that? There isn’t one you say…
There is a lot that goes on that the media and the professionals involved don’t speak about.
Phone, email or visit the court registry.
Phoning will get you the national Contact centre, emails may or not any not be replied to… court registry needs an appointment…
It’s all very nuanced. Until you know how it all works, you don’t know
The filings by the parties are made public in the USA and other countries. So you can actually see the arguments and evidence.
Magistrates court trials are not recorded so no transcripts. So a malicious prosecution is easy to pursue.
When one files for a transcript in courts that are recorded, the transcript is first sent to the Judge and the judge is allowed to change anything they like, with no transparency. They can also refuse a transcript if they feel like it.
I’m not going to respond any further to you as you for some unknown reason are talking about things that you do not understand…
Have a good day.
That's horrific
Im confused as to why you think you know better
Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.
I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
Interesting times.
OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.
Used to do those migration in a previous life.
I’ve worked with a few major US grocers on very similar projects (some hardware only refreshes and one VMware to HyperV/Azure Local migration).
Have lots of customer who run it and would echo your same positive review.
It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.
There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).
[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]
Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/
I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.
Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter
If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.
What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.
It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.
I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.
If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?
Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.
The future is Snickers!
If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.
They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.
Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.
One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.
Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.
a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once.
b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration.
c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration.
d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion.
e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases.
There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work.
Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.
But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)
I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.
In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)
Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.
Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.
Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:
* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor
* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime
* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team
* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime
* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire
* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.
I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)
Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.
I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.
>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"
Who needs paying customers when you have AI?
Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.
migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.
if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.