Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover | Hacker News Reader

Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

borncity.com

108 pointsFindus2382 comments

It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed...

I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.

Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they already paid for?

Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible.

This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want.

They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

But they're cutting off customers who have paid and are under contracts

I'm not talking about ripping off the bandaid on the new sales channels, I'm talking about the fact that customers who have active licenses they've paid for can no longer activate them because they've shut these systems down

That inevitably is going to lead to a class action against them

They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.

I am suspicious that they even thought about it that far. There's no way it's cheaper to let the active customers sue them rather than just leave the license activation servers up

How does that make sense? Had they chosen a slow gratuitous path those customers might've switched to other products, now they've been burned and will think twice before choosing VMware again.

Vmware is dead. They don't plan to acquire new customers (or invest a cent in research& development). The purpose of this whole thing is to milk those fortune 500 companies that are too entrenched to migrate away.

Ahh the grand BigCo tradition of acquiring a company and then setting fire to it.

> They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.

Why would they think that after that disaster said customers will still be with them? I no longer have the displeasure of being a VMware customer, but if I saw what they're currently doing while jacking up prices and trimming support, what possible reason would there be to remain as a customer? Inertia? At some point you know the bill will be too high, so might as well move before it gets too bad.

VMware will end up like Symantec or similar, a shell of a company that people know of, but nobody actually uses on purpose.

That's the whole plan. They basically only want to retain the fortune 500 customers and wing them dry. Anybody that can migrate away will do so, but the rest will be taken to the cleaners.

There's little competition in some of VMWare's segments and even if there is, the migration is long, expensive and risky.

Most of the damage was already done during acquisition process (simply based on Broadcom's reputation). There simply isn't any incentive to deviate from the original plan to milk the customers.

>everyone should be looking into alternatives

I'm interested to hear this community's take on what an alternative to vmware is. And I'm not talking about just ESX, I'm talking about their entire ecosystem including vsphere and all of it's features that an enterprise environment depends on.

OpenStack

So 10 years ago I was part of a project which pitted VMware vsphere against openstack. VMware was cheaper opex by a factor of 4 and they were using ESXi as the hypervisor. Openstack is a non starter for enterprise environments.

Now with containers and kubernetes being the standard, openstack is another very very heavy distribution your organization must maintain

OpenStack's got Magnum for that need.

The framework for deployment has vastly improved.

> VMware was cheaper opex by a factor of 4 and they were using ESXi as the hypervisor

How could it be 4x cheaper in Opex when OpenStack is an open source project with multiple competing vendors available if you want support? In terms of non-licensing costs, OpenStack has a few more services that need to be deployed separately, but I don't see that costing 4x, especially when those services often don't have VMware equivalents.

No two environments are the same. Instead of looking for a like for like total replacement (even though you actually don't use all VMware features or use some only because they were the only way possible in VMware's ecosystem and not because they're actually any good (vRA, Log Insight)), evaluate your actual needs and what do you need to run under what conditions. You'll probably end up discovering that any of Proxmox, OpenStack Nutanux, oVirt, Ganetti, Kubernetes (with or without KubeVirt), Nomad (with or without VMs) will cover most if not all that you need.

You will also probably end up discovering your costs drastically inflate. There is a reason why companies stick with bundled products. Find a way to bundle that mismash of software you mentioned into a single pane of glass with a 4 year support guarantee and you will be rich.

You will quickly find out why it hasn’t been done and why Redhat and Microsoft look so promising after all

Ha, nonsense. VMware products are notoriously super expensive. From discussions with people at organisation switching to alternatives, their cost are going down 30-50%, with all the added benefits of a proper modern orchestrator instead of an obsolete hardware simulator. (Stuff like having a way of securely introducing secrets or security authenticating workloads, or integrated deployments, healthchecks, etc.)

Also, "bundled" stuff constraints you. You're forced into using VMware's crap orchestrator or log management tool because it's the one that works best with the mess that is other VMware products.

You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one.

You paid for the product, fuck them.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is.

Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions.

So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a license and you are not oversubscribing it.

IANAL, but one or the other must be true.

Certainly an interesting one.

IANAL, but I believe the terms of the purchased license would be to use the product with only the license key provided. Therefore using an alternative key would be a breach of the license terms, meaning you're using unlicensed software and subject to all relevant laws.

I can see an argument that the vendor is in breach of contract by failing to provide a valid key with the license, and therefore the contract is void and the vendor should refund.

And yet again, I can see an argument that the license has been paid for, and a different key is used in the interim to access the paid for software, therefore no loss has occurred to either party rendering the whole argument moot.

Would be interested to know if this has been tested in the court system.

Depending on jurisdiction there may be rules or case law related to re-engineering and patching of purchased software to keep it working. This is again a reminder how important the right to repair is.

> but one or the other must be true.

they are neither mutually exclusive, nor even related.

You have a key that opens a door to a house you dont own. Do you have permission, just because you got a key, to go in?

You lost a key to a house you have already been given permission to go in. You found out that there's actually a master key that you can get in the black market, which you buy to open that door to go into the house.

Alternatively: I lost the key to my home (which is rented) and someone is able to fashion a functioning key.

That's actually legal.

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything.

They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license.

So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be) but the proof of a paid order is what determines if you are licensed.

I've experienced multiple MSFT compliance audits at small business Customers in the 2004-2020 timeframe. MSFT only ever cared about reconciling what was in use with what was paid-for. I've been asked for photos of OEM key stickers attached to hardware but never asked to retrieve keys from installed software.

I assume keys are another facet of keeping specific details around licenses vague enough that there's always room for MSFT to argue or bargain.

My experience was similar at a medium size business. We had reusable keys that we used as needed. Once a year, we would run their audit tool and pay the difference.

I never got the impression they cared where the keys came from. We knew exactly when they were coming every year. They were easy to deal with and I don’t recall ever having any issues.

We also had an ELA with VMware and they were awful. We only stuck with them because the software fulfilled a need. They treat you like dirt during the sale and every renewal. In between, they act as if they’re the ones doing you a favor by allowing you to be a customer. The support was terrible.

But oddly enough, they always gave us more licenses than we paid for. Every time, they would throw in products we didn’t purchase and weren’t cheap about it either. It was always like 100+ seats and one time it was 1000.

I worked at enterprise software companies, and I have seen them usually give 25% “buffer” where software keys restrict usage to account for growth, with a reconciliation at renewal.

> MSFT only ever cared about reconciling what was in use with what was paid-for. I've been asked for photos of OEM key stickers attached to hardware but never asked to retrieve keys from installed software.

If I recall correctly, CALs don't really get 'installed', so my guess is that going off of 'provable licenses' keeps the audit process more uniform and streamlined.

So if you're using the same SKU(s) and are not oversubscribed, it should still be fine shouldn't it? If you buy SKU A and get Key 1, then use keygen to get Key 2 which is for SKU A, I'm not seeing where the audit will come back against you as long as you're only using one instance of SKU A.

It’s only a problem if you want to maintain support. If you’re ready to sever your Broadcom relationship, keygen away. I am not a lawyer, and am probably wrong.

I thing the biggest risk with this comes from the DMCA, a stupidly heavy-handed piece of legislation that doesn't care at all about the consumers.

Honestly that's the sad story behind drm in a nutshell. Pirates get a better product.

> Pirates get a better product.

Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

"If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing."

That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too.

(Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open source alternative to the products in question have avoided all of this mess, even if they had to forsake some useful features for that.)

So the issue of open source becomes : who creates the open source product in the first place?

The fact that open source exists today is because there are charitable people out there that are contributing it for free (or effectively free). Some business models employ open source as a marketing strategy for their paid parts, which is inevitably what you really would need (and thus have the "licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing" problem).

In the end, the pirate's product is free because they can make it free for way less effort, at the cost of the original creator of that software. While it's arguable that the piratee does not really do harm, as they wouldn't have paid for said software anyway, it is the original creator of the software that borne the cost of its creation.

For this reason open source always lags, but this decade's proprietary cutting edge always* becomes the next decade's open source.

* except in niches

> even if they had to forsake some useful features

Curious: what does VMWare do that you can't do using Xen, KVM etc? Why was VMWare worth a billion?

I used to use VMWare ages ago (free version). It had nice GUIs; ad-hoc VM setup and management was miles easier than Xen (my driver). But most VM setup isn't ad-hoc, and isn't done through a UI, it's done through automation.

Broadcom seems to be a mean, nasty company: "Everyone hates us, we don't care."

So much so that even Microsoft support reps are using the pirating tools

No great surprise there.

Orders/renewals for Symantec products were effectively impossible for about 18 months following their Broadcom experience.

IIRC, in the end they just gave everyone a 1-year subscription extension.

Edit: Ooops - that gets a mention at the bottom of the linked article...

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors.

KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool in your stack.

KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?

KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment.

Do you think major cloud providers haven't engineered the whole "You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day." step?

Of course, they build their own tooling. They'd have to build their own to operate at scale. For a small business or home lab operation that needs dozens of VMs, that already exists (as pointed out by another poster, who mentioned libvirt and virt-manager.)

libvirt, virt-manager, et al are all perfectly suitable tools for an average member of the HN audience, or someone playing with a home lab, or any number of other technically proficient users - but those people are not the people who are buying vmware's products.

And virt-manager comes across from their docs as a bit on the basic side, proxmox and ovirt look a bit more polished - but again, companies are often wary of running their entire infrastructure on something where there isn't someone they can blame if it goes wrong - it's more about managing the risk than anything else.

I would absolutely love it if these sorts of companies used and relied on open source technologies more, but it's unlikely that they would pay for the staff with the relevant skills to manage it all, or pay enough to retain those staff that get trained up internally. (And I'm somewhat hopeful that this broadcom/vmware mess will cause more resources to flow into open source projects, or spark new developments in this space - cloud isn't always the answer to everything).

You are right. I don't understand why companies will continue to shell out big $$$ for VMWare licenses and training, but not invest the time to learn open source. Maybe start with a POC running a few VMs on KVM/libvirt. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

It also doesn't help that many more traditional "IT" folks I've met don't want to learn anything new. I still know guys that don't understand IPv6, for example.

>KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?

Major cloud providers have huge teams developing their compute as a service, that is what they do, that is the bread and butter.

I don't have the resources and team size to hack our own hypervisor/on-prem cloud solution.

I have a team of 3 people, that is it. I can't put 5 people on designing and maintaining a hodgepodge solution of various tools that get us to where vmware already has us. I need a turn-key solution that a small team can manage.

Proxmox is quite good, it's not VMWare, but hey, it's not VMWare ;-)

OpenStack is pretty okay these days

Well yeah, this is at least as much a side effect of people not using open source solutions in the first place as it is the reason that people don't use open source VM solutions.

If more people had used open source solutions in the first place then they wouldn't be in this situation that they find themselves in now.

> There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors

Well the first question is, do you actually need hypervisors? In a lot of cases, the answer is no, or not for many of the workloads. In others it's 100% yes.

Then, after you've decided you actually do need a hypervisor, there's actually tons of choice - Proxmox (very good and advanced KVM wrapper), Nutanix's AHV, oVirt (future kind of up in the air), OpenStack, KubeVirt, XCP-ng.

Problem is, many VMware users are set in their ways and want an exact and 1:1 replacement, without even considering they were only doings things that way because that was the only tool they knew and had at their disposal, not because it's actually a good way of doing things. Virtual Machines are just a means to an end, and a clunky one at that. VMware are actively pushing you away, time to start paying attention and considering what the organisation's actual needs are, and how are they best served. (And unless you're doing VDI, or almost exclusively using third party appliances delivered as VM images, that's not virtual machines).

>Problem is, many VMware users are set in their ways and want an exact and 1:1 replacement, without even considering they were only doings things that way because that was the only tool they knew and had at their disposal, not because it's actually a good way of doing things.

Correct. You have entire teams in your average Fortune 500 who have built the entire career on being the VMware team.

Well, unfortunately for them, it's the time to evolve or get left behind while others in the organisation (either users who are unhappy or higher ups looking at budgets) try to push for change, with good reason.

Theres clouds built with KVM, you dont know your stuff.

> Theres clouds built with KVM

No shit, they have huge teams and this is their bread and butter. I have 3 people. I do know my stuff, which is why I would never use KVM and try to match that to the features VMWare gives me with a team of 3 (including myself).

I am running Apache CloudStack with KVM in my homelab. Took me a couple of hours to set it up.

It might not have all of the features of VMWare but it just works.

Why does the SEC keep allowing acquisitions like this? And why are there not more legal consequences to this kind of behavior after an acquisition?

Why would the SEC care? Shareholders of VMWare were properly compensated, and shareholders of Broadcom should know by now that Broadcom management seeks to buy companies and ruin their products. Nothing securities fraud about that.

DOJ and FTC enforce anti-trust and are more likely to be gatekeepers fo acquisitions, but while Broadcom is big and VMWare is big... Broadcom is going to ruin the product and that's not going to increase their marketshare and market power, so what's the problem?

It's like complaining about PE buying a failing company and then it goes bankrupt 3-7 years later. PE just accelerates the path, Toys R Us was already dead.

Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.

> but they have bigger fish to fry.

My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.

Thanks, Broadcom. You've taken the one little bit of my job left I enjoyed and turned it into something I never want to touch again even in my personal life.

I do recall several HN commenters called it back them when it was announced Broadcom would take over and cause a shit show.

Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible.

So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.

So… what are the alternatives?

The million (billion?) dollar question... problem is for a lot of large companies to do any sort of upgrade is already a long enough process. Moving everything to a different/new stack is simply not feasible in a short time frame. Add to this the issues with regulators (need to run on supported sw), especially at places like banks, it will be a bumpy ride I think.

We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it.

When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet spot, any more shifted the price dramatically).

So I eventually shifted our production to ganeti as well, because it had been so solid in dev/stg. It's all manageable from the Linux CLI, and it works really, really well. It's basically a management layer on top of kvm+qemu+drbd+ceph. https://ganeti.org/

The other popular option, which I ran in my previous work, is Proxmox. It is probably a more comfortable analog to VMWare users. https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.

Docs page: "Last updated: Jan 4, 2021."

It's mostly in maintenance mode right now, but that's also kind of fine because it is pretty solid. I would like a better ZFS storage story, but it does have great DRBD, LVM, and Ceph stories.

>Windows GUI

I assume you're referring to the (ancient) VIC? Vsphere has been all web based for a long long time now. It had probably just never been upgraded.

Also I'm curious why the move to local storage, what do you do if a host dies?

Good to know it's got something web-based now. Is the licensing still got that 5-machine sweet spot?

What we did if a machine failed was: design our apps to be resilient. Basically everything we run can survive machine failures via either app design or corosync/pacemaker.

We're a pretty small shop, but we ran an experiment of trying a SAN (an HP of some sort) and every year like clockwork the redundant SAN would fall over and take our whole stack with it. Every year like clockwork HP would say "you aren't running the latest firmware, try this one". Equallogic at another job was super reliable but also was easily twice the price of the HP.

The simplicity and redundancy of local storage has largely been a huge win. We did have a couple of Dell machines where the drive arrays seemed to fall over, possibly because of too much IO, but Dell identified a particular SSD and the array has been solid for 3-4 years since then.

For everything VDI, take a look at Parallels RAS[1] or Parallels Secure Workspace[2]. For the hypervisors and cloud part, probably Nutanix[3].

[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...

[2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/

[3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...

if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult.

Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Small home lab? Hand-roll QEMU-KVM.

>pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.

Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.

I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:

* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.

* Host webcam passthrough.

* Intel PXE boot ROM.

* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.

* Cloud integration features.

[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing

For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.

Evaluate what workloads you have and what is the best way to deliver them instead of searching to replace VMware with the exact same thing. Virtual Machines are nothing more than a means to an end, and nobody on the business side actually cares about them.

You might find that some workloads are best fit for a modern orchestrator running containers such as Kubernetes or Nomad, or a SaaS, or a PaaS/IaaS, or a different hypervisor such as Proxmox or full infrastructure management platform such as OpenStack.

They've also said they're trying to spin off the EUC element (i.e. Workspace One, Horizon and associated bits). (Potentially Carbon Black may be up for and exit as well).

Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...

Does this licensing problem affect the Spring Framework as well?

What an absolute shitshow. These are customers who have paid major $$$ for something they now can't redeem.

The sad thing is... this is nothing compared to what they've done to their cloud providers (formerly known as VCPP partners)... All resellers and cloud partners got a letter in december ending the program, with the 'good news' that some of them would be invited back somewhere early in 2024. The rest will have to turn off their workloads by end of March.

So these 4500+ cloud providers now (including the likes of OVH, Rackspace, IBM, ...) are now in limbo. Some will know next week or early feb if they can still legally host their customer's workloads. Else they will have 6 weeks (!) to migrate away to one of the partners that made the cut. Ignoring that many of these cloud partners have multi-year contracts with their end customers (which include banks, hospitals, public sector, ... especially the niche kind of environments that often have boutique requirements that make them unsuitable for an easy public cloud migration) they can now no longer fulfill.

Oh, and the license aggregator partners that used to run the admin side of this business and help those partners? They're being reduced to 10 worldwide too, and they're also in the dark.

At least their SaaS partners have a clear message: that business is dead. ("sunset")

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