VMware Kills Off 56 Products | Hacker News Reader

VMware Kills Off 56 Products

thestack.technology

117 pointsgalenmarchetti92 comments

@Dang the current title, and maybe article linked, is going to cause a titanic misunderstanding in what's happening.

The 1st party link has a much clearer title "VMware End of Availability of perpetual licensing and associated products" https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/96168?lang=en_US&ref=thestac...

E.g. it's not that NSX as a whole is discontinued it's that NSX perpetual licensing is discontinued and you must buy the NSX subscription licensing. Some of these other SKUs may not have an equivalent but for anything "big" like NSX or vSphere there will be.

I don't pretend to know the true actual reality of what's going on here, but an article about the end of non-subscription licensing from December of last year is linked in the original article.

The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.

Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.

Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.

Yeah, this is a really unclear announcement.

It sounds like they are saying the products are entirely discontinued, including subscriptions, but then they say: "In the future, at the time of renewal, customers will be offered the best subscription products to fit their needs."

What does that even mean?

It's very unlikely you cancel an existing contracted subscription in this space, but you need to send a really strong message to get your customers to move, so I actually think this is intentional to scare them but not get them mad enough to lawyer up.

Yep, seems like it's going to be a couple of 'all-in-one' products, only by subscription, with some add-ons available:

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2024/01/embracing-change-wi...

It says "not available for purchase" and that users will be recommended what subscription product to use instead.

It's written horribly complicated, and it leaves a lot of open questions, but what it does not say is that you can't give money to broadcom to get the features of those products. And it's hard to imagine that this is the end of vsphere. It's just the end of buying vsphere.

Good point to highlight that it's really subscription bundles rather than maybe the individual subscriptions some had switched to before.

That VMware KB article says the subscription version of those applications is no longer available either.

    The following products are at End of Availability (EOA).  All licensing options
    including ... subscription, as well as all editions, suites ... are included
    in this announcement.

It sounds like those ones are going away rather than just forcibly transitioning people to a subscription model.

And the linked blog post: https://news.vmware.com/company/vmware-by-broadcom-business-...

Inaccurate. VMware is consolidating its ABSOLUTELY INSANE list of SKUs down to a handful. Yes, some products are getting put down (I.e. no longer maintained, with support ending way later), but not 56 of them, and definitely not NSX (makes HUGE money for VMware).

Source: I work at VMware in presales

You should tell whoever wrote this kb and the associated articles that the language is opaque, confusing and contradictory.

Your potential customers will not enter your sales funnel with this kind of strange and misshapen noise happening about your products.

What I take from several kbs and articles is they're removing all of that as individual products, and they're selling the new all-in-one "vSphere foundation", only in a subscription model, that will have some of those functionalities and then offer some others (like NSX) as add-ons:

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2024/01/embracing-change-wi...

Right. Many of these products are going to be integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF.

i think i will still be in tech when the pendulum swings back to on-prem, when everybody notices how awfully expensive the cloud is, after the bigger players raise the prices at will, because they killed off the competition.

I work at a Fortune 50 company and the pendulum for us has already swung back around. 5 years ago it was all "move everything to public". Now, we're building a bunch of on-prem infra and there are huge projects to move workloads back.

For us, on-prem is about half the cost for compute and storage vs public cloud.

Problem is that management is usually not skilled enough (or just greedy for bonus money short term) to understand what is happening. Cloud is good if you are tiny or need to scale really fast if you are growing and then move out of it. For the bigger companies it can be a good strategy to scale out, but for that you only need IAAS and no fancy cloud vendor lock-in products. you will always be cheaper if you build it on your own, if your usecase is heavy load.

you might be cheaper with colocation instead of building your own datacenter but most enterprises still have a need for their own anyway.

I wonder how this will cut into the hobbiest/learn-at-home crowd with our half width, 1U free-tier-license ESXi servers we learn our skills for our day jobs on.

I don't think this is a concern of theirs - the new owners don't appear to have any plans for it to be around long enough to need another generation of people to run it.

It's likely that for whatever products remain after this purge, there will be no more major releases, only security patches and ever-more-expensive extended support contracts.

I think people underestimate the long term impact of this kind of thing. Giving the people who use and maybe more importantly influence the purchasing of expensive commercial products the ability to easily play with them on their own is essentially free advertising. And taking that away after you've offered it is even worse since now those same people not only can't experience your product firsthand as easily, but they now actively dislike your company for screwing up their home lab.

Maybe the bet here is that VMWare is so entrenched or the time horizon of the people making the decisions is so short that it won't matter to them personally. But I bet long term it has significant impact and makes room for competitors with more foresight.

It's likely going to substantially grow the business of their competitors.

I'm already not going to renew my VMUG membership, and am planning to switch my VSphere cluster over to Proxmox.

Are you using live migration of running VMs, or wanting it to work in Proxmox?

Asking because in my testing of that in Proxmox 3 and 5 node clusters last month, the live migration would fail (aka just hang with no further progress) just over 20% of the time.

Haven't looked into it further (likely will though), but searching around online shows lots of other people having experienced the same issue. General sentiment seems to be "Proxmox is good for homelab and non-prod environments. But probably don't use it in production."

Perhaps the performance of your storage or network isn't up to scratch. I have a 3 node cluster with ceph on ssds and a 10gb network and my live migrations worked perfectly fine.

This was all in a virtualised setup on my local workstation (Ryzen 5950X, 64GB ECC, local mirrored NVMe SSDs).

I've not seen flaky comms between virtual interfaces on this setup before, but you never know. ;)

Check put XCP-NG if youre looking in this space. Its a mature xenserver fork with a much improved interface. Migrations work well, and it has a comparatively inexpensive vsan equivalent that works well if you prefer a hyperconverged route.

Thanks. I looked at it briefly, but the project doesn't seem to be headed in a good direction.

The main interface (Xenadmin) now has an EOL notice as their README: https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin

The other alternative now seems to be a paid solution:

https://vates.tech/blog/introducing-vates-virtualization-man...

That doesn't seem like a good match for my needs. :(

I think you can use Xen Orchestra with xcp-ng, isn't it?

That's the second link I think. At least, when going to their web page, that 2nd link is what they point to.

AWS and Azure rubbing their hands together. We use one of these products and unfortunately will have to abandon ship.

I wonder who vSphere users can even go to

We're definitely seeing an uptick in interest for Triton Datacenter[1] from vSphere users looking for alternatives.

Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community.

While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions.

[1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com

I loved spotting the .joyent directory on one of the screenshots.

Some things live on!

They probably need a therapist at this point. They've been through a lot over the years.

I'm sorry, what better interface is there for massive amounts of VM management in a GUI?

Backstage or ServiceNow in front of kubevirt

There is also Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager and Azure Stack that might be an alternative for companies that ran Windows on their vSphere environment. I've seen Windows shops already switch to that because the licensing a lot cheaper.

There's also Nutanix, RedHat and other options that people have mentioned here.

> RedHat

Unfortunately post-IBM aquisition, Red Hat's closest equivalent (RHEV) was killed off. You've got OpenStack and k8s VMs now, neither of which are really what people running VMWare are looking for I suspect.

Funny part is IBM is one of the largest users of VMWare and IBM cloud is based on Ubuntu .

Apache CloudStack.

It supports multiple hypervisors including VMWare, KVM, XCP-ng, etc. I haven't tried but it has some features to allow users to migrate from VMWare to Apache CloudStack with KVM and/or XCP-ng.

Xen Orchestra is another alternative.

But the issue with this and Proxmox is vsphere is not just the web interface.

Usually a company has Veeam integration for backups, and server creation/decom automations all built on the vmware platforms...

Xcp-ng has built in backups that can be done in continuous 15 min increments or more traditionally if you like.

Proxmox offers a free "Backup OS" that you can install on a host to backup your proxmox servers.

No Veeam, but they noth have this covered.

Proxmox? (I appreciate that this is a significant change)

I see Proxmox like an alterative to ESXi rather than vSphere. I'll either go xcp-ng with Xen Orchestra or Nutanix as an alternative to vSphere.

Nutanix has a really nice product. They’re going to win a lot of business.

Both AWS and Azure have migration agnets for vShere VMs

"Lift and Shift" cloud VMs is going to be MORE expensive than on-prem.

Sure you CAN do it but not advisable.

Nutanix

HPE is after Nutanix. I dread the day HP buys Nutanix

I remember when Nicira/NSX and the concept of SDN was groundbreaking stuff. Hyperconverged had just become a thing, and VMware was the brightest star in the galaxy. Seeing it shuddered is pretty powerful.

It's not really shuttered it's just become subscription only.

Probably not this quarter, but I wouldn't expect it to last more than two years tops.

Looking forward to when aws does this. Lock in and tighten the screws.

That just got a lot easier for them.

why? loving aws right now, which products do you think they would keep vs kill

Personally I would like AWS et al. to die so that cloud consultants and their associates will go away and I will be able to stop being lectured about "digital transformation" and "the cloud". It's really all very boring now after seeing the same schtick several times.

Probably wishful thinking.

Because then people will move off it.

I’m at a loss with VMware. We’ve been full vdi since 2011 and can’t afford cloud solutions. Citrix is overkill. Love Nutanix, but can’t use AHV due to VMware horizon. We’ve had zero or thin clients for all workstations. It’s been so easy, until now.

The company we purchased from is pretty sure VMware is cutting them off. We used to deal with CDW, but cdw’s service went to crap

Check out Parallels RAS, we hear the same story from many new clients. Disclaimer: I work for them.

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

Check out www.apporto.com - silicon Valley startup. Simple dashboard, low pricing, great service. 100% recommend on Gartner.

Hate to be that guy but you were probably warned about going full VDI. Those people were right to warn you.

Was never warned, when we went full vdi people were very into it. It was a huge bonus to us as a small IT dept being able to maintain and manage a large infrastructure. I think vdi is essentially dead until the swing back to on prem solutions.

VMware (now Broadcom?) owns the Spring/Spring Boot libraries, right? Anyone know if they're still planning on maintaining it?

Here is a twitter comment from Nov... https://nitter.net/odrotbohm/status/1730356168755703945?t=xG...

Make of it what you will...

Lets see, this is main the advantage of Java EE (now Jakarta) over Spring, plenty of companies to chose from.

Very much so afaik.

Am I misunderstanding, there is a bunch of vSphere offerings on the list there, but surely they must still sell vSphere in some form to enterprises?

Isn't it still common to find as a significant part of most on-premise deployments?

This is the discontinuation of all non-subscription licenses. I.e. vSphere (the software) isn't discontinued rather vSphere (the perpetually licensed product) is continued. You must purchase the new subscription items if you want to renew support. For more minor products there may not be a subscription bundle but for anything in common use there should be.

Most but not all vSphere SKUs are listed. Instead of having 30 different vSphere "products" they'll have a handful and do price differentiation in different ways.

Given that it's broadcom it's safe to assume that this won't be a good thing for vSphere customers, but VMWare's vSphere product line was pretty batshit insane and consolidating it seems sensible.

Proxmox [1] will see a boost in popularity, good. I'm using the free version in combination with the backup server on both small (several RasPi 4's spread over several countres running the 'PiMox' [2] port) as well as medium (DL380) sized systems and find it to be a stable as well as practical platform.

[1] https://proxmox.com/en/

[2] https://github.com/pimox/pimox7

Realistically these products aren't being killed; they'll still be available in subscription bundles just not as perpetual licenses.

> Realistically these products aren't being killed; they'll still be available in subscription bundles just not as perpetual licenses.

But the OP says:

> Listing the 56 VMware products and platforms being killed off, VMware said: “All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

I've heard Broadcom is also (dishonestly) pushing a sudden and harsh RTO plan that will probably lead to a huge amount of staff turnover.

Broadcom will not be able to extract their acquisition cost out of future customer due to their rate of cuts.

Broadcom watched Arm sue Qualcomm, and was like, hold my beer. Revenue for VMware was 13.6B last year. They would have to maintain that for 4 more years just to break even on revenue. There is zero chance they will make a profit on this acquisition.

That assumes they would run the business as is, indefinitely.

If they sell some parts, fire 75% of who is left, and squeeze the hell out of numerous large corporations who literally have no choice but to pay up... I think they will be fine. Leaving behind a scorched earth, and many lessons learned.

Many large operations simply can not move away from their current stack in less than three years. But they will need support and licenses if only due to regulations. It will be mad, there will be a lot of screaming, and ultimately we will just move on, to newer and better stacks.

According to VMware/Broadcom in the article: “All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

It reads like these products and any way to purchase them have been axed. What am I missing? - if the expectation is that these products will be bundled into future product offerings, that’s a big if and if I’m not mistaken I don’t think we have any concrete information about that yet.

I think the original blog post from VMWare pretty much says what the above person was claiming, if I'm reading it right:

https://news.vmware.com/company/vmware-by-broadcom-business-...

That blog post was from December, whereas the story link seems to reference a KB from the other day (or today depending on your time zone): https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/96168?lang=en_US&ref=thestac...

This could be read as the solutions will be made available in other products, but there’s no substantial details about that anywhere that I’ve seen.

I think what this really demonstrates is just how much uncertainty around what Broadcom is actually doing with VMware under its new management …

I don't think that's correct - from the article:

“All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

Honestly, looking at the list, I'm not sure what they actually still sell.

I guarantee vSAN and NSX are not canceled; they're critical components of the VMware stack.

Here's the actual article from VMWare:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/96168?lang=en_US

It sounds pretty unambiguous; they go out of their way to note that these products are no longer available by any means and are discontinued, and they list both vSAN and NSX.

But, yeah, just because a company says something doesn't mean it's true, I guess - wouldn't put it past them to say "oh, all these products have been replaced by the new VMWare vCloud Platinum MAX offering" which is just the same products in a bundle that costs ten times as much.

When they say "products" they mean the specific licenses available to purchase. The original announcement linked on that page has all the details:

> For customers seeking an HCI solution, we offer VMware vSAN as an add-on to vSphere Foundation, which includes all the capabilities of vSAN including vSAN Max.

LoL, I just looked at the vSAN cancellation.

People are snapshoting the hell out of those pages on the wayback machine! The world is going insane right now.

Broadcom is burning more actual value than Elon Musk.

Yuck. The subscription everything model of everything just feels dystopian and a step backwards. It’s everywhere .. even silly simplistic applications and add on’s all subscription.

There should be a web quiz "VMWare Product Name" or "Scifi-book technology"

Air gapped vsphere clusters likely moving to hyper-v as it's already covered under the company's enterprise agreement. And there are some simpleish tools to convert from one to the other without too many headaches.

I see many vmdk images being converted to other image formats like qcow and raw - if the new hypervisor even requires it

I am quite curious if Spring will also be eventually affected.

Does it impact Workstation or ESXi (aka ESX)?

I don't think Workstation is changing. ESXi is only available in a subscription bundle now. Free ESXi is gone.

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