Did Broadcom think the VMware moat was a lot deeper than it is? Or do they think losing small or medium customers is worth it to get 10x more revenue from its largest customers?
vmware had this magic sauce that worked before hardware virtualization support was common. In around 2000, the only realistic options was either vmware or vm/esa on a mainframe. It hasn't been like that for a long, long time.
Let's not forget user mode linux. :-) I ran hundreds of "VMs" using UML and it worked surprisingly well.
I was looking at Proxmox, but I kind of got lost in the documentation when it comes to shared storage and high-availability, meaning restarting VMs on another host if one host fails.
RedHat is just as expensive as VMware used to be, but it had less features, so it is not really an option.
Wait, your VM will still restart if vmware host dies, right? You can't have RAM sync between hosts.
That's what FT is for, if the primary VM instance dies or becomes unresponsive, you failover to the mirror instance.
And regarding Fault Tolerance, it is tricky and if you don't need that level of availability it's better to just plan for a VM restart or have other types of high-availability in place to mitigate a host failure.
The core virtualization stuff is commodity, but there’s much more to it.
Price increases as in the linked article can be a compelling reason, of course.
Inertia, both in a company and in the industry, is a major reason.
Also it is not about the VMs only but the whole ecosystem. Last time I worked for a company where we considered moving out of vmware, the main issue was not migrating to a new VM management solution but having to migrate to a new VM hypervisors + migrating to a new backup solution supporting the new hypervisor. This while still maintaining original backup solution until retention runs out or we migrate and test all old backup with long retention. Or we had to decide on maintaining several backup systems in parallel which would increase the cost of backups.
It is not just about migrating VMs.
It is the locust economy.
They are just not selling products individually anymore.
If you previously only licensed a single product, your only option now is to buy everything under a single license.
We are already using a lot of VMWare products, not only do we now have access to more, our overall price went down.
I think medium sized customers have a choice, switch from their Broadcom products, or move more to Broadcom.
they'd be almost certainly right to think that, of course it'd be worth it. The pending question is whether the largest customers will actually sticks with VMWare for them to actually see this 10x revenue materialise