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>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

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.

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.

Sure but whole strategy is "Jack up prices by 500%, cut expenses by 70% and make more money in short term"

What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.

They make AI crap. The future is Mars.

But Snickers is Mars with nuts, so it's both healthier and more filling.

The future is Snickers!

I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.

Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.

Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.

> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal

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?

It's cargo culting. Even 37 Signals fell for it.

The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

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.

> It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

None of those matter in the slightest with containers. Why would you need to reallocate hardware resources when the containers can run on another piece of hardware? You would snapshot the relevant storage, not the whole OS and kitchen sink.

VMs as an intermediary between hardware and containers is just a waste of resources - both directly (RAM, CPU, storage to run a useless OS with no benefit) and indirectly (all of those VM's OS needs maintaining and patching).

It's basically a hold over from the olden days of "everything is a VM".

We run everything on VM just for flexibility. Want to stand up a new machine for testing? Boom, run the script, new Ubuntu server. We need to decommission a machine. Shutdown all the guests, move them over to new machine and start them.

Sure, most of what we do is very cattle and we could run on bare hardware but why not take advantage of easy to add flexibility.

I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state).

Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.

sigh Not everything in the world is containers. Applications running outside of container still exist in many companies for various reasons including political ones.

Yeah this - I know my container is pushing a lot of things to containers (I think customer-facing web stuff is a reasonable use for containers) but stuff like ActiveDirectory controllers, Exchange servers - pretty much any Microsoft thing running on Windows - will continue to run on a VM for the forseable future.

Okay, but that's not at all what this thread is about? We're talking about having a VM intermediary between containers and bare metal. Not applicable to cases where you don't have containers because your workloads aren't fit for them.

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.

It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.

Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4?

(As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).

As I said in another thread, Win95 and RHEL 3 are the oldest we've come across recently. Guests of this sort are not converted, they're copied and run using emulated devices (IDE/SATA, e1000 network etc). We help customers as best we can but don't support these cases.

Usually the story is they're running something like CNC control which originally ran on baremetal, then got virtualized onto VMware when the hardware died (possibly using VDI to make it appear on a terminal close to the machien), and it's still doing the same thing effectively today.

> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of those, because everyone who will at some point try to get rid of them. Not all, not immediately, but the ultimate trajectory is down.

People are still setting up machines by hand, then leaving companies without documenting what they did. The whole "infrastructure as code" is a fantasy at most real companies.

Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy

They explained that fairly clearly

The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)

> I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates

Also known as incompetence. Broadcom's business model is public. Their plans for VMware were public from when the acquisition was announced.

Those companies had years to plan how to get rid of everything VMware. Instead they paid through the nose to postpone the inevitable for a few years.

> Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

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.

I think your assessment is pie in the sky. I am moving hundreds of VM's per day and the amount of anchors attached to the source VM's is ridiculous. LB's that are mapped via VMware object, VLAN's extended for the migration but not working, SR-IOV enabled, etc etc....you may have the most perfect setup here but in real life I've never seen it that simple so I truly doubt what you're saying.

The software deals with all that. It's all open source, you can go & look for yourself! I don't have to prove anything.

Broadcom is acting like a VC. Quickly milk as much as you can then sell the carcass.

They don’t hide this

Nice. Thanks for the insight!

Trading Broadcom for IBM... what could go wrong?

Openshift Virt is fully open source under a BSD license, so you now have legal options to move to a competitor or even manage it yourself (although I wouldn't recommend the latter, even I don't manage OSV myself).

No one is arguing that upstream Kubernetes pieces aren't open source. OpenShift is not open source. If it was, why does RedHat sell licenses for it, gate the binaries, and not share the byte-for-byte reproducible sources for said binaries?