VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom
Broadcom says it may audit VMware users.
Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
I think it had something to do with Broadcom wanting to go for a few big customers and don't want to deal with the small fry anymore.
It's a valid business strategy to kick your low-paying customers to the curb and focus on the big spenders. Did the same with my little PC business back in the day. The small fry cost shitloads to support and are generally more bitchy.
But HOLY shit did Broadcom kick 'em down. I've never seen such an in-your-face business move to squeeze the cash cow as hard as possible, tank the company, grab the money and run.
People can say, and have been from day-1, "I'll never use their shit again!" That's fine with Broadcom, it's literally their plan.
The RIAA special
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
This is another good reminder to not use VMware nor VirtualBox for any reason.
I primarily use mac and when I need to quickly spin up a linux machine, parallels needs you to buy a new version every year or they wont support much, and fusion supports everything but its....vmware
It's free and works for me, why should I stop using Virtualbox?
Because it’s owned by Oracle and they’re the kings of malicious licensing. Using their software, even as an individual, with no intention of ever using it for work, gives them more power. Of course, if you ever even think about using it for work, then be prepared for the company you work for to be paying a huge bill or be sued.
Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
Proxmox ftw
Proxmox is amazing.
I really want to use Nutanix but they are the same price as VMware VCF and they don't support my existing hardware so I'd have to buy all new servers, just to pay the same price.
At first, I thought the products you were listing were "good softwares going to die". I was like "wut. Proxmox is fucking epic."
We told them to go fuck themselves. We retain lawyer specifically in case we have legal concerns, and the way we use their products, price jack up would be so extreme that it’s entirely worth risking it while we migrate away.
That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.
Broadcom is doing an excellent job convincing their customers to stop using VMware. Such a good job that at Red Hat we've shifted strategies with OpenShift Virtualization to pick up those customers. For the longest time our Virt play was just a stop gap to containers, now it's a full blown product.
Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.
The strategy, from day-1, was to dump low-tier customers and squeeze the big dogs. They knew this wasn't a viable long-term plan. Broadcom knew they had captive customers in the large enterprise space who would take years to migrate. They want to rape all they can, cash out and kill the product someday. But hey! As long as they can squeeze, they will do so.
I mean, fuck me, Oracle is still in business and that's the model Broadcom is going for.
Yeah. Let's not get started on fucking Oracle. We'll be here all day. Or year, possibly.
Remember:
There's no such thing as a perpetual license, there's only "until we change our mind" licenses
The not owning anything is ridiculous. We need clear regulation that makes it so companies cant do bullcrap like this. If I buy something, I own it, period.
100% agreed.
Here's a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
I realize there's all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I've got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I'm using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
From my experience running heavily Hyper-V over the last 15 years, don't be afraid of it, it's worth the look. Especially for a single node like you're talking, no reason not to in my opinion.
Proxmox is definitely on its way to become a viable replacement for sure. There's also OpenShift from Red Hat which could be worth a look at as well.
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that's deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
I'd say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn't overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren't really a Linux person, then I'd wager hyper v is the right direction.
Another vote for Hyper-V.
I had a great experience with hyper-v. 2 nodes running about 60 vms for 7 years.
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn't use it if there's a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
I'm surprised I haven't seen Nutanix mentioned at all here tbh. Direct competitor to VMware.
Give bhyve a try. Especially on illumos host.
At this point, why would anyone do business with broadcom at all?
Because they make all the cheap ethernet chips that go on motherboards.
Other than that, can't think of a good reason.
Sounds like a them problem if their software won't refuse to update without an active contract. If it keeps working and being able to be updated then it's on them.
This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn't exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.
Unfortunately for Mac hosts, Apple has no KVM/Hyper-V equivalent so your best option for virtualization there is Parallels.
(and it's honestly kinda stupid that Apple can't build their own KVM equivalent into the Darwin kernel which macOS is based on)
There is a KVM equivalent on MacOS, Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework.
KVM is just the kernel side, you need QEMU (for example) on userland. On MacOS you have now UTM.
I didn't even know that was a thing. Cool!
I stupidly bought a VMWare Workstation license when I first got on the Windows 11 train. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and all that rubbish. My experience was such shit that I abandoned it all for Linux and Virtualbox.
Fuck Microsoft, fuck VMWare.
qemu ftw.
I was a happy camper with Hyper-V on server operating systems, was always a PITA on desktop versions though. Wonder if that's changed. (Doubt.)
A move this dumb will totally work out in thier favor. /S
They're trying to kill it. Anything they can squeeze out of existing customers in the meantime is just gravy.
NUTANIX AHV BITCHES! Download The Nutanix Bible and start learning it.
Very surprised that this is the only comment in this thread mentioning Nutanix.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
Isn't VMWare out of support anyway?
Not that I fault the users of it - a perpetual license is a perpetual licence and good luck with the C&D, but there are other options. Though I only know of OpenShift on RHEL.
Why would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
