[HN Gopher] VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of pe...
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VMware transition to subscription, end of sale of perpetual
licenses
Author : transpute
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-12-12 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.vmware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.vmware.com)
| bombcar wrote:
| Has the free ESXi survived the turmoil?
| coldbrewed wrote:
| It's probably not the first thing on the chopping block as
| there's plenty of revenue to be squeezed from vSphere; over the
| next 2-5 years I don't see a world where the free ESXi will be
| left unmonetized/uncrippled.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Free esxi is pretty crippled at this point, esp for high core
| counts. Proxmox is the way to go!
| fredski42 wrote:
| What about Nutanix?
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Nutanix has a Community Edition which works well, but has
| some fairly strict requirements due to the overhead of
| their controller VMs and such
|
| https://www.nutanix.com/products/community-edition
| whalesalad wrote:
| I would not choose it for a greenfield project unless I
| knew that they had a particular module for more enterprise-
| grade stuff like doing hardcore/proprietary interconnects.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| What about xcp-ng?
| whalesalad wrote:
| I intensely disliked xcp-ng when I tried it a few years
| back. It's more of a move fast and break things indie type
| of project. Proxmox feels more stable and trustworthy.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > Here is a list of products impacted by the new licensing
| policy:
|
| VMware Cloud Foundation
|
| VMware vSphere
|
| VMware vSAN
|
| VMware NSX
|
| VMware HCX
|
| VMware Site Recovery Manager
|
| VMware vCloud Suite
|
| VMware Aria Suite
|
| VMware Aria Universal
|
| VMware Aria Automation
|
| VMware Aria Operations
|
| VMware Aria Operations for Logs
|
| VMware Aria Operations for Networks
| delfinom wrote:
| > VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and
| transition from a perpetual to a subscription model to better
| serve customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value,
| and predictable investments.
|
| Yea, a one-time cost wasn't predictable enough, instead a
| subscription number that will be changed each year on a whim is
| predictable.
|
| Got it.
| thedougd wrote:
| If you're running VMware and CA (mainframe), Broadcom owns you
| at this point.
| toyg wrote:
| Doublespeak at its finest - unless one is to interpret
| "predictable investments" as investments _by Broadcom_ , which
| will indeed become easier once all customers are turned into
| digital serfs-- sorry, subscribers.
| coldbrewed wrote:
| My heart goes out to all of the institutions that are about to
| get hammered by this change, but I would by lying if I said I
| wasn't excited about a potential increase in investment in open
| source cloud virtualization infrastructure. Proxmox seems poised
| to benefit from this; is Openstack in a situation where it could
| be reasonably rolled out as a substitute for vSphere without
| requiring significant staff increases?
| thedougd wrote:
| OpenStack provides a different axis of offering than vCenter.
| It's more aligned for multi-tenant, API driven use cases, ala
| cloud. Of course, you could open access to only the
| virtualization team, but they'd likely find the console
| experience frustrating. VMware even has an OpenStack product
| that is built on vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software
| defined networking.
|
| The challenge is that companies architect their services and
| applications around what they have, and they may be very
| operationally dependent on specific features of vCenter and how
| they've configured those features.
| NBJack wrote:
| Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If you
| can afford an expert to set it up for you, great! Otherwise,
| prepare to invest in other ways. I'm not going to say VMware
| has a super intuitive system, but I've gotten surprisingly
| far at times without a lot of deep knowledge. Well, until the
| *nix-like kernel in the hypervisor misbehaves....
| znpy wrote:
| If you have any significant workload on vmware you likely
| already have an expert on payroll.
| Klasiaster wrote:
| The setup is not too complicated with something like
| https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack
| prometheanfire wrote:
| devstack is for dev work, expect nothing to persist.
|
| If you want a deployment choose something like openstack-
| ansible.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Yeah, OpenStack is very much not a great competitor. If
| you can afford an expert to set it up for you, great!_
|
| If you know (say) Ubuntu and Ansible, then there's pretty
| good automation with _openstack-ansible_ and _kolla-
| ansible_. There are a number of moving parts, but an
| intermediate-level Linux sysadmin can get things going
| without too much difficulty. There are vendor-provided
| solutions (e.g., from RH) as well if you don 't want to do
| a fully DIY, or want commercial support.
|
| * https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/distros/
|
| At a previous job we had a team of 4-5, and 1.5 FTEs split
| their time between our HPC cluster and our OpenStack
| cluster (20+ hypervisors, ~10 Ceph servers; >350
| VMs/instances).
| mitjam wrote:
| There is also Rancher Harvester (https://harvesterhci.io/)
| which I think is a breadth of fresh air compared to VMware
| and OpenStack and then there is the Windows Server based
| Azure Stack HCI, too. In my experience, VMware's biggest moat
| is the vast support from software vendors. It basically is
| the default supported platform for almost every business
| application. This comes with well known best practices, many
| experienced admins, out of the box solutions from hardware
| vendors and highly standardized managed services. Most apps
| leave VMware for the cloud or Kubernetes but not another on-
| prem VM platform.
| hhh wrote:
| Harvester has been great for me, except when I wanted to
| start using a real SAN with it. It's KubeVirt under the
| hood if I recall correctly, which is also a great project
| to check out.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Or go vendor independent with pacemaker + drbd + libvirt.
| For that stack you can get support from SUSE, Redhat and
| Linbit and maybe even Ubuntu. Or just go with Debian if you
| don't need support.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _VMware even has an OpenStack product that is built on
| vSphere virtualization and NSX-T software defined
| networking._
|
| * https://www.vmware.com/ca/topics/glossary/content/openstack
| -...
|
| * https://www.vmware.com/ca/products/openstack.html
| thedougd wrote:
| It's a pretty good product, IME, especially if you're using
| it with NSX-T.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| unless something has changed recently, openstack is a horror
| to setup and administer.
|
| the point of vmware is that is fairly trivial to go from a
| single server with some VMs, to a massive cluster with live
| zero-downtime migrations. (and have funky storage, get
| working snapshots and backups.)
|
| Sure openstack can do that. but its non trivial to setup.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| We used Openstack for a while, but overall it was a
| nightmare. I'm sure it's better than it used to be, but it
| is not simple to spin up or maintain, and it's not designed
| to baby VMs -- if one acts up they expect you to delete and
| recreate it, which works OK for microservices but not for
| huge Windows terminal servers.
| natbennett wrote:
| Has OpenStack as an organization solved the problem where
| there's not really such a thing as OpenStack? In terms of e.g.
| what APIs will be available and so on?
|
| That's basically what stopped it back in '14 or so. It was too
| hard to provide software that could run on an OpenStack because
| it was such a choose-your-own-adventure.
| pierrelf wrote:
| I was at the Apache Cloudstack conference just a few weeks ago
| and it seems most of the integrators are pivoting to moving
| VMware customers to KVM + CloudStack, and have even upstreamed
| an auto conversion tool.
|
| https://cloudstack.apache.org/
| jabl wrote:
| People at a cloudstack conference think cloudstack is great
| and want their customers to use it?
|
| What's next, a survey of people attending the annual
| dentistry conference shows that they think dental health is
| important?
| rwmj wrote:
| Are they using virt-v2v for conversions from VMware to KVM or
| something else?
| csydas wrote:
| While I am excited to see that quite a decent number of past
| clients I've had are considering proxmox and other
| virtualization stacks, I am not confident there will be a fast
| answer for this new change in the virtualization realm.
|
| Large and Enterprise companies won't really be bothered by the
| change except the price, and unless other platforms include all
| the "Enterprise Check-boxes" they think they want, I'm not sure
| how fast adoption will be if at all for stacks like Proxmox.
|
| I am not defending the business model or the tech offerings of
| Vmware, Microsoft, etc -- far from it. They're extremely
| bloated, buggy, and unless you happen to be one of VMware or
| Microsoft's most expensive customers, the support might as well
| just be a sin tax. Even for the "biggest" clients, they were
| not able to get Vmware or Microsoft to budge on some pretty
| obvious and complete blocker bugs that would drop production
| environments entirely.
|
| Enterprise is weird -- I would be extremely happy if not a bit
| exhausted supporting a large OSS virtualization infrastructure
| for clients, but I just do not see it happening without a lot
| of "carrots" for such companies from the virtualization vendor.
| Enterprise business is basically about shifting responsibility
| and liability for your tech-stack to someone else -- yes, it
| requires strong tech skills to use these tech-stacks, but the
| more maintenance/liability that can be shifted to the vendor,
| the more preferable it is for most companies.
|
| I don't know what the businesses will choose -- I'm hopeful
| medium and smaller businesses will shift to more open solutions
| and from this business, the open solutions will be able to grow
| and become more attractive choices for enterprise, I'm just not
| sure that such solutions will avoid the tech industry's
| obsession with subscription licensing and feature bloat to
| check boxes.
| depereo wrote:
| With all the 'investment' in ISO27001:* validation of the
| existing infrastructure choices and the like, I'd be
| astonished if any move in a large company was able to happen
| within five years.
|
| From what I've seen none of them have taken this issue
| seriously, either, and won't until they get squeezed hard
| enough, at which point they'll have to... spend five years
| trying to move!
| eddyg wrote:
| Don't forget about the open-source XCP-ng[1] to which you can
| add Xen Orchestra (which is like vCenter; a key reason people
| use ESXi) which has a flat-rate (no socket, host or VM limits)
| $2600/year _Enterprise_ license. And XCP-ng even supports
| migrating from VMware[3].
|
| [1] https://xcp-ng.org [2] https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-
| features/webinterface [3] https://xcp-
| ng.org/blog/2022/10/19/migrate-from-vmware-to-xc... and
| https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/04/13/how-bedrock-streaming-mig...
| bushbaba wrote:
| Suspect it'll be the biggest gift to the public cloud
| providers. Firms who use VMWare rarely want to self-manage
| their virtualization tech.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| proxmox is presently not an alternative to the VMWare stack.
| Not even close. Converting from the VMWare stack proxmox would
| be a giant shitshow.
|
| I have been a paying user of WMware personally since the
| beginning and I have worked on their enterprise stack for
| several years. With the changes being made I cant see myself
| wanting to spend any personal money on it I and I would not
| recommend someone to start fresh with it, but for a lot of
| enterprises, they will, short term, have little choice than to
| pay the fees.
|
| I have no idea about the state of Microsoft HyperV. The little
| I have worked with it, and that was quite a few years ago now
| it seemed severely lacking in the tools department.
|
| Oracle owns VirtualBox, and even if they started to build it
| out (or have they?) going to Oracle to avoid high fees is not
| going to be a good idea.
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| Microsoft is ending mainstream support of Hyper-V Server 2019
| on January 9, 2024 and extended support will end on January
| 9, 2029. Hyper-V Server 2019 will be the last version of this
| product and Microsoft is encouraging customers to transition
| to Azure Stack HCI.
| tlamponi wrote:
| We have many happy customers successfully converting from
| VMWare to Proxmox VE just fine, what's missimg for your
| usecase?
| kodama-lens wrote:
| This might be a serious issue for my current client since their
| entire stack is build on VMware and I was helping to build a
| massive project that would lift their current setup to a full
| self service private cloud setup. They were already worried by he
| acquisition but this... With the current budget cuts puts the
| entire project at risk.
|
| I would feel bad for them but today I was informed by my PO that
| the budget cuts also affect my contract so it will not be
| extended. The only bitter taste is that the project was meant to
| improve the infrastructure for citizen services. Kind of have a
| bad feeling for how this will turn out
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm used to corporate marketing speak, but damn this is
| impresively corporate orwellian. This is real copy/paste from
| TFA, not some parody that I wrote.
|
| > Q: Why is this good for partners?
|
| > A: The industry has already widely embraced subscription and
| SaaS, and many partners in our ecosystem have already developed
| success practices in this area. Subscription and SaaS models
| provide an opportunity for partners to engage more strategically
| with customers and deliver higher-value services that drive
| customer success. It also helps accelerate their own transition
| to a business model focused on annual recurring revenue.
| rychco wrote:
| This is so hilariously out of touch that I would have believed
| it was satire without context. This is viral copy-paste quality
| material.
| geodel wrote:
| Sorry, I don't think it is out of touch? I see this kind of
| thing all the time everywhere.
| geodel wrote:
| I mean it does look like a shifter of paradigms that businesses
| are demanding. What's not to like here.
| toyg wrote:
| Gotta leverage those competitive advantages to enable
| holistic synergies, yo.
| xuhu wrote:
| "-- Written in my leased BMW Series 7 with subscription warmed
| seats. These things don't pay for themselves you know."
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| The enshitification continues
| natbennett wrote:
| You know, I always used to think that e.g. Amazon talking about
| "customer obsession" was stupid. Of course a business is focused
| on its customers? That's where the money comes from?
|
| Then I got to see the conversation about subscriptions at VMware.
| The storyline was always "wouldn't it be great for us if we
| switched to subscriptions? Look how good all the math gets!" The
| customer barely appeared as a background character.
|
| Especially entertaining when it came to things like PWS. After
| the acquisition VMware shut it down -- because it didn't have any
| real customers -- and then in the push to subscriptions the new
| folks in charge of TAS were like "Great idea everyone! What if we
| provided Cloud Foundry... as a Service!" The engineers who had
| been around long enough to see the whole cycle tried to explain
| but I don't think it got through.
| ljm wrote:
| I read The Messy Middle some time ago, which mostly documents
| the process of Behance's CEO joining Adobe post-acquisition and
| then switching their entire suite of products over to their new
| subscription-based model, Creative Cloud, and sunsetting their
| perpetual license model.
|
| This is described in the book as a fantastic achievement for
| Adobe but one that was quite difficult to get off the ground.
| On reflection I do not share that assessment and while it may
| have been personally successful for the CEO/author of the book,
| it was done entirely at the expense of the customer and their
| experience. I would in fact consider renting software that
| takes up storage on your own hardware to be anti-consumer.
| al_borland wrote:
| At most companies it is an uphill battle to advocate on behalf
| of the customer. It's really important that those values start
| at the top, and get support at all levels of management.
|
| The best story I heard on this was from Zappos and Tony Hsieh.
| Zappos was famously customer focused (which probably played a
| big roll in Amazon acquiring them). The story goes that after a
| night of drinking they had someone call Zappos to find pizza
| for them, and Zappos customers services helped them out (not
| knowing the CEO was there listening).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ5k_Byd9Fs&t=2296
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Amazon Prime is a subscription though. It seems Amazon and
| VMware are in many ways similar in that regard.
| pappeyrome wrote:
| Broadcom will feast on revenue from Govt IT departments. Well
| done
|
| /sarcasm
| nunez wrote:
| To be clear, Broadcom is just speeding up something that VMware
| has been trying to do for a while.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Ah, I see that Broadcom is working on speedrunning the "lose all
| your customers" game. Not what I would do if I dropped eye
| watering sums of money to purchase those customers, but you do
| you, Broadcom.
| peeters wrote:
| This has always been Broadcom's MO. They buy a company,
| determine which of that company's 150/250/500 customers overlap
| with their core 500 customers, bundle the acquired product(s)
| with everything they already sell those customers, and then
| jack up the price on the entire portfolio. Anybody not on the
| refined core customer list either gets explicitly cut, or is
| spun off into a second-tier digital sales program where they
| are ignored until they leave on their own.
| axus wrote:
| I was periodically buying a software product they acquired,
| very small volumes. The sales process and support did improve
| a bit. It was a low bar, though.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| This might be a shorter timeline to destroy a company than a
| Musk.
| schaefer wrote:
| Oh, you don't sell a product?
|
| I guess I won't but it then.
|
| Thanks.
| mig39 wrote:
| Classic enshittification.
| yedava wrote:
| I wonder what will happen to the Spring ecosystem. Will Broadcom
| close it off and try to monetize it?
| LadyCailin wrote:
| This "everything is a subscription" thing just cannot be
| sustainable. I mean, sure, some companies with a huge moat can
| probably sustain this well enough, but eventually consumers and
| businesses will simply run out of money, and then can't buy
| anything anymore. Not to mention that it means that no one can
| make investments anymore, and can only piss away money every
| month. I have no clue how to stop this from happening though
| either from a regulatory perspective or a free market
| perspective.
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| I don't know how managers aren't paying for RedHat products
| excitedly. It's the only business which competes with itself and
| where an acquisition by a private equity firm will, by the
| application of the typical strategies, destroy it's own customer
| base in days.
|
| Not like open-source won, more like proprietary eats itself.
| el-dude-arino wrote:
| We're entering a post-growth economy in the near future, so the
| only way for companies to have reliable revenue streams is to
| create subscription services. Get ready because y'all are about
| to be rundled to death.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yeah, just pirate and crack everything at some point.
| HHad3 wrote:
| This is unfortunate. The writing was on the wall already with
| vSphere+, but I can't really commit to a subscription for VM
| infrastructure. Broadcom would be able to hold the whole company
| hostage with price increases.
|
| I'm not sure yet where we'll end up, but the small cluster of 8
| machines of ours will not run vSphere in 2025.
| xbar wrote:
| Their pricing model seems designed to make you leave. I wish
| you well.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| I'm not sure I have clarity on this, but if your service and
| support agreement expires, do perpetual licenses get locked out
| of esxi patching? It's unclear based on what they're saying.
| Update VIBs were always available even to foundation and
| essentials, but companies like HPE paywall locked bios updates
| and certain support installer a few years ago and even legally
| went after people for distributing them. We usually use use the
| commands from https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ to run updates. We
| use vmware 6.7 and 7 extensively for small business along with
| Veeam to make recovery and snapshotting better.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Soon we will have reached the point where software piracy is the
| only way not to build your company on digital quicksand. I
| sincerely hope we never get there because it would ruin the
| commercial software market, which did produce amazing tools in
| the past. But by now, it certainly looks like major participants
| are boosting their last remaining quarters (before the company
| implodes) by scorching the earth they walk on. First Unity, now
| VMWare. I really have no idea why a CEO might think it to be a
| good long-term strategy to throw the majority of your past
| customers under a bus.
| happytiger wrote:
| It's could be a great day for Open Source software.
|
| Maybe we need to adapt Open Source so that cloud providers who
| use it have to pay for continued development instead of just
| using it for free or putting a control panel on top of
| something and calling it their own product, but that's the
| solution we came up with the first time proprietary software
| vendors started trying to lock the universe down into perpetual
| upgrade nonsense.
|
| Perhaps it's time to revisit Open Source licenses with a fresh,
| sharp pencil and an eye towards making all these systems
| compete with cooperative, collective-interest development
| again. We definitely need to find models that don't cut the
| investment valuation so hard, as that's been a huge problem for
| the Open Source companies.
|
| Down markets and cost saving periods are when Open Source has
| seen massive adoption, as companies look to save money...
|
| Maybe I'm wrong but it's been on my mind a lot lately.
| living_room_pc wrote:
| dead man walking!
|
| 1. switch to subscription model <- we are here 2. jack prices to
| maximize profit among the proportion of customer that can pay
| higher prices. 3. smaller startups migrate to other cheaper tools
| 4. cheaper tools slowly become mainstream 5. vmware is irrelevant
| and dead. ~ 7-10 years, maybe less.
|
| The problem with this strategy here, is that unlike Photoshop
| (sorry gimp) there _is_ alternatives.
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