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Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since Broadcom's $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company's personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.

This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

For the cost, SMB is going to walk away. There are millions of SMB's.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

SMBs are not the target. Companies with a sizeable vSAN investment, huge amounts of VMware based automation and the fortune 1000 are. MSRP on the cheap license is going to be around $275/core, minimum 16 cores per socket.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And a potential 90% discount for big customers?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Shockingly, no.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Probably not that deep. I've heard there are definitely discounts. That doesn't count for much though when it still increases your cost 6x.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

That's simply short sighted.

So they ignore the Fortune 1000+1 (the up-and-coming 1000). They also stop providing a learning/familiarity path.

I'm already seeing SMBs looking at KVM, Proxmox, Xen, etc. When these young engineers/managers/architects grow and move to Enterprise, what are they going to recommend when VMware is $300/core?

I'm all for (as in I push) recognizing the value of (even expensive) licensing when it reduces engineering costs and complexity, but that's what I'd call a "metric shitload".

A mid-size business could easily justify transitioning to just about any other VM solution when faced with that kind of increase. One 16-core host is now $5k in licensing, practically doubling the cost - and that's an annual cost for years - saddling "future IT" with that cost that can now no longer be invested elsewhere.

Now imagine you have 10 such boxes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

They are planning to tolerate losing 95% of their customers. Of about 100,000 customers, they only care about 600 of them much, and about 6 thousand kind of, if they want to stick around, but not too much. The rest are fully expected to bail.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/30/broadcom_strategy_vmware_customer_impact/