Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.

Looks like proxmox has well-fleshed-out documentation for migrating from vmware:

"Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well."

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE

It’s ok, UK courts are mainly rigged and likely to favour a home company over a foreign one (see Tesla v bbc as an example).

Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….

I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.

OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.

OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.

Used to do those migration in a previous life.

Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.

It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.

There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).

[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]

Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

> A lot of work ahead.

Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.

One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.

Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.

I can't speak to this particular case, but most of the delay is likely to be organisational rather than technical at this kind of scale.

Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:

* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor

* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime

* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team

* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime

* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire

* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above

It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.

From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?

Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible

Honestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.

Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.

Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.

Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s

there is no risk since spring boot is open source.

any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something

What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?

VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.

... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?