The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.
They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
They do keep investing in their software "just enough" to keep customers from churning.
These sorts of lawsuits never really make it to court, there's a negotiation tactic.
Meanwhile Broadcom's software revenue led by VMware keeps growing 30% YoY and they close new contracts because in spite of being expensive.... because there's very few true alternatives in the market to VMware Cloud Foundation at high scale - Nutanix, Proxmox, Azure Stack, and OpenShift all exist but have their own problems. I've worked with them all, and they're all... big, expensive and difficult, though VMware probably is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch. Just costs a lot.
Revenue may be increasing, but their customer base is decreasing, and any customer who's paying attention is now looking for an exit strategy.
Yes, the alternatives have their problems, but ESXi/VMware/VCenter/VSphere have a lot of problems too. I will disagree with your claim that "VMware is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch." I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.
More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process. We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS. There was a never ending stream of security vulnerabilities, so you were highly incentivized to patch, but it never got any better.
It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.
still easy enough to target, and with the added benefit of non-stop internecine wikipedia arguments + the marketing depts of these firms edit pages + potential lawsuits
Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).
You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.
None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.
Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.
Being told you are carrying a scorpion across a river is not a lot of help halfway across.
I think however this mostly speaks about how hard it is to run anything even vaguely securely. There are so many independant CPUs and OSes on one motherboard plus HDD these days …
And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america.
I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.
One supermarket close to me, has a wall of various pre-prepared lunch items and I think there's a deal if you get the soup as well.
Another chain shop has a smaller selection of items... But does have the '5$ cluck' on thursdays, i.e. a pre-cooked hen for 5 USD. Grab a bag of good add-water mashed potatoes or some corn and/or perhaps a veggie, and you can get a proper dinner for at least 2, maybe 3 people out of it for under 15$.
Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them.
Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.
What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere theres zero reason to be subjecting yourself to a supermarket meal deal, we've got an overabundance of independent food places in towns in the uk.
Everything massively increased in price. Also you won’t get anything for less than a fiver jn pret. A regular baguette is 6.25 and add a coffee it’s now £10
This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler.
Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.
A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Gosh, it used to be £3 not that long ago. About £5 for a wrap at Prêt if I couldn't be bothered to go fight with the tourists to cross the road down Kingsway.
There's a lot to complain about in the UK, but food price/quality is actually pretty good. Not the absolute best, but far from the worst and certainly not Scandinavian prices.
Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany
Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me
honestly, they depend on the store you chose to go to. they always taste the same.
and the last time i ate one of the sandwidches in the UK they tasted the same there too - but it's been a pretty long time, admittedly (like 20 years or so)
personally i'd skip the sandwiches in all cases - the wraps, baguettes or ready to eat salads are way better and cost the same. and i'd skip the chips too. i mean thats just pure calories. rather eat a great salad for 3€ instead of the el cheapo sandwidches and chips :)
Then I misunderstood, I thought you meant you could buy 3 sandwiches for €1.99, 67¢ each.
Tesco also have four choices for £1.50 each (€1.73), several 100-200g bags of crisps/tortilla chips for less than £1, and 2 litres of cola for 49p. This would be cheaper than the "Meal Deal".
Aldi-Nord often has packages with 3 in them for 2€, I was just unable to find them through the website, but I frequently see them as I often buy the 3€ salad right next to them - but they're not separately packaged if that was the misunderstanding
Incorrect. Maybe you familiar with the high cost of living areas. There are similar $5 deals in the United States. The US is a big place and has many, many businesses offering very similar deals.
Meal deal prices are higher in certain places, like motorway service stations. If there's a captive market, they'll sneak the price up just like every other company. If there's competition they'll use lower pricing.
If you want a shitty sandwich you can find it for $5 in the US no problem. Plus some variation of the sausage roll that will clean you out just as well.
The "main" has expanded to Huel, salads, wraps, sushi, even hot food
The "snack" can be more than crisps: small bags of fresh chicken, 2 boiled eggs, small sushi pack, gyozas etc
The "drink" includes quality smoothies, acceptable vending machine coffee etc
Meal deal value maximizing is the whole game lol. There are also lots of healthier options if you choose carefully
In certain Sainsbury's you can get hot food as the main such as a small green curry or chicken goujons, and wedges or hash browns as the side
But the price creeps up £0.50 practically yearly. I think it's £5.50 already in Sainsbury's
It's better to view it as a cheaper alternative to eating at a restaurant rather than somehow saving money compared to bringing in leftovers. People who think £5.50 a day for lunch is saving money versus cooking themselves are delusional
$6.5 is about what you'd spend to get a bag of chips, hot or cold sandwich and drink from any Walmart that's been renovated recently enough to have a "Grab and go" or whatever they're calling it.
A sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a drink at the grocer near me is $8. I don't exactly live in a super low cost of living area, nor is it one of the most expensive in the US.
Not ashamed to say that visiting the UK again for the first time in about 12 years, getting some Boots/Tesco/Greggs meal deals was on my to-do list. Something I missed moving to Australia. Not that they are _good_, just that they are so readily available, cheap, and have a lot of choices. Woolworths in AU have started doing premade sandwiches, but they are just bad, and don't come in a deal. I doubt they would even try to hit the A$10 price range if they ever did introduce deals.
Garment section is also amazing, british ppl are so classy while having timeless thick pieces
I ended up flying back home with some oxford shirt from the Tesco, and it's really cool (vneck pull over - tie - shirt sets were sold out with my size unfortunately)
In really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves.
So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies.
By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired!
There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.
It's the bank's problem. The bank is supposed to determine whether it's likely to be repaid in full, and if not, don't issue the loan which blocks the sale.
I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.
Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.
I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
It might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.
At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates.
Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.
There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.
I did a gig at a Fortune 500 that had actually succeeded in entirely eliminating Oracle. Life was still miserable.
They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.
Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.
There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.
It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.
Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs.
They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV.
I want an MSP that isn’t scared of things outside of Microsoft.
It's honestly been easy as hell to support and upstream support contracts are available for cheap as chips, like a grand a socket a year or less. An MSP could partner with them to offer enhanced support if they were smart! It's just KVM / Qemu / Ceph on Linux, plenty of 3rd parties can provide support for it... just go spin up a cluster in a trio of VMware machines with nested virtualization turned on and take it for a spin.
Having done this to a number of clusters, it works really well; TLDR you can have it as simple as mounting the remote ESXi as a datastore and just migrating it straight over in the UI. Or automate it if you have 40,000 of them as Tesco does, though tbqh I'm not sure Proxmox is the solution for that scale of workload.
There's a hell of a difference between "court filings are secrete and the media is censored to not talk about that" and "there's a process, but I personally don't know how to follow it"
You can get court transcripts but (just like the USA) you have to pay for them. Things could be improved, but in no way are normal UK court cases secret as you claimed. You can also visit the courts and watch cases from the public gallery. You're basically wrong and doubling down on it, for what reason I cannot say.
My friend, please don’t act like an expert when you happen to be talking to one…
Magistrates court trials are not recorded so no transcripts. So a malicious prosecution is easy to pursue.
When one files for a transcript in courts that are recorded, the transcript is first sent to the Judge and the judge is allowed to change anything they like, with no transparency. They can also refuse a transcript if they feel like it.
I’m not going to respond any further to you as you for some unknown reason are talking about things that you do not understand…
Mags courts are for petty offences, nothing like this. Contract law and Torts will be heard at the High Court, and transcripts are available via EX107.
The only exceptions are when the judge imposes reporting restrictions or anonymisation (unlikely in a non-criminal case as it's meant to protect the identities of complainants or sensitive witnesses) or for ex parte actions (which are very limited, eg. to cover an emergency injunction to prevent imminent destruction of evidence).
Magistrates don’t deal with what you term petty offences, their powers have been steadily increasing over time. And indeed any conviction has serious affect on a person even after spent.
The rest of your post is also that of a person with very basic understanding of the matters. So not sure why you commented.
> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
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.
Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.
> Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.
As a sysadmin of Proxmox, I do not see how it can scale to 40k VMs. The Proxmox folks themselves have seen "~24" nodes in a cluster (theoretical support is higher), so you'd probably need a lot of clusters for 40k:
I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.
Before my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.
I wish I knew ... at least it was a span volume so we could use proxmox support for vmdk and achieve about 30 minutes of planned downtime but a week of storage vmotion followed by another week of the proxmox equivalent.
When I get back to work I will finish the samba configuration of the ceph cluster front-ends to replace those elephants.
The FC multipathing was a learning experience and the manual workload placement requires good metrics on your workloads. The built-in ceph is decently configured and more performant than FC if you have 100GBS mellanox NICs and adequate quantity of ram. Veeam integration is serviceable but it's not as mature and polished as the integration available on vmware.
Having tried azure local before (it seems magical but the more you use it the worst it gets, update failed for no apparent reason on only some supposedlyidentical nodes, the sdn was atrocious to deploy and was manageable from wac only), I would recommend proxmox over it anyday.
If you don't have linux expertise on hand and have traditional FC based storage, I would recommend something else, probably nutanix if your budget is big enough.
And if you had to do it one a normal human setup of three hosts and 15 total VMs, no fiber, no san, no special nics or anything like that, just tied in to an ordinary Veeam with the ssd storage on an immutable Linux machine elsewhere?
I would choose promox or ovirt (oracle virtualiztion manager is pretty nice, I use it because the licence of the only oracle database of our institution requires it, that and a specialc cores pinning configuration, to avoid licensing every cores in all clusters, https://houseofbrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Oracle-P... ) but it's oracle so we went with proxmox.
We have migrated from VMware to Nutanix, well, over half way there from a 8,000 VM pool. Nutanix has been a royal pain. LCM updates fubar'ing, Firmware upgrades screwing up UUID numbers of disks so CVM's won't boot, VM's not handling vlan nic and vxlan nic together, our SAN's just now being supported, the amount of bug fixes is weekly and impossible to keep up with, a team's ddos'ing of us with their app caused distributed storage to reboot every VM in the cluster, etc etc etc......I hate Broadcom but Nutanix has been painful!
I don't love their pricing but it's not brutal like others I've seen. We run 3 clusters - one of which is an old legacy cluster that was our original and despite Nutanix not supporting it officially (meaning we don't pay for support on it), their support has still been helpful with it and like the other 2 clusters, uptime/stability has been rock solid.
Prism Central has definitely gotten better with the UI since the earlier days. I still prefer Prism Element in some cases, but overall it all works pretty well.
We use HYCU for backups and while I was really skeptical about it in the beginning, it is absolutely solid in a Nutanix environment. Overall we are happy with Nutanix.
It is, I was thinking more of the core of it. In the same way one might say modern Openshift is rebadged kubernetes, but I will admit it wasn't best word choice
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.]
>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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Not just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.
What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.
I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.
I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.
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.
I dont think that's true, a lot of the database market that exists is basically "we're not oracle but we did a thing they can also do for much cheaper"
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.
I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.
We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.
It's a very scalable and almost fun task once you get into it.
Alternatives to VMware can run VMware VMs almost immediately, by translating the configuration and with only a few (or sometimes no) changes to the guest. Usually those changes are scriptable. I've done it a few times, moving between VMware and KVM of Windows guests pretty much just worked; the rest was optimisation, i.e. guest driver changes, etc.
Live migration is not realistic between different hypervisors, but a very short downtime per VM is realistic if the new hypervisor can adopt the old disk images directly, which some can. If you want, you can convert formats in the background while the VM is running on the new hypervisor. E.g. KVM and things built on KVM can do all these things.
So to each guest, it looks like a quick reboot with a quick hardware upgrade.
If that's coordinated properly, with a generic HA or Kubernetes setup, there's absolutely zero service downtime (if there are no serious mistakes), as it's just nodes within a cluster taken down one at a time while the others keep the services running, and state migrates among the nodes which are live.
Most of the things you'll change when migrating are the same for large numbers of VMs that are configured the same way except for their disk images, and easily minor things like MAC/IP. So after you've verified a small number, you can go right ahead and script the migrations for another thousand VMs, even doing them in parallel.
You don't need to migrate all VMs at the same time, and you shouldn't do that anyway. So the temporary hardware / cloud cost can be in the low single-digit percentage (for a few weeks to months at 40k VM scale, a few hours to days at 10 VM scale). You probably have some slack in there already, though, so might not need any additional hardware.
The 40k servers are probably made up of multiple redundant vSphere clusters with failover. You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. Then the other half. Then duplicate that process. As you build more compute in the new stack, you can decomission more and more of the old stack and convert it. The transition would progress like a cascade, with larger and larger groups of clusters being migrated at once until you're left with the one-off, ad-hoc, weirdo clusters at the end that need to be manually migrated (usually with great effort).
The actual hardware servers are clustered together into pools of resources. The pools are where the VMs live. The bigger the new pool becomes, the faster you can empty the old one. So the migration starts very slowly, ramps up quickly, and then tapers off.
> You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over.
For that half you are migrating, you are essentially operating without redundancy. If these are serious production workloads, the tradeoff is not as simple as you make it seem.
The way a cluster works is you have a giant pool of resources. Say, 33 - 50% larger than the workload. The workload is a dozen VMs. The cluster is 8 giant compute servers and two giant storage servers acting as one giant compute and storage unit. For redundancy you have extra clusters laying around with no workload, but they are added as failovers.
Normally, if one server on a production cluster goes down, the other members of that cluster seamlessly will take over. This is where the extra capacity comes in. You don't migrate the workload to another cluster. You just lose overhead capacity. If you lose too much then you start migrating parts of the workload to the failover. Not the entire thing.
You usually don't have to use your redundant cluster at all until it's time to rebuild the failed cluster. You might pick one of these spare clusters you keep around for redundancy to migrate all or part of the production workload to while you fix the production cluster.
When doing a big migration you take a percentage of your redundancy and convert it to the new environment. This is your staging environment. Once it is capable of doing work, you slowly grow it out and shrink the old environment at the same time.
This is basically how HA works with VxRail. I buy more VxRail than I will actually host because if a node fails then the VMs can be moved - sometimes not always without downtime but no loss. If I run out of HA nodes or start running low on capacity, then Aria will start sending alerts.
Ha I have done migrations recently from vSphere to vSphere using vMotion and it was easy.
But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)
40k server workloads… what a good, objective, quantifiable unit of measure. I’m sure the author’s intent was to make it sound like 40k servers or virtual machines. Either way, those numbers would be insane. Sensationalist clickbait headline.
Could very well just have been that last stubborn server they just never got round to!
They've got a little over 5,000 stores. Probably a few different offices. Each store probably has several VMs or so so they can continue to run isolated if their connectivity to the mothership disappears briefly. You'll probably want the basics of running some kind of local auth service (maybe AD, maybe something else), your system running the POS platform which might even be an app server and a database server as separate VMs, probably some VM running various building management stuff, a VM to run the security camera platform, I dunno what else.
That's just for the operations of the local stores and we're now at probably >25,000 VMs and we've only touched the retail locations. We still haven't addressed logistics locations, corporate offices, stuff to manage their customer-facing applications and websites, etc.
When I first saw 40,000 VMs I too thought it was a bit excessive, but when you're an org wit several thousand locations that you want to be somewhat self-sufficient things add up quickly!
Online ordering. Backend logistics (like icebergs, most of a supermarket is invisible). Stocktaking. Financials. They've probably got several role-isolated servers per store, each with a backup.
Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.
You motivated why they need a big database. Still unclear to me why they need 40k VMs and not just 100.
Its ok for Amazon to do it since they paid for the physical machines anyway and they want to dogfood their AWS services, it does not make sense for someone who rents compute and licenses.
How do you imagine cash registers work these days? With 5,000 stores worldwide, 40k servers is 8 computers per store, which doesn't seem excessive to me.
5000 stores, let's say 10 checkout lines per store, just to overprovision, so at worst 50000 simultaneous transactions going on, but probably way less. You can do that with a single server, but you'd want some redundancy and spare capacity.
I worked with a Danish retailer with +3000 store in ~50 countries, and even adding their webshop on top and they were closer to 200 (maybe 300) servers (most VMs). Then you need the ActiveDirectory, office IT, all that stuff, with redundancy and it adds up quickly... but not to 40K.
What I will say that people forget is that production might be 8 beefy VMs, you still need to replicate that to a number of test systems, staging environments and so on. So a 8 node production cluster because maybe 24 servers when accounting those other environments.
I'd assume most of the big supermarkets have a 4-5 host cluster with the small local stores having a 2-3 host cluster. You've got the software to run the tills sure, but also the loyalty card system (which seems to have a local cache at each site based on how quickly it returns your first name), VoIP, Door Access systems, BMS, Digital Signage, Scan as you shop systems, CCTV, Stock management systems..
I imagine that cash registers have the cpu power of at least a cellphone and that they can store transactions over internet in the central company database.
Lots of these machines are dynamically created and provisioned depending on load factors nowadays.
The days of manually setting up servers in hyperscaling-environments are long long gone.
Example: Your GitLab CICD needs Runners. They are dynamically requested "somewhere in our cloud somwhere in the world" and then spun up and configures fully automatically. No human touches this stuff anymore.
Good. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.
As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?
I work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months.
In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)
Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.
Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.
VMWare is like Active Directory: been around for ages, wildly flexible, and has a habit of seeping structural debt into every line of business the organization undertakes.
The ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency.
I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.
At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.
My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to:
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.
I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)
It's incredible how hard it is for firms to migrate away from platforms. Clearly you could just give something away for nearly free for 20 years and then jack the price up and make bajillions.
Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.
i just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart
Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming.
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.
I’m surprised by the comments here.
The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.
They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.
They do keep investing in their software "just enough" to keep customers from churning.
These sorts of lawsuits never really make it to court, there's a negotiation tactic.
Meanwhile Broadcom's software revenue led by VMware keeps growing 30% YoY and they close new contracts because in spite of being expensive.... because there's very few true alternatives in the market to VMware Cloud Foundation at high scale - Nutanix, Proxmox, Azure Stack, and OpenShift all exist but have their own problems. I've worked with them all, and they're all... big, expensive and difficult, though VMware probably is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch. Just costs a lot.
Revenue may be increasing, but their customer base is decreasing, and any customer who's paying attention is now looking for an exit strategy.
Yes, the alternatives have their problems, but ESXi/VMware/VCenter/VSphere have a lot of problems too. I will disagree with your claim that "VMware is the most stable and hassle free of the bunch." I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.
More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process. We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS. There was a never ending stream of security vulnerabilities, so you were highly incentivized to patch, but it never got any better.
Most stable of the bunch does not mean ”100% stable”
What specific issues did you have with OpenShift at high scale? How long ago was it?
Curious since it is the truly real open source one.
It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.
KKR bought Avago, which bought Broadcom and took the name.
They are a PE firm
Someone really needs to build an "Evil Companies" list with flowcharts showing the date/time of demonic possession.
I started building one some years ago, until a friend pointed out that I’d be unemployable and probably targeted.
I guess one of the people who made their millions and retired should do it
Sounds hard to do from a yacht...
With Starlink, now CEOs can use AI to make decisions from any water in the world!
Do it anonymously?
Calling @cstross as technology and demonic possession seem to be some of his core competences.
Is @catross generally responsive to beetlejuicing of this nature?
Crowdsource it - do it on Wikipedia?
still easy enough to target, and with the added benefit of non-stop internecine wikipedia arguments + the marketing depts of these firms edit pages + potential lawsuits
I think KKR sold Avago/Broadcom years ago but the same CEO and private equity mindset is still there.
Wikipedia's ownership section on broadcom is stale 2024 data but back then at least 10 investment firms and banks owned about 40% of it.
Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).
You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.
None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.
Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVGO/holders/?p=AVGO
> None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.
So a public(ly-traded) private equity firm. :)
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This is not true.
Broadcom is a public company. It doesn't have a single or even majority owner.
Being told you are carrying a scorpion across a river is not a lot of help halfway across.
I think however this mostly speaks about how hard it is to run anything even vaguely securely. There are so many independant CPUs and OSes on one motherboard plus HDD these days …
That's what Constellation Software do and they're in the top 20 biggest software companies. It's not a niche thing for sure
”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom”
For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.
(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).
And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america.
I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.
I've seen 'Close enough' locally.
One supermarket close to me, has a wall of various pre-prepared lunch items and I think there's a deal if you get the soup as well.
Another chain shop has a smaller selection of items... But does have the '5$ cluck' on thursdays, i.e. a pre-cooked hen for 5 USD. Grab a bag of good add-water mashed potatoes or some corn and/or perhaps a veggie, and you can get a proper dinner for at least 2, maybe 3 people out of it for under 15$.
Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them.
Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.
What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere theres zero reason to be subjecting yourself to a supermarket meal deal, we've got an overabundance of independent food places in towns in the uk.
Local food markets offer much better options than Pret to be fair
True, but it avoids any unknowns when the office manager is organising a senior leadership lunch meeting. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Pret".
A great Pret baguette is like £5. Food from a food market is £10 or more these days. They massively increased in price after covid.
Everything massively increased in price. Also you won’t get anything for less than a fiver jn pret. A regular baguette is 6.25 and add a coffee it’s now £10
Fortnum and Mason were cheaper than food markets for quite a while.
It varies. They have cranked the prices up in the last couple of years.
This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler.
Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.
No, Konbini, and Japanese food in general, is much much healthier than the equivalents in the West. Especially the Anglo West.
Konbini have more unhealthy stuff than you'll find in the ready-to-eat section of Tesco, although the sushi is better in Japan.
Both are way ahead of the USA.
I wouldn't say they are sad. They're a handy option when you're in a pinch. Sad if you're having a meal deal every day of course.
I imagine the positive reception is because the US doesn't have them so it's kind of novel.
Not M&S though
The meal deal was a Boots invention around the turn of the century. It's amazing that now it's a thing in every supermarket and petrol station.
What's so unbelievable about meal deals? It seems like a really straightforward bundle purchase.
A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Gosh, it used to be £3 not that long ago. About £5 for a wrap at Prêt if I couldn't be bothered to go fight with the tourists to cross the road down Kingsway.
It's £3.85. Not that much more.
£5.50+ is for the better “main” options, some of which used to be in the base deal, in most places that do a meal deal.
There's a lot to complain about in the UK, but food price/quality is actually pretty good. Not the absolute best, but far from the worst and certainly not Scandinavian prices.
Costco sells really good hotdogs with a large coke for $1.50.
Mechanically reclaimed meat and a half gallon of high fructose corn water isn't much of a comparison.
I honestly can’t understand why not wasting meat is such a bad thing?
Sure from an efficiency point of view its fantastic, personally i like some texture from my meal deal.
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Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany
Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me
I don't think I could find a sandwich anywhere around here in Canada save maybe one of those awful gas station ones for under $6
The ones being discussed in the UK are in the triangular box like that, but there's so much competition between the shops that they're ok.
It's also a dense enough country that they will be at most a day or two old.
Can you give an example, as I'm not sure it's a fair comparison?
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/262308005
honestly, they depend on the store you chose to go to. they always taste the same. and the last time i ate one of the sandwidches in the UK they tasted the same there too - but it's been a pretty long time, admittedly (like 20 years or so)
eg https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/ja-bacon-ei-sandwich-160g/7878218 cheap sandwidches (2€)
https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/lay-s-chips-red-paprika-150g/8940... chips 150g (99c)
https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/coca-cola-1-5l/6730574 cola, 1.25l (1.19€)
personally i'd skip the sandwiches in all cases - the wraps, baguettes or ready to eat salads are way better and cost the same. and i'd skip the chips too. i mean thats just pure calories. rather eat a great salad for 3€ instead of the el cheapo sandwidches and chips :)
Then I misunderstood, I thought you meant you could buy 3 sandwiches for €1.99, 67¢ each.
Tesco also have four choices for £1.50 each (€1.73), several 100-200g bags of crisps/tortilla chips for less than £1, and 2 litres of cola for 49p. This would be cheaper than the "Meal Deal".
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/fresh-food/chilled-s...
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/treats-and-snacks/cr...
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/drinks/fizzy-and-sof...
Aldi-Nord often has packages with 3 in them for 2€, I was just unable to find them through the website, but I frequently see them as I often buy the 3€ salad right next to them - but they're not separately packaged if that was the misunderstanding
Incorrect. Maybe you familiar with the high cost of living areas. There are similar $5 deals in the United States. The US is a big place and has many, many businesses offering very similar deals.
Thing is, the meal deals are _everywhere_ in the UK. There is no "high cost of living" priced Tesco. Or Sainsbury's. Or 5 other supermarkets.
Meal deal prices are higher in certain places, like motorway service stations. If there's a captive market, they'll sneak the price up just like every other company. If there's competition they'll use lower pricing.
If you want a shitty sandwich you can find it for $5 in the US no problem. Plus some variation of the sausage roll that will clean you out just as well.
And by "clean you out" you mean financially or both?
Oh, you'll be able to afford it... but you may end up having to spend some time instead
Meal deal = main + snack/side + drink
The "main" has expanded to Huel, salads, wraps, sushi, even hot food
The "snack" can be more than crisps: small bags of fresh chicken, 2 boiled eggs, small sushi pack, gyozas etc
The "drink" includes quality smoothies, acceptable vending machine coffee etc
Meal deal value maximizing is the whole game lol. There are also lots of healthier options if you choose carefully
In certain Sainsbury's you can get hot food as the main such as a small green curry or chicken goujons, and wedges or hash browns as the side
But the price creeps up £0.50 practically yearly. I think it's £5.50 already in Sainsbury's
It's better to view it as a cheaper alternative to eating at a restaurant rather than somehow saving money compared to bringing in leftovers. People who think £5.50 a day for lunch is saving money versus cooking themselves are delusional
£3.85 in my nearest central-London Tesco, it even includes some premium energy drinks like Tenzing that alone would get close to the cost of the deal.
Ah thanks I haven't been paying close enough attention. That's good
$6.5 is about what you'd spend to get a bag of chips, hot or cold sandwich and drink from any Walmart that's been renovated recently enough to have a "Grab and go" or whatever they're calling it.
A sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a drink at the grocer near me is $8. I don't exactly live in a super low cost of living area, nor is it one of the most expensive in the US.
Not ashamed to say that visiting the UK again for the first time in about 12 years, getting some Boots/Tesco/Greggs meal deals was on my to-do list. Something I missed moving to Australia. Not that they are _good_, just that they are so readily available, cheap, and have a lot of choices. Woolworths in AU have started doing premade sandwiches, but they are just bad, and don't come in a deal. I doubt they would even try to hit the A$10 price range if they ever did introduce deals.
you will wet yourself in an M&S
Garment section is also amazing, british ppl are so classy while having timeless thick pieces
I ended up flying back home with some oxford shirt from the Tesco, and it's really cool (vneck pull over - tie - shirt sets were sold out with my size unfortunately)
Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.
The fifth largest (Morrisons) was also sold to PE with predictable results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrisons#CD&R_takeover
In really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves.
So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies.
By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired!
There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.
It should simply be illegal.
It's the bank's problem. The bank is supposed to determine whether it's likely to be repaid in full, and if not, don't issue the loan which blocks the sale.
A bank shouldn't be recognizing collateral that the buyer doesn't own.
We need a private equity tracker so we can get alerts on these and track the debt loading and looting.
Was Morrisons ever any good?
Pretty damn good; not least because each store (aside from the smallest) has their own on-site butcher and fishmonger. Not to mention a decent deli.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll pop by one over the coming weeks.
Their fish & meat counters are much better than the other supermarkets. Better selection and much fresher.
I never knew that! I'll try one out next time I'm passing.
>(2nd largest was owned by Walmart
I am late to this thread but Sainsbury is the 2nd largest supermarket in the UK and it is now owned or have any partnership with Walmart.
Or are you talking about ASDA?
asda
It has decent presence in some parts of South East Asia as well via JVs e.g. Tesco Lotus in Thailand.
FWIW, Tesco just divested from all of the Lotuses… now it’s the awkwardly named Lotus’s.
Didn’t realize they were behind Lotus. I also liked the refrigerated meals they would heat up for you right in the store.
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I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.
Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.
I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?
It might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.
At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates.
Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.
There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.
used to work at a company that was tied to literally all of those. life was miserable.
then oracle cut costs on next gen exo-data stuff and agreed to waive some license costs this time and bam just doubled down on them again. ugh.
I did a gig at a Fortune 500 that had actually succeeded in entirely eliminating Oracle. Life was still miserable.
They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.
Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.
There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.
This in turn introduces a lot of economic inefficiency, for no good reason. I think regulation would be useful here.
> I think regulation would be useful here.
Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!
Contrast one regulation vs. thousands of litigations by companies who don't always have the expertise or budget to pursue complex legal procedures.
If you have a contract that says the price is $1k, pay them $1k and don't answer their calls. They can sue you and they'll lose.
If you have a contract that says they can change the price at any time, and you're a business, that's on you.
It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.
There is also risk introduced by change. Risk is very scary when you are in management.
If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants.
Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.
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
Ugh. ProxMox breaks my heart.
Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs.
They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV.
I want an MSP that isn’t scared of things outside of Microsoft.
It's honestly been easy as hell to support and upstream support contracts are available for cheap as chips, like a grand a socket a year or less. An MSP could partner with them to offer enhanced support if they were smart! It's just KVM / Qemu / Ceph on Linux, plenty of 3rd parties can provide support for it... just go spin up a cluster in a trio of VMware machines with nested virtualization turned on and take it for a spin.
Doesn't the company behind ProxMox sell enterprise support?
Apparently not enough for my lazy MSP to be confident in their service level agreements.
Having done this to a number of clusters, it works really well; TLDR you can have it as simple as mounting the remote ESXi as a datastore and just migrating it straight over in the UI. Or automate it if you have 40,000 of them as Tesco does, though tbqh I'm not sure Proxmox is the solution for that scale of workload.
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What are you talking about? Judicial filings in the UK are not generally confidential and when they are it is usually only about specific documents.
In USA you can go on a website and download the filings for PDiddy or Tate or whoever
Show me the uk website.
Oh what’s that? There isn’t one you say…
There is a lot that goes on that the media and the professionals involved don’t speak about.
Not automatically published on the internet, and confidential aren’t the same thing.
Phone, email or visit the court registry.
You need permission of the court(I.e. Judge ) as per CPR
Phoning will get you the national Contact centre, emails may or not any not be replied to… court registry needs an appointment…
It’s all very nuanced. Until you know how it all works, you don’t know
There's a hell of a difference between "court filings are secrete and the media is censored to not talk about that" and "there's a process, but I personally don't know how to follow it"
The takeaway is the appearance of justice has been carefully maintained over decades.
You can go to the court house, sit in the gallery during a trial and literally watch justice being done, anytime you like.
What's the purpose of the process?
Irrelevant to the question at hand: Are UK court proceedings secret.
I think it's quite important. If they make it hard to get the information, that's soft censorship.
https://www.bailii.org/
That’s judgements (What the judge said)
The filings by the parties are made public in the USA and other countries. So you can actually see the arguments and evidence.
You can get court transcripts but (just like the USA) you have to pay for them. Things could be improved, but in no way are normal UK court cases secret as you claimed. You can also visit the courts and watch cases from the public gallery. You're basically wrong and doubling down on it, for what reason I cannot say.
My friend, please don’t act like an expert when you happen to be talking to one…
Magistrates court trials are not recorded so no transcripts. So a malicious prosecution is easy to pursue.
When one files for a transcript in courts that are recorded, the transcript is first sent to the Judge and the judge is allowed to change anything they like, with no transparency. They can also refuse a transcript if they feel like it.
I’m not going to respond any further to you as you for some unknown reason are talking about things that you do not understand…
Have a good day.
Mags courts are for petty offences, nothing like this. Contract law and Torts will be heard at the High Court, and transcripts are available via EX107.
The only exceptions are when the judge imposes reporting restrictions or anonymisation (unlikely in a non-criminal case as it's meant to protect the identities of complainants or sensitive witnesses) or for ex parte actions (which are very limited, eg. to cover an emergency injunction to prevent imminent destruction of evidence).
Everything you have said is off the mark.
Magistrates don’t deal with what you term petty offences, their powers have been steadily increasing over time. And indeed any conviction has serious affect on a person even after spent.
The rest of your post is also that of a person with very basic understanding of the matters. So not sure why you commented.
I wonder how the register (the source for this article) managed to even get the information for their article...
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>filings are private
That's horrific
If uk media were not silenced then yes, everyone would be horrified at what goes on.
It would be if it were true.
It is
Im confused as to why you think you know better
> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.
What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?
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.
Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.
Interesting times.
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.
HPE's VMWare alternative is Morpheus, and it supports both Veeam and Zerto. So it's probably not them.
Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.
> Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.
As a sysadmin of Proxmox, I do not see how it can scale to 40k VMs. The Proxmox folks themselves have seen "~24" nodes in a cluster (theoretical support is higher), so you'd probably need a lot of clusters for 40k:
* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...
For such a size (and sticking strickly with open source), XCP-ng could be an option, or OpenStack. In the closed source space, Nutanix.
As of 2021, CERN had 35k instances/VMs in their OpenStack implementation:
* https://superuser.openinfra.org/articles/scaling-bare-metal-...
Proxmox for 40k vm would be surprising also veeam support Proxmox.
I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.
Before my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.
> 192TB VM
Why? Honest question, what leads to that Kind of size and why cant it use NAS shares or SAN disks for most of that data? Kudos on the migration!
I wish I knew ... at least it was a span volume so we could use proxmox support for vmdk and achieve about 30 minutes of planned downtime but a week of storage vmotion followed by another week of the proxmox equivalent.
When I get back to work I will finish the samba configuration of the ceph cluster front-ends to replace those elephants.
Would you do it again (ProxMox)?
The FC multipathing was a learning experience and the manual workload placement requires good metrics on your workloads. The built-in ceph is decently configured and more performant than FC if you have 100GBS mellanox NICs and adequate quantity of ram. Veeam integration is serviceable but it's not as mature and polished as the integration available on vmware.
Having tried azure local before (it seems magical but the more you use it the worst it gets, update failed for no apparent reason on only some supposedlyidentical nodes, the sdn was atrocious to deploy and was manageable from wac only), I would recommend proxmox over it anyday.
If you don't have linux expertise on hand and have traditional FC based storage, I would recommend something else, probably nutanix if your budget is big enough.
And if you had to do it one a normal human setup of three hosts and 15 total VMs, no fiber, no san, no special nics or anything like that, just tied in to an ordinary Veeam with the ssd storage on an immutable Linux machine elsewhere?
I would choose promox or ovirt (oracle virtualiztion manager is pretty nice, I use it because the licence of the only oracle database of our institution requires it, that and a specialc cores pinning configuration, to avoid licensing every cores in all clusters, https://houseofbrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Oracle-P... ) but it's oracle so we went with proxmox.
I’d guess thousands of clusters. They have over 3k retail stores in the UK, so that could be a 2-3 node cluster in every one.
I’ve worked with a few major US grocers on very similar projects (some hardware only refreshes and one VMware to HyperV/Azure Local migration).
Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.
We have migrated from VMware to Nutanix, well, over half way there from a 8,000 VM pool. Nutanix has been a royal pain. LCM updates fubar'ing, Firmware upgrades screwing up UUID numbers of disks so CVM's won't boot, VM's not handling vlan nic and vxlan nic together, our SAN's just now being supported, the amount of bug fixes is weekly and impossible to keep up with, a team's ddos'ing of us with their app caused distributed storage to reboot every VM in the cluster, etc etc etc......I hate Broadcom but Nutanix has been painful!
How has pricing been? I’ve heard their renewals can get expensive.
Have lots of customer who run it and would echo your same positive review.
I don't love their pricing but it's not brutal like others I've seen. We run 3 clusters - one of which is an old legacy cluster that was our original and despite Nutanix not supporting it officially (meaning we don't pay for support on it), their support has still been helpful with it and like the other 2 clusters, uptime/stability has been rock solid.
Prism Central has definitely gotten better with the UI since the earlier days. I still prefer Prism Element in some cases, but overall it all works pretty well.
We use HYCU for backups and while I was really skeptical about it in the beginning, it is absolutely solid in a Nutanix environment. Overall we are happy with Nutanix.
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.
The latter is IIRC rebadged KubeVirt
OpenShift Virt is way more than Kubevirt.
It is, I was thinking more of the core of it. In the same way one might say modern Openshift is rebadged kubernetes, but I will admit it wasn't best word choice
Running machines under basic Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machines). Veeam have started supporting it, but only on RedHat.
Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.
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/
>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.
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.
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.
Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.
It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.
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.
> 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?
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.
It's cargo culting. Even 37 Signals fell for it.
Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.
They explained that fairly clearly
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!
> 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?
> 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.
Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware.
He talked about "Broadcom lies.."
I’m sure they don’t care. They were pretty up front when they bought VMware what the play was
I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!
Not just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.
When I was working at Tesco some 7 years ago, the goal was to move to AWS. Surprised they're still not even close.
Good on them for sticking it to Broadcom.
What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.
Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?
I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.
I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.
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.
Pshaw! Similar behavior by Oracle has not diminished its footprint nor its sales.
I dont think that's true, a lot of the database market that exists is basically "we're not oracle but we did a thing they can also do for much cheaper"
It has. Which is why they were forced to turn to acquisitions to grow - they can only buy other people's customers, not attract new ones.
That's why broadcom bought the company he went with instead.
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.
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?
Broadcom has paying customers - they sell chips to companies that have no paying customers.
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.
Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s
I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.
I don't work at this level, but there's lots of things you can do.
a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once.
b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration.
c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration.
d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion.
e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases.
There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work.
Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.
We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.
It's a very scalable and almost fun task once you get into it.
Alternatives to VMware can run VMware VMs almost immediately, by translating the configuration and with only a few (or sometimes no) changes to the guest. Usually those changes are scriptable. I've done it a few times, moving between VMware and KVM of Windows guests pretty much just worked; the rest was optimisation, i.e. guest driver changes, etc.
Live migration is not realistic between different hypervisors, but a very short downtime per VM is realistic if the new hypervisor can adopt the old disk images directly, which some can. If you want, you can convert formats in the background while the VM is running on the new hypervisor. E.g. KVM and things built on KVM can do all these things.
So to each guest, it looks like a quick reboot with a quick hardware upgrade.
If that's coordinated properly, with a generic HA or Kubernetes setup, there's absolutely zero service downtime (if there are no serious mistakes), as it's just nodes within a cluster taken down one at a time while the others keep the services running, and state migrates among the nodes which are live.
Most of the things you'll change when migrating are the same for large numbers of VMs that are configured the same way except for their disk images, and easily minor things like MAC/IP. So after you've verified a small number, you can go right ahead and script the migrations for another thousand VMs, even doing them in parallel.
You don't need to migrate all VMs at the same time, and you shouldn't do that anyway. So the temporary hardware / cloud cost can be in the low single-digit percentage (for a few weeks to months at 40k VM scale, a few hours to days at 10 VM scale). You probably have some slack in there already, though, so might not need any additional hardware.
The 40k servers are probably made up of multiple redundant vSphere clusters with failover. You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. Then the other half. Then duplicate that process. As you build more compute in the new stack, you can decomission more and more of the old stack and convert it. The transition would progress like a cascade, with larger and larger groups of clusters being migrated at once until you're left with the one-off, ad-hoc, weirdo clusters at the end that need to be manually migrated (usually with great effort).
The actual hardware servers are clustered together into pools of resources. The pools are where the VMs live. The bigger the new pool becomes, the faster you can empty the old one. So the migration starts very slowly, ramps up quickly, and then tapers off.
> You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over.
For that half you are migrating, you are essentially operating without redundancy. If these are serious production workloads, the tradeoff is not as simple as you make it seem.
The way a cluster works is you have a giant pool of resources. Say, 33 - 50% larger than the workload. The workload is a dozen VMs. The cluster is 8 giant compute servers and two giant storage servers acting as one giant compute and storage unit. For redundancy you have extra clusters laying around with no workload, but they are added as failovers.
Normally, if one server on a production cluster goes down, the other members of that cluster seamlessly will take over. This is where the extra capacity comes in. You don't migrate the workload to another cluster. You just lose overhead capacity. If you lose too much then you start migrating parts of the workload to the failover. Not the entire thing.
You usually don't have to use your redundant cluster at all until it's time to rebuild the failed cluster. You might pick one of these spare clusters you keep around for redundancy to migrate all or part of the production workload to while you fix the production cluster.
When doing a big migration you take a percentage of your redundancy and convert it to the new environment. This is your staging environment. Once it is capable of doing work, you slowly grow it out and shrink the old environment at the same time.
This is basically how HA works with VxRail. I buy more VxRail than I will actually host because if a node fails then the VMs can be moved - sometimes not always without downtime but no loss. If I run out of HA nodes or start running low on capacity, then Aria will start sending alerts.
If much of this is to support their thousands of supermarkets, almost all of them are closed overnight, or at least overnight on Sundays.
Plenty of time to schedule a migration.
Hire me, I'll be more than happy to show you! :D I'm an expert at it!
Ha I have done migrations recently from vSphere to vSphere using vMotion and it was easy.
But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)
> But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place
Like I said, I specialize in that. My career has been doing hard infra stuff other people won't or can't.
Broadcom shares are performing spectacularly well.
With the new $35 billion dollar AI / XPU deal, Broadcom is looking to ditch the legacy customers and move to the new shiny AI billions.
40k server workloads… what a good, objective, quantifiable unit of measure. I’m sure the author’s intent was to make it sound like 40k servers or virtual machines. Either way, those numbers would be insane. Sensationalist clickbait headline.
Could very well just have been that last stubborn server they just never got round to!
Why a retailer needs 40k servers? What are they serving? To whom?
What is wrong with system designers these days? Are they designing or just selling?
They've got a little over 5,000 stores. Probably a few different offices. Each store probably has several VMs or so so they can continue to run isolated if their connectivity to the mothership disappears briefly. You'll probably want the basics of running some kind of local auth service (maybe AD, maybe something else), your system running the POS platform which might even be an app server and a database server as separate VMs, probably some VM running various building management stuff, a VM to run the security camera platform, I dunno what else.
That's just for the operations of the local stores and we're now at probably >25,000 VMs and we've only touched the retail locations. We still haven't addressed logistics locations, corporate offices, stuff to manage their customer-facing applications and websites, etc.
When I first saw 40,000 VMs I too thought it was a bit excessive, but when you're an org wit several thousand locations that you want to be somewhat self-sufficient things add up quickly!
Online ordering. Backend logistics (like icebergs, most of a supermarket is invisible). Stocktaking. Financials. They've probably got several role-isolated servers per store, each with a backup.
Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.
You motivated why they need a big database. Still unclear to me why they need 40k VMs and not just 100.
Its ok for Amazon to do it since they paid for the physical machines anyway and they want to dogfood their AWS services, it does not make sense for someone who rents compute and licenses.
They have over 3000 stores. Maybe each one has a handful of VMs.
Maybe each self-service checkout runs a VM, or each staffed checkout.
They wouldn't want to rely entirely on a remote database to be able to sell products.
And their Dunnhumby division is a huge data consultancy in its own right, and likely the largest user of compute within the wider Tesco org.
How do you imagine cash registers work these days? With 5,000 stores worldwide, 40k servers is 8 computers per store, which doesn't seem excessive to me.
5000 stores, let's say 10 checkout lines per store, just to overprovision, so at worst 50000 simultaneous transactions going on, but probably way less. You can do that with a single server, but you'd want some redundancy and spare capacity.
I worked with a Danish retailer with +3000 store in ~50 countries, and even adding their webshop on top and they were closer to 200 (maybe 300) servers (most VMs). Then you need the ActiveDirectory, office IT, all that stuff, with redundancy and it adds up quickly... but not to 40K.
What I will say that people forget is that production might be 8 beefy VMs, you still need to replicate that to a number of test systems, staging environments and so on. So a 8 node production cluster because maybe 24 servers when accounting those other environments.
See these numbers I buy. 40k smells over engineering to me (or more likely a 3P salesman made a huge bonus after selling the architecture to tesco)
I'd assume most of the big supermarkets have a 4-5 host cluster with the small local stores having a 2-3 host cluster. You've got the software to run the tills sure, but also the loyalty card system (which seems to have a local cache at each site based on how quickly it returns your first name), VoIP, Door Access systems, BMS, Digital Signage, Scan as you shop systems, CCTV, Stock management systems..
I can see how you hit 40k pretty quickly.
I imagine that cash registers have the cpu power of at least a cellphone and that they can store transactions over internet in the central company database.
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8 servers per store does sound excessive unless of course they are running vm ware on all the computers in the stores, and they count as "servers".
Lots of these machines are dynamically created and provisioned depending on load factors nowadays.
The days of manually setting up servers in hyperscaling-environments are long long gone.
Example: Your GitLab CICD needs Runners. They are dynamically requested "somewhere in our cloud somwhere in the world" and then spun up and configures fully automatically. No human touches this stuff anymore.
"No human touches this stuff anymore." And then Clown Strike happens ... amplified by Opus and "agile" BS.
To the business? logistics, facilities (think power, HVAC, refrigeration systems), security, HR, finance, accounting, legal, purchasing, sales, marketing, etc. Probably with multiple environments (dev/qa/prod/DR) for anything important.
If you can't imagine the scale of a retailer's etnerprise architecture, maybe it's a you problem?
Good. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.
They also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts.
They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.
As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?
I work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months.
In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)
Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.
Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.
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
Don't forget any relevant training for employees (e.x. for things like 'how to connect to a virtual desktop'). That can add up in some cases.
VMWare is like Active Directory: been around for ages, wildly flexible, and has a habit of seeping structural debt into every line of business the organization undertakes.
AD is on the way out, it seems. Microsoft are pushing Enta or whatever it’s called these days.
Interesting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.
The ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency.
I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.
There was no second product. vSphere was in a league of its own.
At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.
Go and try to create 40000 VMs on Hetzner. The cloud may look infinitely big, until it suddenly isn't.
My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to:
> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality
meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.
>VMWare is still basically the only option
The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.
I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)
It's incredible how hard it is for firms to migrate away from platforms. Clearly you could just give something away for nearly free for 20 years and then jack the price up and make bajillions.
Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.
i just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart
Imagine paying for virtualization software when open source options are almost industry standard
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effective
extremely effective
this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot.
migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.
if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.
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
support contracts ? if your spring-boot version is 2 releases behind etc. You use extensions that are [VMWare Tanzu Spring Enterprise Extensions]
Claude Code is your best support contract
What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?
Mostly 30 years of people writing code.
Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming.
If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.
VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.
... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?
If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it.
At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.
[0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg