From El Reg: AT&T sues Broadcom over VMWare support

[Vincero]

Link to article:

AT&T sues Broadcom for breach of VMware support deal

Telco giant slams silicon-and-software shop for trying to bully it into buying software it doesn't want or need, at huge prices

www.theregister.com

US telecoms giant AT&T has alleged Broadcom has reneged on an extended support deal it struck with VMware, and warned the consequences could be massive outages for customer support operations – and even the US president's office.

I don't fully buy in to AT&T's doom and gloom assessment of things, but about time at least one of their (VMWare's) big customers finally pulled the trigger and took action against them.

I can't believe I'm about to say this - I think I can taste a bit of sick.... ok breath.... ok... - but I hope that AT&T win... not that it will save the current direction VMWare is headed - Broadcom will end up doing a better job killing them off for profit than any of the other VM/Hypervisor software solutions could have done through normal competition.

 

[Solaris17]

I hope they both burn. VMware can smd with there contracts and like 300% price hikes. Couldn’t migrate off that cluster fast enough.

 

[dirtyferret]

I hope they both burn. VMware can smd with there contracts and like 300% price hikes. Couldn’t migrate off that cluster fast enough.

obviously you did not "go all-in on Cloud Foundation", otherwise you would have "emerge with reduced costs and agile private clouds that represent competitive advantage."

 

[Solaris17]

obviously you did not "go all-in on Cloud Foundation", otherwise you would have "emerge with reduced costs and agile private clouds that represent competitive advantage."

Damn your right; if only I had spent more.

 

[Vincero]

Damn your right; if only I had spent more.

Where have I heard that before.... somewhere equally cash-grabby.... oh yes...

 

[A Computer Guy]

I hope VMWare Workstation survives. I've been using it since version 2 and it's worked pretty well.

 

[dirtyferret]

Where have I heard that before.... somewhere equally cash-grabby.... oh yes...

It's a proven fact* that by boosting your performance tier you can help minimize expenditure.

*We are "legally" obligated to state there are no facts that substantiate that claim...but if there were you better believe it would!

In all seriousness my neighbor used to work for VMware

 

[Chrispy_]

Broadcom buys companies with large numbers of heavily-invested customers so that they can extort them. If you look at their list of acquisitions, none of them have made any improvements since the buyout, many of them have gone to hell in a handcart, and all of them have increased in price substantially.

It's certainly an effective business model but that doesn't mean we have to like it. I hope AT&T tears a significant chunk of flesh out of this monster.

 

[remixedcat]

rooting for att on this one hock tan needs hocked in nutty putty cave

 

[chrcoluk]

What has happened since the purchase of VMware is ridicolous, on AT&T's side here.

Luckily I moved all my VM infrastructure a fair few years ago so not affected by any of this.

 

[Chrispy_]

What has happened since the purchase of VMware is ridicolous, on AT&T's side here.

Luckily I moved all my VM infrastructure a fair few years ago so not affected by any of this.

I have some VMware still, but not big complex licenses, just a couple of isolated HA-clusters using the old Essentials Plus license bundles. What did you move to?

My only other VM experience is Hyper-V, which isn't a good fit for VMWare estates, and Proxmox which I use for CAD workstation VDIs.

 

[chrcoluk]

Using Proxmox now, wasnt a particular complex setup. So was easy for me to migrate.

Havent looked back really, I actually prefer the software and have had a performance bump as well.

 

[Vincero]

I think for anyone using ESXi for personal or low complexity scenarios, Proxmox VE was one of (if not the) most logical choices of replacement - I would have said MS Hyper-V server should be an option especially for Windows VMs but it's a lot more faffy than it really needs to be for anyone not on a domain configuration, etc.

 

[azrael]

Broadcom buys companies with large numbers of heavily-invested customers so that they can extort them. If you look at their list of acquisitions, none of them have made any improvements since the buyout, many of them have gone to hell in a handcart, and all of them have increased in price substantially.

It's certainly an effective business model but that doesn't mean we have to like it. I hope AT&T tears a significant chunk of flesh out of this monster.

Somehow reminds me of the RAMbus debacle a couple of decades ago.

 

[Vincero]

Somehow reminds me of the RAMbus debacle a couple of decades ago.

The RAMBus late-P3/early-P4 era wasn't nearly as bad in a sense that there was already an alternative from other chipset providers, and they hadn't taken over Intel - they just somehow merely wormed their way into the product strategy to a pretty spectacularly negative effect in terms of customer satisfaction (pricing wise at least - I guess there would have been a few that did appreciate the siginificantly better than SDRAM memory throughput they offered) - and it was pretty easy for Intel to reverse course (I'm pretty sure they always had an alternate strategy).

Broadcom is kinda like the equivalent of a company buying the Tesla charging network (assume a scenario that Tesla are the only ones with that connector and no other 3rd party options) and bumping the price up 3x to use it.... oh sh!t... I've probably just given them a new idea...

 

[Solaris17]

I think for anyone using ESXi for personal or low complexity scenarios, Proxmox VE was one of (if not the) most logical choices of replacement - I would have said MS Hyper-V server should be an option especially for Windows VMs but it's a lot more faffy than it really needs to be for anyone not on a domain configuration, etc.

Agree. I migrated us to proxmox. That said I made the move another time for a place that was deeply integrated in AD, hyper-v was fantastic in that regard.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Agree. I migrated us to proxmox. That said I made the move another time for a place that was deeply integrated in AD, hyper-v was fantastic in that regard.

Do you have any good references that guide how to move from VMWare to Proxmox? My needs are small but I'd like to be able to save my prior VM's if possible if VMWare becomes extinct.

From your experience could you give some quick bulleted pros and cons of the move?

 

[Solaris17]

Do you have any good references that guide how to move from VMWare to Proxmox? My needs are small but I'd like to be able to save my prior VM's if possible if VMWare becomes extinct.

From your experience could you give some quick bulleted pros and cons of the move?

I’m on vacation so I only have my phone but I can dig through my bookmarks when I get back.

Pros
- it’s cheap
- performance is the same or better
- a hypervisor is a hypervisor (HV, proxmox, VMware, nutanix) once you know one you know them all.
- if you go all in PBS is a great backup solution and cross site backups are effortless.
- making a cluster of effortless.

Cons
- proxmox support is nothing like MS or VMware. The supp licenses are cheap but if you are a shop of developers or front end your gonna get rightly nervous if something breaks

- network is easy but more complex configs need you to manually edit the interface file. Atleast initially.

- pcie pass through is easy but doesn’t lend itself well if your servers are different configs. That’s a hypervisor rule in general but where VMware and Hyper-V will immediately fail the compliance check proxmox will happily build the cluster. So validate your HW configs ahead of time.

I’m a hyper-v guy originally but the past few years migrated and used proxmox extensively when I joined a team that needed someone experienced with data and clustering. After building several clusters, migrating and even proxmox HA.

I think it stands with the big dogs for sure. No problem. The big BIG gotchas. I worked with a team of experienced engineers.

If you need your hand held or your team/company needs its hand held, you need an MSP if you want to move over. If your team doesn’t have experience running there own infra (not exclusive to proxmox) you shouldn’t switch.

It’s not like it breaks every week but during setup you WILL need someone that’s knows wtf they are doing, and while I think you should DEFINITELY buy the (crazy cheap) support licenses I would NOT expect the same level you might be used to if you leaned on VMware or MS. So don’t go firing the guy you have maintaining it.

Observability is great. The dashboard tells you everything you need to know. Storage types are expansive and not difficult to setup. Overall I wish it existed in its current state a decade or more ago and maybe the hypervisor landscape would be different.

Now leave me alone im drinking coffee on the beach.

 

[A Computer Guy]

I’m on vacation so I only have my phone but I can dig through my bookmarks when I get back.

Pros
- it’s cheap
- performance is the same or better
- a hypervisor is a hypervisor (HV, proxmox, VMware, nutanix) once you know one you know them all.
- if you go all in PBS is a great backup solution and cross site backups are effortless.
- making a cluster of effortless.

Cons
- proxmox support is nothing like MS or VMware. The supp licenses are cheap but if you are a shop of developers or front end your gonna get rightly nervous if something breaks

- network is easy but more complex configs need you to manually edit the interface file. Atleast initially.

- pcie pass through is easy but doesn’t lend itself well if your servers are different configs. That’s a hypervisor rule in general but where VMware and Hyper-V will immediately fail the compliance check proxmox will happily build the cluster. So validate your HW configs ahead of time.

I’m a hyper-v guy originally but the past few years migrated and used proxmox extensively when I joined a team that needed someone experienced with data and clustering. After building several clusters, migrating and even proxmox HA.

I think it stands with the big dogs for sure. No problem. The big BIG gotchas. I worked with a team of experienced engineers.

If you need your hand held or your team/company needs its hand held, you need an MSP if you want to move over. If your team doesn’t have experience running there own infra (not exclusive to proxmox) you shouldn’t switch.

It’s not like it breaks every week but during setup you WILL need someone that’s knows wtf they are doing, and while I think you should DEFINITELY buy the (crazy cheap) support licenses I would NOT expect the same level you might be used to if you leaned on VMware or MS. So don’t go firing the guy you have maintaining it.

Observability is great. The dashboard tells you everything you need to know. Storage types are expansive and not difficult to setup. Overall I wish it existed in its current state a decade or more ago and maybe the hypervisor landscape would be different.

Now leave me alone im drinking coffee on the beach.

Thanks. Enjoy your beach time and watch out for sand crabs.

 

[Bill_Bright]

It's a proven fact* that by boosting your performance tier you can help minimize expenditure.

Not quite sure I understand your point.

If my job depends on me getting from point A to point B in a certain amount of time, and if the speed limit is 70mph, and my old Yugo will only do 50mph (downhill with the wind behind me), then it would be a wise investment for me to pay more for more capable car that can easily keep up with the traffic going 80mph (nobody really does 70) that gets me to my destination in time.

But it would NOT be wise to invest in a Ferrari if limited to 70 - 80 mph by the cops, speed cameras, etc.

So why pay more for more if my own limitations prevent me from taking advantage of them?

 

[dirtyferret]

Not quite sure I understand your point.

it was marketing sarcasm, rather then say "pay for a higher tier" marketing would work around the word "pay" with other synonyms like "boost" "upgrade" "invest".,etc., anything but hey why don't you give us even more money and we we will give you some add ons no one would really want or that we don't sell a la carte anyways. It's just a new way of saying "the more you spend the more you save".

 

[Bill_Bright]

it was marketing sarcasm

LOL - sure you didn't mean marketing SarCAsM?

 

[remixedcat]

Using Proxmox now, wasnt a particular complex setup. So was easy for me to migrate.

Havent looked back really, I actually prefer the software and have had a performance bump as well.

Do they have conversion tools from one vm format or the other??

 

[chrcoluk]

Do they have conversion tools from one vm format or the other??

Kind of.

You can use vmware device types to make migration easier, it will have network connectivity, so the idea of just booting up the VM and it works is possible. The performance will be less than optimal but its a compatibility option. After its booted and online change the network interface from vmware to virtio, then boot again using proxmox virtio drivers. The storage you might get away with using virtio from the off if it was configured with labels instead of device id's.

I am trying to remember exactly what I did in terms of the drive migration, as its really that which will be the most complex, it was something I ran on command line, waited a bit then could import the drive.

But the good news, looks like a wizard has been created, details here.

New Import Wizard Available for Migrating VMware ESXi Based Virtual Machines

We are proud to announce the first release of our new integrated import wizard! Proxmox VE now provides an integrated VM import wizard re-using the storage plugin system for native integration into the API and web-based user interface. You can use this to import VMware ESXi VMs as a whole, with...

forum.proxmox.com

 

[remixedcat]

Kind of.

You can use vmware device types to make migration easier, it will have network connectivity, so the idea of just booting up the VM and it works is possible. The performance will be less than optimal but its a compatibility option. After its booted and online change the network interface from vmware to virtio, then boot again using proxmox virtio drivers. The storage you might get away with using virtio from the off if it was configured with labels instead of device id's.

I am trying to remember exactly what I did in terms of the drive migration, as its really that which will be the most complex, it was something I ran on command line, waited a bit then could import the drive.

But the good news, looks like a wizard has been created, details here.

New Import Wizard Available for Migrating VMware ESXi Based Virtual Machines

We are proud to announce the first release of our new integrated import wizard! Proxmox VE now provides an integrated VM import wizard re-using the storage plugin system for native integration into the API and web-based user interface. You can use this to import VMware ESXi VMs as a whole, with...

forum.proxmox.com

cool. That will save a lot of people time and make it much easier!