I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.
This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want.
They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.
I'm interested to hear this community's take on what an alternative to vmware is. And I'm not talking about just ESX, I'm talking about their entire ecosystem including vsphere and all of it's features that an enterprise environment depends on.
You paid for the product, fuck them.
Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions.
So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a license and you are not oversubscribing it.
IANAL, but one or the other must be true.
They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license.
So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be) but the proof of a paid order is what determines if you are licensed.
IANAL, but I believe the terms of the purchased license would be to use the product with only the license key provided. Therefore using an alternative key would be a breach of the license terms, meaning you're using unlicensed software and subject to all relevant laws.
I can see an argument that the vendor is in breach of contract by failing to provide a valid key with the license, and therefore the contract is void and the vendor should refund.
And yet again, I can see an argument that the license has been paid for, and a different key is used in the interim to access the paid for software, therefore no loss has occurred to either party rendering the whole argument moot.
Would be interested to know if this has been tested in the court system.
they are neither mutually exclusive, nor even related.
You have a key that opens a door to a house you dont own. Do you have permission, just because you got a key, to go in?
You lost a key to a house you have already been given permission to go in. You found out that there's actually a master key that you can get in the black market, which you buy to open that door to go into the house.
Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
"If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing."
That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too.
(Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open source alternative to the products in question have avoided all of this mess, even if they had to forsake some useful features for that.)
Orders/renewals for Symantec products were effectively impossible for about 18 months following their Broadcom experience.
IIRC, in the end they just gave everyone a 1-year subscription extension.
Edit: Ooops - that gets a mention at the bottom of the linked article...
KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool in your stack.
Well the first question is, do you actually need hypervisors? In a lot of cases, the answer is no, or not for many of the workloads. In others it's 100% yes.
Then, after you've decided you actually do need a hypervisor, there's actually tons of choice - Proxmox (very good and advanced KVM wrapper), Nutanix's AHV, oVirt (future kind of up in the air), OpenStack, KubeVirt, XCP-ng.
Problem is, many VMware users are set in their ways and want an exact and 1:1 replacement, without even considering they were only doings things that way because that was the only tool they knew and had at their disposal, not because it's actually a good way of doing things. Virtual Machines are just a means to an end, and a clunky one at that. VMware are actively pushing you away, time to start paying attention and considering what the organisation's actual needs are, and how are they best served. (And unless you're doing VDI, or almost exclusively using third party appliances delivered as VM images, that's not virtual machines).
If more people had used open source solutions in the first place then they wouldn't be in this situation that they find themselves in now.
DOJ and FTC enforce anti-trust and are more likely to be gatekeepers fo acquisitions, but while Broadcom is big and VMWare is big... Broadcom is going to ruin the product and that's not going to increase their marketshare and market power, so what's the problem?
It's like complaining about PE buying a failing company and then it goes bankrupt 3-7 years later. PE just accelerates the path, Toys R Us was already dead.
My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.
So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.
Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...
The sad thing is... this is nothing compared to what they've done to their cloud providers (formerly known as VCPP partners)... All resellers and cloud partners got a letter in december ending the program, with the 'good news' that some of them would be invited back somewhere early in 2024. The rest will have to turn off their workloads by end of March.
So these 4500+ cloud providers now (including the likes of OVH, Rackspace, IBM, ...) are now in limbo. Some will know next week or early feb if they can still legally host their customer's workloads. Else they will have 6 weeks (!) to migrate away to one of the partners that made the cut. Ignoring that many of these cloud partners have multi-year contracts with their end customers (which include banks, hospitals, public sector, ... especially the niche kind of environments that often have boutique requirements that make them unsuitable for an easy public cloud migration) they can now no longer fulfill.
Oh, and the license aggregator partners that used to run the admin side of this business and help those partners? They're being reduced to 10 worldwide too, and they're also in the dark.
At least their SaaS partners have a clear message: that business is dead. ("sunset")
It might not have all of the features of VMWare but it just works.
That's actually legal.
No shit, they have huge teams and this is their bread and butter. I have 3 people. I do know my stuff, which is why I would never use KVM and try to match that to the features VMWare gives me with a team of 3 (including myself).
Now with containers and kubernetes being the standard, openstack is another very very heavy distribution your organization must maintain
How could it be 4x cheaper in Opex when OpenStack is an open source project with multiple competing vendors available if you want support? In terms of non-licensing costs, OpenStack has a few more services that need to be deployed separately, but I don't see that costing 4x, especially when those services often don't have VMware equivalents.
The framework for deployment has vastly improved.
You will quickly find out why it hasn’t been done and why Redhat and Microsoft look so promising after all
Also, "bundled" stuff constraints you. You're forced into using VMware's crap orchestrator or log management tool because it's the one that works best with the mess that is other VMware products.
Correct. You have entire teams in your average Fortune 500 who have built the entire career on being the VMware team.
Curious: what does VMWare do that you can't do using Xen, KVM etc? Why was VMWare worth a billion?
I used to use VMWare ages ago (free version). It had nice GUIs; ad-hoc VM setup and management was miles easier than Xen (my driver). But most VM setup isn't ad-hoc, and isn't done through a UI, it's done through automation.
Broadcom seems to be a mean, nasty company: "Everyone hates us, we don't care."
The fact that open source exists today is because there are charitable people out there that are contributing it for free (or effectively free). Some business models employ open source as a marketing strategy for their paid parts, which is inevitably what you really would need (and thus have the "licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing" problem).
In the end, the pirate's product is free because they can make it free for way less effort, at the cost of the original creator of that software. While it's arguable that the piratee does not really do harm, as they wouldn't have paid for said software anyway, it is the original creator of the software that borne the cost of its creation.
* except in niches
I assume keys are another facet of keeping specific details around licenses vague enough that there's always room for MSFT to argue or bargain.
I never got the impression they cared where the keys came from. We knew exactly when they were coming every year. They were easy to deal with and I don’t recall ever having any issues.
We also had an ELA with VMware and they were awful. We only stuck with them because the software fulfilled a need. They treat you like dirt during the sale and every renewal. In between, they act as if they’re the ones doing you a favor by allowing you to be a customer. The support was terrible.
But oddly enough, they always gave us more licenses than we paid for. Every time, they would throw in products we didn’t purchase and weren’t cheap about it either. It was always like 100+ seats and one time it was 1000.
If I recall correctly, CALs don't really get 'installed', so my guess is that going off of 'provable licenses' keeps the audit process more uniform and streamlined.
Do you think major cloud providers haven't engineered the whole "You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day." step?
And virt-manager comes across from their docs as a bit on the basic side, proxmox and ovirt look a bit more polished - but again, companies are often wary of running their entire infrastructure on something where there isn't someone they can blame if it goes wrong - it's more about managing the risk than anything else.
I would absolutely love it if these sorts of companies used and relied on open source technologies more, but it's unlikely that they would pay for the staff with the relevant skills to manage it all, or pay enough to retain those staff that get trained up internally. (And I'm somewhat hopeful that this broadcom/vmware mess will cause more resources to flow into open source projects, or spark new developments in this space - cloud isn't always the answer to everything).
Major cloud providers have huge teams developing their compute as a service, that is what they do, that is the bread and butter.
I don't have the resources and team size to hack our own hypervisor/on-prem cloud solution.
I have a team of 3 people, that is it. I can't put 5 people on designing and maintaining a hodgepodge solution of various tools that get us to where vmware already has us. I need a turn-key solution that a small team can manage.
I'm not talking about ripping off the bandaid on the new sales channels, I'm talking about the fact that customers who have active licenses they've paid for can no longer activate them because they've shut these systems down
That inevitably is going to lead to a class action against them
Why would they think that after that disaster said customers will still be with them? I no longer have the displeasure of being a VMware customer, but if I saw what they're currently doing while jacking up prices and trimming support, what possible reason would there be to remain as a customer? Inertia? At some point you know the bill will be too high, so might as well move before it gets too bad.
VMware will end up like Symantec or similar, a shell of a company that people know of, but nobody actually uses on purpose.
It also doesn't help that many more traditional "IT" folks I've met don't want to learn anything new. I still know guys that don't understand IPv6, for example.
When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet spot, any more shifted the price dramatically).
So I eventually shifted our production to ganeti as well, because it had been so solid in dev/stg. It's all manageable from the Linux CLI, and it works really, really well. It's basically a management layer on top of kvm+qemu+drbd+ceph. https://ganeti.org/
The other popular option, which I ran in my previous work, is Proxmox. It is probably a more comfortable analog to VMWare users. https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...
I assume you're referring to the (ancient) VIC? Vsphere has been all web based for a long long time now. It had probably just never been upgraded.
Also I'm curious why the move to local storage, what do you do if a host dies?
What we did if a machine failed was: design our apps to be resilient. Basically everything we run can survive machine failures via either app design or corosync/pacemaker.
We're a pretty small shop, but we ran an experiment of trying a SAN (an HP of some sort) and every year like clockwork the redundant SAN would fall over and take our whole stack with it. Every year like clockwork HP would say "you aren't running the latest firmware, try this one". Equallogic at another job was super reliable but also was easily twice the price of the HP.
The simplicity and redundancy of local storage has largely been a huge win. We did have a couple of Dell machines where the drive arrays seemed to fall over, possibly because of too much IO, but Dell identified a particular SSD and the array has been solid for 3-4 years since then.
Desktop? Learn to live with Oracle's VirtualBox and pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration.
Small home lab? Hand-roll QEMU-KVM.
Worth mentioning that the Extension Pack is distributed separately[1] from VirtualBox itself and requires deliberate installation. Put more simply, it's an opt-in.
I'll also mention that, at least for most personal and even small business use cases, you probably don't need the features provided by the Extension Pack[2]:
* VirtualBox Remote Desktop Protocol (VRDP) support.
* Host webcam passthrough.
* Intel PXE boot ROM.
* Disk image encryption with AES algorithm.
* Cloud integration features.
[1]: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
[2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
[1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se...
[2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/
[3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...
You might find that some workloads are best fit for a modern orchestrator running containers such as Kubernetes or Nomad, or a SaaS, or a PaaS/IaaS, or a different hypervisor such as Proxmox or full infrastructure management platform such as OpenStack.