I do suspect they'll settle but I doubt it will result in a new contract. They've already made significant investments migrating off VMWare and none of those will snap back with a new contract. Tesco was also cut off from updates and support, and so had to purchase 3rd party support, so they have real damages.

Eh, it's still the least hassle at scale for your own data centers and VCF 9 isn't exactly low tech - it does things no one else really can do to the same level of quality (DRS, HCX, NSX, VSAN all come to mind) , the question is, is it worth the money? Unless you're over 10,000 VMs, probably not.

OpenShift is okay but has quirks unless you have a major Kubernetes staff; Proxmox is good for most but I wouldn't use at massive scale. Azure Stack/ Hyper-V can work but has its own quirks.

Compared to something like proxmox? Sure.

It takes a long time to change corporate mindset.

Comments like this are a sign of someone living in a bubble.

Broadcom doesn't care. They just want to milk VMware for all it's worth to goose their short-term profits.

1. Tesco is migrating off

2. Tesco had a good deal they paid for ahead of time, with the full support cycle detailed in the contract that Broadcom is refusing to honor.

3. Broadcom is arguing that since Tesco is migrating off, they can't sue for damages. Tesco would probably counter argue that the migration is due to Broadcom not honoring the original contract.

Because there's no business potential.

20 years ago anyone and everyone had datacenters full of VMware. Now most of it is stuff that a company hasn't bothered to move to cloud yet. There's a few things it's still the best choice for but those are niche things. Like stuff that absolutely needs to be self hosted for privacy or security. The time of VMware being the default is long gone.

Moving from a mainstream to a niche product means a market that's shrinking. No growth potential. No potential for new competitors to start up. Proxmox is good but it's not exactly enterprise.

This is why Broadcom bought it and sucks the most value out of it before it completely disappears.

Big ships turn slowly is all. It’s no easy feat to move away from something like that.

because there are no real alternatives. Everything that could be considered an alternative has drawbacks or things that are missing. Proxmox comes close but doesn't offer proper enterprise support contracts, so you'd be stuck with a 3rd party.

Then there's training. you can't easily switch your admins and service desk techs to a different product. That alone takes months, of not years, and costs a lot. Rewrite all processes, etc.

Then there's 3rd party integration. Since VMware was basically the "default", most 3rd party products offered turnkey integration into VMware, and VMware only. Think backup applications or security etc. You don't switch backup vendors easily (for the same reasons - training, features, ...) and if you do consider it, it adds to the cost

This is why, for many companies that don't have 50-100 people or more in their IT department, it's more expensive to switch away from VMware so they grudgingly pay, while trying to move as much workload away from it as possible.

There is always some dependency which would be devastating to lose. Maybe it is VMWare, maybe it is your Oracle database, could be your Visa payment processor. Sometimes you have to accept the risk and move on without owning a copper mine so as to smelt chips.