Killing VMware ➹

The amount of aggravation Broadcom has been causing VMware customers and partners is certain to become the stuff of legend in IT circles–Since getting wind of this I have been personally involved in at least three instances of major customers (one of them a sizable European hosting company) setting some hard dates for cutoff to another solution (either on premises or in the cloud), and smaller shops are already deploying KVM or Hyper-V in multiple shapes and forms.

Before you ask, Proxmox is not really a suitable replacement for some of VMware’s key enterprise features. But it might get there in a few years.

The truth is, Broadcom is also setting some companies back years in terms of infrastructure management capabilities or application redundancy, because they locked themselves into VMware’s VMotion or SDN technologies and now they have to tear all of that down.

The bet on Broadcom’s side seems to be that customers will pay to maintain the status quo rather than endure the pain of change, but they seem to have massively overplayed (and overcharged) their hand here.