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Sudden disturbing moves for IT in large companies, mandated by CEOs
- pinewurst 4y agoWhat’s strange here is OpenShift as a target. The last I looked, VMs were just getting initial support - certainly not enough functionality or proving to encourage one to rehost 100k VMs onto it as a platform. Also why the assumption that IBM would treat them better than Broadcom/CA?
- nyc640 4y agoA commenter on the thread mentioned the VMWare price hikes, so it could be as simple as IBM sensing an opportunity to poach customers from VMWare (probably more overlap in potential customers than AWS/GCP/Azure) and aggressively selling OpenShift to the C-suite with a promise of "if we can get a deal done this year, we'll give you heavily discounted pricing for X years". It does seem a bit strange that all of these requests supposedly come specifically "from the CEO" though, as I would expect most companies would have CTOs making purchase decisions like this.
- rootsudo 4y agoNot strange at all, CEO and Finance talk about budget. If cost is going to 10x, by doing nothing then it is going to be an quick decision. Most CTO's would've brought it up in the last quarter and be working on it now. This reddit post is just a late canary in the minefield that shows a what one sysadmin is doing at one MSP.
- jhickok 4y agoUnless something has changed recently, IBM doesn't push OpenShift but rather Cloud Paks which are tailored solutions built on OpenShift. IBM sellers don't get paid on vanilla OpenShift. I think if the story is to believed, the Red Hat sellers dedicated to big Fortune 500 accounts were given marching orders to reach out about recent negative publicity regarding vmware and the c-suite is asking for pricing/feature comparisons. This doesn't seem sudden or disturbing but rather what happens multiple times a year.
- markild 4y agoThough I do agree with your sentiment here, this saying comes to mind: "Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM".
- mhio 4y ago... most of the time =) https://www.itnews.com.au/news/newman-still-considering-legal-action-against-ibm-354491 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/newman-still-considering-lega...
- rwmj 4y agoWe have an open source tool for moving off VMware to KVM: https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html https://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v.1.html It installs virtio drivers into Linux & Windows guests and updates configuration and registry, so the VM will boot straight away on the target.
- trhoad 4y agoThe idea that Fortune 500 CEO's are cold-emailing companies to ask about assistance in re-platforming VM's is plainly ridiculous. Leadership taking a strategic decision to shop around for options following the VMWare price increase isn't so crazy. In fact, I'd say it's expected.
- pixelbeat__ 4y agoPossibly related to recent VMWare SEC fraud charges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988
- sithadmin 4y agoI seriously doubt there is a single executive or IT decision-maker in the world that will drop VMware because they were accused of revenue-smoothing.
- faeriechangling 4y agoI'm about 100x more concerned that VMware got bought out by Broadcom than I am that VMware is led by fraudsters.
- ukasyah900 4y ago
- egberts1 4y agoRedhat acquisition of Makara (Aug 2021) probably enabled a sweeter price point for CxO to buy and virtual host themselves.
- stingraycharles 4y agoInteresting, it does seem plausible that the cause is the VMWare price hike; as they specifically stated aiming at large enterprises because they’re slow to move, I wonder whether they may be overplaying their hand. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine these enterprises moving have a million of VMs before the end of the year, so they probably do have a point. But it just seems like short-sighted short-term thinking here, giving up enterprise market share in exchange for some additional $ now.
- mhio 4y agoAny reduction in memory managed by VMWare would be savings though. Say they need 50% of the VMWare license this year and 5% next year they're probably still happy. At least happy until whatever IBM has been promising behind closed doors runs out, and then IBM start turning the screws.
- andrenotgiant 4y agoFantasy fiction of a sysadmin that uses anonymity on the internet to craft themselves into someone more important than they are in real life.
- tablespoon 4y ago> Fantasy fiction of a sysadmin that uses anonymity on the internet to craft themselves into someone more important than they are in real life. No. Everything on reddit is true.
- kramerger 4y agoOn HN too (On the fence if this story is true or not, it could very well be)
- rootsudo 4y agoThis, unfortunately. Fortunately it's quickly nipped in the thread on reddit. The news isn't new, and companies already had shy of a quarter to work on it, but not that we hit Q3 and forecasting for Licensing is now kicking in for Q1-Q2 23' it's now sudden that the capex will be $$$ so there is a huge rush to migrate to mitigate licensing cost and sunk cost of a yearly licensing option. Most IT/Sysadmins do not communicate with Finance/FPA, but the ones that do are really ahead of the game. I'm fortunate that in my past and present org(s) I always include them on talks, and once they are on your side they are an invaluable ally. Money talks, finance talks. IT and Finance are back office administration, or the other side of the house in many orgs and should be talking about all terms of licensing and proper forcasting, but I do see it strained because IT focuses on what the tech can do, and finance only understands money and liability. But IT can also mitigate liability if it's framed properly. This MSP sysadmin is clearly only in tech and never went out of it. Which isn't bad. But it is a very, very common silo and trope for external IT partners.
- AyyWS 4y agoI lived through EMC's VMware tightening their grip, killing off our vendor "reflex firewall" by restricting their use of network APIs (to boost their Nicira acquisition which became NSX), then making us pay the vRAM vtax as part of the VSPP program (public cloud), and launching project Zephyr (vCloud Air) where they directly competed with us. RIP VMware. Been getting Novell vibes from them for the last 10 years.
- spoonjim 4y agoThis definitely feels fake. Either just a fabulist or someone mad at VMware and wants to scare them. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies do not know about the Linux virtualization market.
- recursv_thnkng 4y agoYeah this seems odd for a Fortune 500 company’s CEO asking specifically for Linux VMs. There’s not enough hours in the day where these CEOs would be so far down in the weeds of the business that they’re making VM flavor decisions.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThat's why it's remarkable and worth well remarking about.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoAs VMware is getting considerably more expensive it's reasonable to assume some CEOs are aware of that. It would be enough if one or two of them for one reason for another googled "cheap virtualization" or talked to some "tech guy" and somehow "Linux is cheap/free and can do virtualization" is what stuck with them. Then they talk to their friends at the golf club and after a while the topic reaches critical mass in those circles and spreads across those companies, probably not without playing "Chinese whispers" along the way.
- spoonjim 4y agoThere are close to 0 Fortune 500 CEOs who would be DIRECTLY reaching out to Linux virtualization companies. There could easily be a CEO who convenes a meeting with the CIO and COO to "Find 10% savings on operational software costs" but the idea that they are directly reaching out to vendors is one of those "tell me you've never worked with a Fortune 500 C-suite without telling me that you've never worked with a Fortune 500 C-suite" memes.
- 4y ago
- jasonhansel 4y agoMy suspicion: these CEOs are trying to scope out the cost of adopting OpenShift, so that, when they're negotiating prices with VMWare, they can show how much money they would save with OpenShift in the long term. This may be essentially just an attempt to gain some negotiating leverage in the face of potential VMWare price hikes.
- bluGill 4y agoNot to mention that you need to have the ability to switch anyway in case there is some other problem with VMWare. Anytime you have a single supplier that you depend on you should have some mitigation plan ready to go should that supplier fail you. The mitigation plan may be a lot more expensive than the supplier you are using, the goal isn't to use them it is just to ensure you have an option.
- mroche 4y agoThis is Reddit, so taking any claims with a severely hefty earth sized grain of salt.. > Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames. > Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically. As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments. We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we're killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it's not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That's what solutions like Nutanix are for. This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing/discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while. [0] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
- pabs3 4y agoSo OpenShift virt replaces oVirt? What was the reason for dropping oVirt?
- ghaff 4y agoKubeVirt is the upstream. Essentially so there is common management/operational model between virtualization and containers rather than having a Kubernetes-based one and a largely independent virtualization one.
- mroche 4y agoRemember, oVirt an upstream virtualization project, the product we derive from it is Red Hat Virtualization (RHV). From the development and deployment side of things, Red Hat has chosen a direction that is primarily container based going into the future, betting a lot of this on OpenShift. This decision was made a few years ago before anything with Broadcom/VMware was occurring. OpenShift Virtualization (based on KubeVirt) exists to provide a path of migration for "legacy" VM environments to containers, allowing admins to maintain one platform in a consistent manner (Kubernetes resources) while giving the teams that can to evolve their applications to containerized deployments. I believe there are plans to get the management capabilities of RHV into OpenShift Virtualization, I'm not quite sure how far that's gotten. In terms of virtualization solutions from Red Hat, we have the following: - KVM on RHEL. With the announcement of the RHV EOL, we removed the restrictions on how many guest VMs you can run simultaneously on RHEL. Note that this is different from the RHEL for Virtual Data Center (VDC) subscriptions we sell; it's just the removal of the contractual limitation, it doesn't entitle your guests. - Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: already discussed. - Red Hat OpenStack: If you need to be running a broad private cloud platform that has a virtualization component.
- sceptically 4y agoI am struggeling so hard... IT departments of two customer companies just moved VMs with a one week deadline to Azure and everything stopped working and I have the responsibility as external developer... Weird SSL errors I have no clue how to fix. I think they are talking about my clients in this reddit post.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
- jiggawatts 4y ago> Weird SSL errors Wild stab in the dark: the only things that would kill SSL/TLS on a disk-image based lift & shift where the certificates and associated config moves with the VM are: - An internal Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Distribution Point (CDP) was forgotten about and not moved along with everything else. These are often Enterprise PKI certificate authorities on servers like AD domain controllers. Admins will typically deploy new domain controllers in the cloud, and move everything else. They'll forget the old CAs and maybe even turn them off. This then causes SSL issues after... about a week. - Another possibility is that they incorrectly moved an outbound access restriction. Again, overzealous network security admins tend to block Internet access on servers and forget about CRLs. It's an especially common issue on "secure" environments where someone decides to block HTTP outbound and only permit HTTPS because it's "secure". However, CRLs (and OCSP) absolutely require HTTP and will never work via HTTPS by design.
- jb_s 4y agoAzure stopped supporting TLS 1.1 recently as well. If these are old systems, it could be this... if they're running .NET apps compiled against framework pre... 4.7? 4.8? TLS ain't gonna work...
- jiggawatts 4y agoThey would only be affected by the Azure TLS changes if they already used Azure APIs while on-prem, which would be unusual for an on-prem-to-cloud lift & shift.
- jupp0r 4y agoHow is this disturbing? People moving away from Windows must make everyone happy in my book. Probably just leverage in contract negotiations with VMWare as other comments have pointed out though.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoIt's a different market segment for sure, but at my company we spent considerable engineering resources migrating the codebase away from a proprietary embedded toolchain to gcc. The toolchain vendor's licensing scheme was expensive and annoying, and had no chance of sustainably scaling with the company's growth. They weren't willing to negotiate, and so they priced themselves out of relevance permanently. Maybe they thought we were bluffing?
- Havoc 4y agoIt’s the sysadmins sub - ie the crowd dealing with the fallout when migrations go bad. So sudden big moves of questionable technical merit are disturbing to them
- jupp0r 4y agoSure, but if you have ever administered Windows vs Linux servers, you’ll know which is much more pleasant to work with. Being on the hoo for the migration though …
- ik8s 4y agoThis looks fake. I just imagine someone shorting VMware’s stock on the other side of the keyboard… but who knows.
- vardump 4y agoCame to say exactly this. As much as I don't like VMWare as a company, I have to agree, this stinks.
- sithadmin 4y agoI quit my role at VMware a couple years ago to return to consulting. Nearly client I have worked with since then has dramatic reduction of vSphere footprint, if not outright elimination, on their roadmap. VMware was burning bridges long before the Broadcom announcement. Broadcom is fuel on the fire.
- phillipwei 4y agoI would suggest scanning through a few pages of OPs history to determine for yourself whether this is legit or not.
- krasin 4y agoI tried to follow the advice. It's clearly someone who is working with computers and for a long time. The comments are touching various topics (from tech to society to random stuff) and it's likely that the person is behind a keyboard, not on a mobile phone: comments are rather long on average. That's quite compatible with sysadmin psychological profile. Hard to say for sure, but at least I am confident that the OP is not a dog!
- paganel 4y agoFor what it’s worth, I’ve heard that when the current war in Ukraine started the Moscow/Russian employees of a big US networking hardware company of which everyone on this forum has heard about had their access cut off instantly, as in the invasion started at around 2AM and when the employees tried to get to work that morning they found out they could no longer access the company’s resources. Which tells me that that company’s HQ had already put a sort of kill switch in place for cases like this.
- ciceryadam 4y ago2 AM Moscow time is 3 PM Pacific time - if they had someone working west coast times it could be done in regular working hours. Dropping users from their VPN LDAP group (or directly from the VPN servers) doesn't take long.
- jollybean 4y agoFor sure. Critical technology companies for sure have these kinds of plans and things ready. And these big brand companies with international offices are full of spies it's good cover.
- kornhole 4y agoI know of another SW company that did the same thing. Everybody at the company was then told not to contact or communicate with any of the employees in Russia. Then one of the executives told everybody that it was a vendor who was providing the remote access solution who pulled out of the country in a blame shift we saw right through.
- urbandw311er 4y agoHas anybody considered that this could simply be a marketing tactic for OpenShift to get people talking about it.
- ForHackernews 4y agoTop comment: > VMWare had a price hike in August and is going to a very aggressive subscription model so that may play a role here. Sounds like CEOs trying to gain leverage in negotiating with VMWare.
- netrap 4y agoYes, and there are comments about Broadcom's history of price gouging after acquisitions.
- reportgunner 4y agoLooks like this is related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834988
- mijoharas 4y agoworth pointing out, that while the timing of these two articles might make you think that, cost increases in light of the broadcom acquisition seems far more likely.
- qwertyuiop_ 4y agoThey know something you don’t. That’s how most people make money. In all seriousness this appears to be cost cutting. They sat down with their CTOs and asked give me a list of cost cutting measures right down to the bone. The CTO says boss we pay for windows licenses, we could move to Linux and save a zillions of $$. CEO says “what are you waiting for do I have to tell you to get a new toilet roll if you run out of one ?”
- kornhole 4y agoThis is a possibility when pushing companies from perpetual licenses onto subscription and then upping their subscriptions. Wall street is heavily pressing SW companies to increase their ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) or some call it, you will own nothing and be happy. Switching to free software is looking more appealing at the enterprise level.