7 ms·

Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

108 points by Findus23 3y ago

kotaKat 3y ago
Thanks, Broadcom. You've taken the one little bit of my job left I enjoyed and turned it into something I never want to touch again even in my personal life.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I do recall several HN commenters called it back them when it was announced Broadcom would take over and cause a shit show.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible. 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.
  - chris_wot 3y ago
    So… what are the alternatives?
    - mvdwoord 3y ago
      The million (billion?) dollar question... problem is for a lot of large companies to do any sort of upgrade is already a long enough process. Moving everything to a different/new stack is simply not feasible in a short time frame. Add to this the issues with regulators (need to run on supported sw), especially at places like banks, it will be a bumpy ride I think.
    - linsomniac 3y ago
      We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it. 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/ 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/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...
      - nunez 3y ago
        I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.
        FireBeyond 3y ago
        Docs page: "Last updated: Jan 4, 2021."
        linsomniac 3y ago
        It's mostly in maintenance mode right now, but that's also kind of fine because it is pretty solid. I would like a better ZFS storage story, but it does have great DRBD, LVM, and Ceph stories.
      - SteveNuts 3y ago
        >Windows GUI 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?
        3y ago
    - xz18r 3y ago
      For everything VDI, take a look at Parallels RAS[1] or Parallels Secure Workspace[2]. For the hypervisors and cloud part, probably Nutanix[3]. [1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-server/ https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se... [2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/ https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/ [3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastructure https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult. 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.
      - Dalewyn 3y ago
        >pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration. 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 https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
        jandrese 3y ago
        For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      Evaluate what workloads you have and what is the best way to deliver them instead of searching to replace VMware with the exact same thing. Virtual Machines are nothing more than a means to an end, and nobody on the business side actually cares about them. 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.
  - gertrunde 3y ago
    They've also said they're trying to spin off the EUC element (i.e. Workspace One, Horizon and associated bits). (Potentially Carbon Black may be up for and exit as well). Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for-end-user-computing.html https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...
RockRobotRock 3y ago
You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one. You paid for the product, fuck them.
- dijit 3y ago
  I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. 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.
  - laurowyn 3y ago
    Certainly an interesting one. 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.
    - heisenbit 3y ago
      Depending on jurisdiction there may be rules or case law related to re-engineering and patching of purchased software to keep it working. This is again a reminder how important the right to repair is.
  - chii 3y ago
    > but one or the other must be true. 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.
gertrunde 3y ago
No great surprise there. 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...
sofixa 3y ago
It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed... I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.
- mixdup 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they already paid for?
  - newsclues 3y ago
    Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible. 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.
    - mixdup 3y ago
      But they're cutting off customers who have paid and are under contracts 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
      - newsclues 3y ago
        They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.
gminic 3y ago
Does this licensing problem affect the Spring Framework as well?
miohtama 3y ago
Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.
- hitpointdrew 3y ago
  Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors. 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.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?
    - gertrunde 3y ago
      KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment. 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?
      - icedchai 3y ago
        Of course, they build their own tooling. They'd have to build their own to operate at scale. For a small business or home lab operation that needs dozens of VMs, that already exists (as pointed out by another poster, who mentioned libvirt and virt-manager.)
        gertrunde 3y ago
        libvirt, virt-manager, et al are all perfectly suitable tools for an average member of the HN audience, or someone playing with a home lab, or any number of other technically proficient users - but those people are not the people who are buying vmware's products. 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).
thayne 3y ago
Why does the SEC keep allowing acquisitions like this? And why are there not more legal consequences to this kind of behavior after an acquisition?
- toast0 3y ago
  Why would the SEC care? Shareholders of VMWare were properly compensated, and shareholders of Broadcom should know by now that Broadcom management seeks to buy companies and ruin their products. Nothing securities fraud about that. 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.
- oarla 3y ago
  Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.
  - thayne 3y ago
    > but they have bigger fish to fry. My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.
hocktheman 3y ago
What an absolute shitshow. These are customers who have paid major $$$ for something they now can't redeem. 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")

108 points by Findus23 3y ago

Thanks, Broadcom. You've taken the one little bit of my job left I enjoyed and turned it into something I never want to touch again even in my personal life.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

I do recall several HN commenters called it back them when it was announced Broadcom would take over and cause a shit show.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible. 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.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  So… what are the alternatives?
  - mvdwoord 3y ago
    The million (billion?) dollar question... problem is for a lot of large companies to do any sort of upgrade is already a long enough process. Moving everything to a different/new stack is simply not feasible in a short time frame. Add to this the issues with regulators (need to run on supported sw), especially at places like banks, it will be a bumpy ride I think.
  - linsomniac 3y ago
    We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it. 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/ 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/overview https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...
    - nunez 3y ago
      I used ganeti 10 years ago at a company I was at. It was really great then. Glad to see it's still worked on.
      - FireBeyond 3y ago
        Docs page: "Last updated: Jan 4, 2021."
      - linsomniac 3y ago
        It's mostly in maintenance mode right now, but that's also kind of fine because it is pretty solid. I would like a better ZFS storage story, but it does have great DRBD, LVM, and Ceph stories.
    - SteveNuts 3y ago
      >Windows GUI 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?
      - 3y ago
  - xz18r 3y ago
    For everything VDI, take a look at Parallels RAS[1] or Parallels Secure Workspace[2]. For the hypervisors and cloud part, probably Nutanix[3]. [1] https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-server/ https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/remote-application-se... [2] https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/ https://www.parallels.com/products/psw/ [3] https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastructure https://www.nutanix.com/uk/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastruc...
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    if you're large enough (i.e. you have the compute demand and the staff to justify the expense for the latter), OpenStack - you should be able to keep most of your hardware, OpenStack supports everyone and their dog, which is what makes the "find capable operations staff" and "get it running" parts so much more difficult. 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.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >pray you never ever get audited for the guest toolkit acceleration. 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 https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads [2]: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#intro-installing
      - jandrese 3y ago
        For what it is worth I get a lot of use out of VirtualBox and I've never seen much point in installing the extension pack.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Evaluate what workloads you have and what is the best way to deliver them instead of searching to replace VMware with the exact same thing. Virtual Machines are nothing more than a means to an end, and nobody on the business side actually cares about them. 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.
- gertrunde 3y ago
  They've also said they're trying to spin off the EUC element (i.e. Workspace One, Horizon and associated bits). (Potentially Carbon Black may be up for and exit as well). Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for-end-user-computing.html https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...

RockRobotRock 3y ago

You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one. You paid for the product, fuck them.

dijit 3y ago
I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. 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.
- laurowyn 3y ago
  Certainly an interesting one. 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.
  - heisenbit 3y ago
    Depending on jurisdiction there may be rules or case law related to re-engineering and patching of purchased software to keep it working. This is again a reminder how important the right to repair is.
- chii 3y ago
  > but one or the other must be true. 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.

gertrunde 3y ago

No great surprise there. 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...

sofixa 3y ago

It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed... I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.

mixdup 3y ago
Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they already paid for?
- newsclues 3y ago
  Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible. 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.
  - mixdup 3y ago
    But they're cutting off customers who have paid and are under contracts 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
    - newsclues 3y ago
      They have budgeted for lawsuits and don’t care. It’s a feature not a bug to get rid of clients who won’t be milked to the bone.

gminic 3y ago

Does this licensing problem affect the Spring Framework as well?

miohtama 3y ago

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

hitpointdrew 3y ago
Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors. 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.
- icedchai 3y ago
  KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?
  - gertrunde 3y ago
    KVM does work great, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of the comment. 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?
    - icedchai 3y ago
      Of course, they build their own tooling. They'd have to build their own to operate at scale. For a small business or home lab operation that needs dozens of VMs, that already exists (as pointed out by another poster, who mentioned libvirt and virt-manager.)
      - gertrunde 3y ago
        libvirt, virt-manager, et al are all perfectly suitable tools for an average member of the HN audience, or someone playing with a home lab, or any number of other technically proficient users - but those people are not the people who are buying vmware's products. 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).

thayne 3y ago

Why does the SEC keep allowing acquisitions like this? And why are there not more legal consequences to this kind of behavior after an acquisition?

toast0 3y ago
Why would the SEC care? Shareholders of VMWare were properly compensated, and shareholders of Broadcom should know by now that Broadcom management seeks to buy companies and ruin their products. Nothing securities fraud about that. 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.
oarla 3y ago
Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.
- thayne 3y ago
  > but they have bigger fish to fry. My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.

hocktheman 3y ago

What an absolute shitshow. These are customers who have paid major $$$ for something they now can't redeem. 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")