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The Broadcom licensing experience


Certainly not a scenario unitque to our orginization, but the Broadcom acquisition of VMware was a long, strange, uncertain trip.  Questions about licensing and support changes appeared to have taken a backseat to adding the "VMware by Broadcom" logo to everything...  It's still very much up in the air what the long term plan is after this last renewal - if we stay, will we need to scale down our vmware envrionment to keep it from being prohibitively expensive?  Will we start slowly moving Dev/Test and eventually Production workloads over to another hypervisor?  What will that hybrid environment look like and which hypervisor(s) are the best fit?  I read a great deal about other orgs and what they're doing and it usually falls into a few camps: "We're staying, but we're not happy because it's too spendy to move", "We're gracefully spinning down our vmware install base and moving to hyperV/Xen/KVM/Proxmox/AHV/Cloud/etc' or "We're abandoning ship right now".  I have yet to encounter anyone saying 'We love inci
nerating money in increased licensing fees'.  

We are fortunate enough to have a Technical Account Manager from VMware - it's been a great resource and gives our team a friendly face and a point of contact for questions and issues.  During the acquisition, it really felt like he was just as in the dark as us, the customer.  It was a few weeks of awkward uncertainty (through no fault of his) while we tried to deciper what licensing tier we would fall into and which features we would be potentially locked out of.  It was something akin to the last gasps of cable packages:  "What subscription do I need to get the most of what I want and the least of what I never watch?"  Sort of sad, in a way:  I love seeing technology advance and solve issues more and more efficiently; not get hamstrung by licensing and subscription models.  I'm very curious what the next couple years hold for VMware (By Broadcom) and if it will exist as we know it now?  I get there's an attitude of "Well, it's too big to fail" but at the same time there's no immutable law that says it mus
t be the de facto hypervisor of IT shops big and small.

Will VMware be a Blackberry-esque figure and have us old people tell stories about how they used to be on top until 'the great licensing unpleasantness of '24' (We can definitely workshop that name) ?  Or will Broadcom tire of it, realize they've squeezed almost all the $ they can from it and spin it off where it can be a functional company again? 






Links for those curious:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/computershare_vm_migration_project/
https://xcp-ng.org/
https://www.proxmox.com/en/
https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv
https://xenproject.org/
https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page
https://www.qemu.org/