this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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This sounds like it’s exactly what Broadcom intended. They are going to charge as much as they can and companies that depend on it will have to pay until they can move away and that may take years. Broadcom didn’t dig a hole. They triggered a trap on their customers.
Exactly.
Many SMB's lack the in-house expertise to switch to something like Proxmox, and even then the support contract cost for things like Proxmox or TRUENAS, etc, isn't much less than what VMware intends to charge.
Management in such businesses have a hard time comprehending the value in paying for a transition when the annual support costs at the moment don't seem significantly lower (depending on number of processors, of course). There's still the migration cost, and the risk of migrating.
SMB tends to outsource their system management a great deal - I can only hope these vendors see the value in migrating away from VMware.
Everyone I talked to knew that this was what was going to happen when Broadcom bought VMware. I work in a relatively agile industry so everyone starting moving away from VMware as soon as the sale was announced. But I know a lot industries will be stuck for awhile.
What? Have you looked at the prices? Proxmox and TrueNAS have ridiculously low prices compared to VMware support. If we're talking about Nutanix and stuff, sure - they aren't cheaper than VMware. But Proxmox and TrueNAS are dirt cheap in comparison - not only because the documentation is pretty damn good, your standard, run of the mill Linux admin can do both, while Nutanix and the likes is an entirely different animal.
Full support from Proxmox isn't cheap, compared to even the new prices on VMware, if you look at the per processor cost that small businesses often have.
As I said - it depends on processor count. I know a number of small businesses that will be paying $5k/year for VMware, not much more than Proxmox top tier (which is what they would want).
Proxmox is about $1500 per processor, so would be $3k-$6k/year for these businesses. That's a trivial difference when you look at VMware already being installed and running, no transition costs, no risk of migration. You'd burn up a few $k difference with a single issue.
Then there's backup - I doubt VEEM supports VM's in Proxmox yet, and how do services like iLand work with Proxmox? These are associated costs, with migration costs and especially, risks.
Frankly, as much as VMware annoys the shit out of me, I couldn't recommend migrating to Proxmox for those businesses, today. At best I'd recommend planning a transition when they need to upgrade servers, and do it early as a parallel install to give transition time for the business.
SMB doesn't have the luxury of test labs for this stuff - they don't have the cash flow/finance room to justify it.
You're joking, right? VSphere is AT LEAST 1400 per year for the base license, that hasn't even got any support tickets - one Ticket is at least 300, 5 tickets is around 1200. Proxmox Full support starts at 340 Euros - with 3 Support tickets included. Then there's also the fact, that Proxmox doesn't have core limitations - meaning, you need at least two VSphere licenses for a 64-Core EPYC CPU. Oh, you want advanced networking or storage services? That's even more.
WTF? You can't even compare the 5k/year for VMware, just beacuse of the the single fact, that proxmox has UNLIMITED support tickets in the top tier. Not only that - it's 1,1k per processor without any core limit - VSphere still has that ridiculous 32-Core Limit. In many cases, VMware also has support times up to 24 hours - proxmox has max. 2 hours
If they don't, they don't have the cash or finance room to justify their IT, period. For most SMBs, IT has become the utter lifeline for everything they do, that's basically like when you are a machine shop without power. Meaning, the company is dead in the water for a serious period of time.