[rwmj]

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.

It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.

There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).

[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]

Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

[stackskipton]

>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.

Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter

If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.

[sokoloff]

The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)

[sofixa]

> I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates

Also known as incompetence. Broadcom's business model is public. Their plans for VMware were public from when the acquisition was announced.

Those companies had years to plan how to get rid of everything VMware. Instead they paid through the nose to postpone the inevitable for a few years.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.

[stackskipton]

Sure but whole strategy is "Jack up prices by 500%, cut expenses by 70% and make more money in short term"

What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.

[sidewndr46]

Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy

[twoodfin]

I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.

[rwmj]

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

[sofixa]

> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of those, because everyone who will at some point try to get rid of them. Not all, not immediately, but the ultimate trajectory is down.

[2b3a51]

Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4?

(As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).

[twoodfin]

IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.

It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.

[bigstrat2003]

Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.

[nix0n]

> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal

I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.

If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?

[twoodfin]

Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.

[lokar]

They explained that fairly clearly

[Spooky23]

They make AI crap. The future is Mars.

[BLKNSLVR]

But Snickers is Mars with nuts, so it's both healthier and more filling.

The future is Snickers!

[simoncion]

> Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.

They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.

[twizod]

I think your assessment is pie in the sky. I am moving hundreds of VM's per day and the amount of anchors attached to the source VM's is ridiculous. LB's that are mapped via VMware object, VLAN's extended for the migration but not working, SR-IOV enabled, etc etc....you may have the most perfect setup here but in real life I've never seen it that simple so I truly doubt what you're saying.

[rwmj]

The software deals with all that. It's all open source, you can go & look for yourself! I don't have to prove anything.

[Shitty-kitty]

Broadcom is acting like a VC. Quickly milk as much as you can then sell the carcass.

[lokar]

They don’t hide this

[proxysna]

Nice. Thanks for the insight!

[throwawaypath]

Trading Broadcom for IBM... what could go wrong?

[rwmj]

Openshift Virt is fully open source under a BSD license, so you now have legal options to move to a competitor or even manage it yourself (although I wouldn't recommend the latter, even I don't manage OSV myself).

[throwawaypath]

No one is arguing that upstream Kubernetes pieces aren't open source. OpenShift is not open source. If it was, why does RedHat sell licenses for it, gate the binaries, and not share the byte-for-byte reproducible sources for said binaries?