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So previously a discussion was started about cease and desist letters.

More people are reporting these and those who have perpetual licenses but have applied updates less than the critical CVSS 9.x ones are now also receiving letters.

Imgur

(2936) Broadcom’s VMware Takeover Just Hit a New Low.. - YouTube

And before someone posts about needing an official source and not trusting YouTubers, there isn’t one, but do your own research.

Broadcom sent me a Cease & Desist Letter! - Virtualization - Spiceworks Community

@robhall

For those who don’t know, too. Updates are also now behind a paywall, where you need a ‘token’ that validates you have a subscription to download updates.

All i need now is a long-weekend and a Proxmox ISO…

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It was only a matter of time…
…sad.

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It’s like they went into a room and brainstormed ideas about how to make a perpetual license meaningless.

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They’re certainly doing a good job at alienating customers.

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I would almost guarantee this is EXACTLY what they did.

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Or OpenStack… I’m considering a deployment in the lab to do comparison testing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m loving Proxmox, but I want to keep my eye on what’s out there.

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I got my cease & desist last week. Switching to Hyper-V which I’m not liking but never going back to VMWare.

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Bro…actually I also received such a letter in March…I wanted to ask here but we asked the Broadcom local rep and still awaiting for a reply…

  1. Can we still use the VMware 7.x and/or 8.x without patches as we are/should be able to use it as it only says we are not entitled to updates EXCEPT for zero-day patches ?
    BTW, what is CVSS 9.0 or greater ?? Any past VMware such issues ?

  2. We have purchased VMware support for 3 yrs as at 17 Jan 2024.
    So the email to the rep was kinda direct and rude (like a WTF email) ?

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@adrian_ych

  1. If you have a perpetual license, you can use the products for as long as you like, but you can’t apply patches, only security updates with a CVSS score of 9 or greater (Critical)
  1. If you have been running without a subscription for support, and you’ve downloaded patches, you’re not allowed. I don’t think they care if it’s recent or in the past.

@robhall
I’ve been trying a few and each have their own pros and cons.

Hyper-V is not my bag - I do use it, both on my work laptop and home PC, but server side I wouldn’t use it.

Proxmox I am running nested and it’s doing what I want and it’s a lot simpler compared to Hyper-V with the basics. Adding shared storage for example or mounting ISOs from a network is a PITA with Hyper-V and their MMC console is awful. SCVMM is just too cumbersome for a lab.

OVirt and XCP-NG are ok too, a little basic looking but they also do the job.

Nutanix is just a mess and has an odd setup for a hypervisor for home use.

KVM or derivatives like LibVert, Openstack and Qemu are all very similar to oVirt and Proxmox, it’s just visuals and how in-depth one wants to get.

I’ve been labbing a few of these since Broadcom got involves as I knew this chaos was coming. They’ve always been on my list to look at, but the Broadcom takeover has just pushed this.

In all likelihood I will migrate to Proxmox at some point.

I appreciate some people may like some of the above, I’m just sharing my personal view on them.

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Actually last year we also looked at RedHat hypervisor but I would think the main thing is that vCenter is so easy to use…

And also ESXi (7.x) have fewer restrictions on older OSes.

Now Veeam Backup & Replication 13 is ceasing support for older OSes and also stopping reverse incremental backups…

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I know, I posted about it.

As for older OSes, we both know they should be retired, but this isn’t always possible - nothing stops you running these on another hypervisor, it doesn’t have to all be in one place.

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Nutanix is just a mess and has an odd setup for a hypervisor for home use.

Harsh and clearly based on very little actual experience of the product.

As someone who has used Nutanix in production environments for 7 years this is not helpful or true.

It should also be noted that unlike Vmware Nutanix have a much friendlier approach to subscription licensing in that in the last year licensing changed to a per core only model (rather than that and flash licensing) that covers both updates and support.

As for it being a mess- thats just nonsense, yes it takes some time getting used to it but across the board from features ease of management, through performance and reliability and finally their support its far from a “mess”.

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Perhaps

I’m sorry i didn’t provide you with a full break down of my dislikes, I summarised my view of each of the above products, for simplicity.

As for experience, I’ve not had 7 years like you, but enough to dislike it compared to others - your view of my reply being harsh is your personal opinion, like mine is of the product.

I’m glad it works for you and you like it, but my view of it still stands.

It’s a preference, we’re each entitled to one.

To be clear though, I did say for a home lab, for a business in production, this will be different.

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I think you summarized the options pretty succinctly. I came to the same conclusion, and decided on proxmox for our new hypervisor platform. We’ve been using it in production for about 5 months now, with petasan as the underlying storage. We’re also using proxmox backup server for backups, and so far we’ve been very happy with the choice. It contains all of the features of VMWare that we were using, and the addition of the backup server is just icing on the cake as it allowed us to eliminate our Veeam spend as well.
I feel like the UI could use a bit more polishing, but it’ll get there.

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Hey… this topic was mentioned in an article:

Sorry, correction, it was this topic:

Same issue, but different topic.

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I think most would agree with you. The price hike is outrageous.

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  • in 2004 VMware was bought over by EMC for USD 625M
  • In 2007 (Aug 7), VMware shares launched at $29 and closed at $51
  • In 2016, Dell acquired EMC for $62Bn
  • In 2022, Broadcom acquired VMware for $69Bn ($61Bn cash & $8Bn debts)

So Dell bought EMC for free after selling VMware to Broadcom ??

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That is a head-scratcher that they didn’t make a profit. Technically, with inflation they lost money.

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Do they still have the rest of EMC though? If they only split off VMWare and sold that for more than they paid for EMC, whatever is left could still be valuable theoretically.

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Good point. I concede I was in error :grinning_face:

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