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We are a small/micro shop with 3 ESXi hosts. Recently upgraded our servers a couple of years ago and purchased new perpetual licenses for Essentials Plus and vSAN Standard. We pay about $5k with CDW annually for support.

Our term isn’t up until the end of the year, so to get ahead of the game for our accounting department I initiated contact with their specialists to get an early quote from them.

According to CDW’s VMware people we would need to move to Foundation, and annually we would be on the hook for $30k. double-you-tee-eff are they for fscking real?

I would’ve avoided VMware altogether years ago had I known this!

So now I’m thinking, upgrade everything from 7 to 8. and just hold onto these licenses until EOL. But support is really helpful I’ve had some problems in the past and they’ve helped at odd hours.

Anyone else moving away from VMware? Are there any creative solutions?

11 Spice ups
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I’d ride out your license, but start the migration process well ahead of expiration.

We are actively migrating many of our clients from VMware to Hyper-V after they get up off the floor from receiving their VMware license renewal.

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It’s nuts for the VMware people and the response is minimal at best. Definitley just ride it out and the best of luck with the migration, really sorry that your having to face this.

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Essentials Plus is going to be still around and is replaced by the essentials plus kit and vsan is impacted but it depends what version you have.

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This is like the 2nd or 3rd post I’ve see like this; about how the renewal cost for VMware is like triple from what it used to be. I have to wonder if Broadcom just wants to kill VMware off, because I think many customers will leave as a result. What business sense does this make from Broadcom, to gouge their new customer base like this when they takeover a company? I can see raising rates at a reasonable rate every renewal, but not immediately hike the price to insane levels.

I’m genuinely curious though. Does Broadcom think this price strategy will work well for them? I don’t see it ending well.

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Here is some on the transition

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You would need to move to foundation because of the vSAN environment but it doesn’t sound like you were quoted correctly. The model has taken a page from Microsoft, it’s now licensed by core count with a 16 core minimum per CPU. Essentials is $70/per core/year and vSAN is $92/per core/ year. That is msrp, so depending on the core count of your host plus the number of CPUs, that is what they should have quoted you. There is also an HCI package model that has perpetual licensing per CPU. Happy to help if needed.

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Any time I see that a company is merging or that their ownership is changing (going public or back to private) is a sign that it’s time to start looking at alternatives. I’ve never seen a change like that that is beneficial to the end customer.

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Yes please, I generally trust my reps at CDW for good information (why I keep using them). They are saying Foundation is required to run vSAN.

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Broadcom is solely interested in extracting maximum value from their largest customers. They use less support because they likely employ entire teams that have extensive VMware knowledge. They can’t easily change away from VMware because they likely have hundreds or thousands of VMware nodes deployed, and replacing all that with another hypervisor is a lengthy process. In the meantime, Broadcom is going to charge them up the wazoo to stay with what they know.

If that’s not you, then you should look elsewhere, immediately. VMware for SMB/SME (small customers) is essentially dead (or a very poor value proposition at this point). It’ll go the way of large mainframes - only for specialized use cases, and supported by the greybeards who remember how to use it.

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Since I work in this space and want to adhere to the rules of the community, I sent you a direct message.

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There are many of them, and they pop-up daily.

It was posted on other websites that Broadcom are interested in, I think, the top 500 largest companies, and many people are disgruntled.

Not least of which are home labbers who no longer have the free offering, and yes, before someone mentions VMUG, I doubt a home user would pay this if their line of businesses move away from VMware, nor would they want to for a home lab where there are so many other options out there, and also free.

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Something from Vmware website. VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation and as an add-on to VMware vSphere Foundation

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I dropped my subscription to VMUG when I changed jobs and stopped supporting VMware. Now in my home lab, I just have a few VMs and containers on my Synology…

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We did our renewal back in Oct (?) and got a deal for the year. I am not looking forward to our conversation with CDW for next year’s renewal.

I am, unfortunately, locked into VMWare for the foreseeable future. We are using Cisco VoIP and they require VMWare for it to be a supported configuration.

People saw this type of thing happening when the merger was announced and were told “No, they learned their lessons from before.” Ha!

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Hey OP,

We’re hearing this frustration across the board and wanted to share that we’ve launched our seamless switch program for those interested in exploring alternative solutions for their IT infrastructure.

If you are open to new solutions, now is a great time to sign-up and connect with one of our experts at Scale Computing to see if we might be a good fit for your org. Since switching vendors can be a huge undertaking, we’ve added contract term coverage for up to 12 months, access to our free migration tool, and a free pass to our annual conference (see all the details here ). Sign up for a demo and receive a SC//Platform pricing quote, and as a token of our appreciation for your time, we’ll send you a FREE Fitbit Versa 4.

Hoping you find a solution that works out best. Please reach out if you’d like more info!

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Correct. vSAN only sold now based on capacity for VVF or VCF.

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Currently the only thing that is being offered perpetual is VxRail. Even Dell has been having us switch vSan orders to VxRail. I am dreading our VDI renewal this year even though that was moved to a subscription based last year, but it only is covered for 3 years.

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Broadcom as a whole doesn’t care what happens and they have taken the Microsoft strategy in buying up small companies and making their software, tools and Windows enhancements disappear.

Few years ago our MPLS was lost from Windstream and in that package included self managed tools like Message Labs Email filter, Symantec gateway services and we were never warned about the Broadcom purchase then one day we could no longer release blocked emails, alter mail filters and list or delist suspected dangerous IP traffic.

To me they are nothing more than the scum of the earth.

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VDI, is being spun out it will be a different company doing the renewal in 3 years.

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