(CrankyAvenger) 1

My Broadcom support for VMware ESXi expired about a month ago, and they want (literally) 10x what we were paying two years ago for support. They clearly don’t want our business, and we plan to move away from VMware, but it will take a few months.
The licenses installed on my vCenter and my vSphere hosts are perpetual - they all say “Never” under “Expiration” on the Licensing tab of vCenter. My reseller thinks that my systems are only working in a grace period mode and is worried they will stop working on Friday. I think perpetual means perpetual, and so they’ll continue to work and just won’t have support or get updates after that point.
Wondering if anyone else has faced this issue and what their outcome was.

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2

In most languages it does, but this is Broadcom.

There are many, many topics on this, specifically the increase in costs on here.

How many hosts and VMs are we talking - do you know what direction you are moving, and if so have you started?

Depending on volume of machines and data, do you have an estimated migration plan?

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3 hosts, 45 VMs. all of them running on Dell/EMC SAN, 7.2TB. We have an affiliate group that runs Nutanix - that is where we’re going, because they have capacity on their stack. We don’t have a plan worked up yet.

4

I would start preparing a plan.

While your license should not expire, with the rules now changing with the vendor though, it’s hard to tell what may come with that.

Part of the added issue is a minimum 72 core license, so if your 3 hosts have 2x10 core CPUs each (20 per host) that’s 60. You’d still need to license 72 cores.

Depending on your existing license type, are you able to drop packages, for example, from Enterprise plus to standard?

5

We’re Essentials Plus, which is of course gone. We tried to drop packages all the way to Standard, which still costs more than we can afford (because the present administration is mucking up our funding).
We will start preparing a plan - we would have already, but we’ve been dealing with the funding muck-up.
My main concern is that I hear Subscriptions actually stop working on expiration - no features, can’t reboot a server, etc. I can deal with losing vMotion or DRS while I’m planning and moving VMs. I just haven’t heard any case story like mine - perpetual license in place, but no support, what happens? What exactly do I lose?

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6

But you are not on a subscription.

Support.

It is as simple as it sounds.

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7

I’m with you my expectation is I lose support not actual access to my running VMware once my support subscription runs out… I’m a couple years out though so your the guinea pig in this case, so please let us know the outcome.

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In the portal you lose the ability to merge, split, upgrade, or downgrade the licenses. So if you had paid support you needed to have upgraded the licenses prior to support expiration. Other than that you should still function. As to getting updates, that is going to become more troublesome. I suspect that even before October when vSphere 7 goes end of support, it will become impossible.

  • Only supported versions of the product are eligible for Downgrading. If the older version is already in an End of Life status, it will not be eligible for a downgrade.
  • Once contract is expired customers cannot upgrade/ downgrade any license.
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9

We are in the same boat with the renewal fees. As a department, we have decided to renew for one year to give us time to move our environment to the cloud.

Broadcom has a strange business plan. Buy a lucrative server solution, then price themselves out of the market.

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10

My contracts say in use but expired in the support portal. I am all on my own for updating and any issues that occur as a result. The systems are still registered and running. Interesting to see what will happen if they try to stop my systems from functioning. Particularly with payment of future renewals.

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11

They’re not pricing themselves out of the market, they’re pricing you out of their business.

One expects you are quite a small company to them.

Ironically, they seem to have made more than expected in sales - either people have too short notice and buy another year, 3 or 5 locked in prices to buy time before migrating, people have migrated, or people see the cost of moving still more expensive than paying their costs.

If anything, it’s good for the competition, because as people migrate, new features appear, new backup solutions adopt them and the skillset of another product grows.

Financially to Broadcom, your company is likely a minnow to an ocean of whales.

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I know we aren’t huge, but other companies I am aware of that are much larger are moving from VMWare. Poor support and overpricing are the reasons.

13

Each to their own.

Of the limited times I did use support, they was superb, I haven’t needed support in some 15 years though.

As for their price, you get what you pay for. Want the top-tier product, pay for it.

Good luck though.

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14

further to this point

Will not be available now without subscription token configured. It will be interesting to find out if there is a workaround or if all of us past this update are now stuck at current level of ESXi 7 patch until we subscribe to the newer extortion pricing scheme. Even more interesting to find out if there is a legal purchased license compliant workaround.

Edit: my post on the topic to take that discussion there instead of here

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