The End of an Era - Navigating the Transition from VMware

My VMware journey began toward the end of 2006.? A friend extended an invite to see what he had been up to in his big fancy corporate datacenter.? While the datacenter was impressive with rows and rows of noisy server and networking gear it was what was happening on that hardware that was really intriguing, virtualization.? Sure, virtualization had been around for a long time, always the domain of IT departments with huge budgets, but what was on display actually worked!??

As a skeptic of vendor marketing departments and their promises always falling short it was easy to dismiss what virtualization meant in real-world terms at least when it came to the small to medium sized business market.? For me, “the trip was often different than the brochure”.? The idea of a “computer” being just a file was so weird, and it was even stranger that the computer itself didn’t even know that it wasn’t a physical thing. As long as you had access to a compatible hypervisor that file was portable and could be started anywhere often with better performance than if it existed on dedicated hardware.? Like the way a PDF could be opened anywhere as long as you had a PDF reader.? This was absolutely wild and not only did things work as advertised it was really simple in practice.? VMware ESX and later ESXi were revolutionary.? Things were about to change in a measurable way in terms of price and general accessibility with what eventually became known as vSphere 4.?

Two years later I purchased Mastering VMware vSphere 4 (Scott Lowe, 2009) and read it cover to cover. Obviously, there were more exciting things to read but this one book changed the way I architected customer solutions and the overall value we could deliver without charging very much more. We were immediately able to offer much more flexible and scalable systems with significantly better backup, recovery and DR outcomes.? In 2010, we started selling what would eventually be known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and later “The Cloud” before anyone really had a good name for it. This service consisted of a somewhat large VMware cluster consisting of HP Proliant servers, HP Lefthand SANs, HP Procurve Switching and Watchguard firewall appliances being backed up to several HP LTO Autoloaders driven by, in the early years, Symantec Backup Exec.? I know, I know, Backup Exec deserves its own story.??

There were some interesting alternative Hypervisors, specifically Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Also, some compelling hyper-converged solutions such as those from Nutanix, have come to market as well.? In my experience, VMware was superior in the ways that mattered specifically the “thick” management application, disk and virtual network management, and most crucially shared-storage management and integration with 3rd party SAN solutions.? Also, VMware offered their free “VMware Converter” software which enabled quick and painless physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual conversions (V2V) that worked almost every time the first time.?

The beginning of the end, or so it seemed…?

The vSphere platform continued to evolve at a measured but steady pace with some licensing/pricing hiccups along the way until May of 2016 when VMware announced that the “thick” management client was going away.? This may not sound like a big deal until you attempted to use the alternatives which came in the form of a Flash based management interface and the newer HTML5 “fling”.? No big deal, right?? Wrong, Flash was on the way out to begin with and filled with security concerns and the HTML5 management interface was slow and feature incomplete.? Neither solution was a suitable replacement for the thick client.? It took several years for the HTML5 client to be anywhere close in terms of features and performance of the “thick” desktop management application.? In the summer of 2016, I remember going to a large industry trade show in Las Vegas and stopping by the VMware booth and speaking with some of the representatives about this decision and how in my opinion this seemed really boneheaded made by people who really didn’t use the products on a day-to-day basis.???

To me, if you were going to announce the deprecation of one of the best things about the platform the alternative(s) should be worthy successors.? The VMware representatives were totally tone deaf, defensive and adamant that this was the right decision because it would enable this, that and the other thing none of which anyone really wanted or cared about. I’d argue that the userbase STILL doesn’t need what the HTML5 client brought to the party that couldn’t have been integrated into the “thick” desktop application.? Some suitable alternative paths forward included offering the “thick” client for core day to day tasks and HTML5 for the newer edge cases or taking the community up on open sourcing the “thick” client for continued development.? VMware held to the decision and lost one of their major advantages.? This left many wondering what alternatives exist and what does this say about the product management decisions on a go-forward basis.?

Fast forward to December of 2018, two and a half years later, when the HTML5 client became fully featured relative to the “thick” client it STILL had major performance issues which were ultimately resolved in later 6.7 releases and even more so in 7.x.?

I’ve personally come to be at peace with the HTML5 client, but it took a long time and during that time a lot has changed.? By this time VMWare had changed ownership several times and Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) had come a really long way.? Like a lot of things in tech VMware is kind of a question mark as in “You’re using VMware, why?” There was a push to get customers to use VMware on Azure and AWS amongst other public cloud platforms.? To me, there really wasn’t much reason to do this, I understand VMware’s rationale but if the customer’s goal was to migrate to these platforms natively who needs VMware anyways.? Microsoft offers a hybrid-cloud management solution for both hybrid on-prem and Azure resource and workload management.?

Enter Broadcom and the final nail in the coffin…?

In May of 2023 Broadcom announced its intention to acquire VMware.? The transaction closed on November 22, 2023.? Shortly thereafter Broadcom announced the end of sale of perpetual licenses and collapsed the VMware product line down to significantly fewer SKUs.? This effectively meant that the cheapest license was orders of magnitude more expensive but included more for the money which really no one was asking for.? Yes, the product line had sprawled too much, and it was difficult to understand what each SKU did relative to the feature needed but eliminating most of the baseline products really hurt customers with standalone or smaller datacenters consisting of as few as one host to a few hundred CPUs.? If you had even a modest investment in VMware the licensing costs at renewal will skyrocket when your current term expires and when the license subscription expires the product will effectively become worthless without renewal.? Given how VMware is a foundational technology at the center of a lot of large and small operations this is really a non-starter which puts them at odds with one of their most important vendors.? I’ve personally had a difficult time purchasing renewals and new sales for customers because of these changes.? The process is time consuming and expensive in terms of time.? The regulatory agencies who approved this acquisition really should have a look at what has taken place since it was approved. There is no argument where this is a win for customers and given where VMware sits in the market, the technology and related licenses are essential until a migration can be completed.? I’d offer that VMware is in the category of business critical and even a national security concern.?

?Broadcom has also made major changes to their sales and support ecosystem.? The best estimates I’ve heard are that Broadcom eliminated roughly 75% of their partner organizations, gutted support and eliminated a lot of OEM deals with vendors such as HPE.?

While this post is intended to condense a very complicated and long story into a somewhat simplified version of events the conclusion for many, me included, is that the time has come to completely abandon VMware as quickly as possible.? Any good that still exists is overshadowed by the gutting of the support and partner ecosystem in addition to the end of sale of perpetual licenses in favor of subscriptions.? The best intentions are certainly not with the customer base.?

Silver linings everywhere and some shameless promotion…??

For organizations using VMware there are many, many paths forward, none of which involve VMware.? Public cloud, hyperconverged, traditional solutions such as Hyper-V, and hybrid-cloud deployments are easy, and “quick” enough to transition to.? This is true no matter the size or complexity of the migration.? OWG can help!? We specialize in migrations, design, implementation and support of many types of virtualization, hybrid and public cloud.? Our VMware migration projects include project management, capacity planning, resource consolidation, cybersecurity and cost optimization so you’re in good hands from start to finish.?

Ready to partner with an IT company that checks all the boxes? Talk to an expert at OWG today, and let us guide your firm toward a more secure, efficient, and future-proof IT strategy.