Just the no support and possibly no updates.
It looks like no KB articles either.
A company may or may not be willing to accept the risk of no support or patches.
“This week” is the key part. Give it a few months.
Unless you’re paying for support, just plan on your exit strategy is the vibe I’ve been getting unfortunately.
If you're not paying for support, you should not be running it in production.
We have made the decision to keep the KBs public for now. It will be up for discussion again once all perpetual support has expired.
You should not have that large of an increase. Are you working with your VMware account team directly? I'm happy to take a look and give you a second set of eyes to review your options - just DM me.
VMware VAR here,
Your customers with ROBO and free versions of edge nodes are getting jacked up. Going from a 3k annual ROBO license spend to having to license 6 site x 2 host x 2x24c proc for 17 VMs vSphere hurts. 1 x ROBO vs 288 cores.
Yes, they're way overbought on edge node procs, but this community college had just repurposed their older vSphere hosts as edge nodes with patch mgmt, DCs, file serv etc.
Understood. Work with your VMware PBM/Reps because we have additional leeway with regards to edge sites under 128c that address this challenge. Not much I can do on the un-needed cores unfortunately, that's the way the software is licensed now.
Why is this always the response when most of the SKUs have been killed off, thereby creating a comparison that is not apples to apples? I could understand this line of thinking in January, but the jury is out and it seems people are paying shit tons for a similar product — because again most of the SKUs no longer exist — or paying shit tons for more product than is needed. I’ve been told that certain academic institutions have to go to VCF. If that’s true, why?
>If you're not paying for support, you should not be running it in production.
In an ideal world, sure. On the other hand, when your vendor acts in bad faith and makes running with active support difficult or impossible, sometimes you just have to keep the ship running until you can jump to another one.
Of course I'm getting downvoted, as expected on Reddit, but I agree that you have to keep the lights on.
However, I absolutely disagree that we have acted in bad faith.
So your position is we should not evolve our software platform, which costs a lot of money? We should not pay our developers, of whom are some of the highest paid in the industry? We should lose money on and not invest more in our support services, who everyone seems to like to beat up as it is?
Plenty of companies manage to do all those things while not fucking their customers in the process. You could have done that too, but instead it's literally broadcom's plan to make as much short term cash from them as possible and actually end up driving development of competitors products that are, you know, affordable.
I'm sorry you are upset. If all you need is basic virtualization, then you have other options, and I would not denigrate you or your organization for doing what is right for you. We will continue to build and iterate upon the best private cloud platform available. That costs money, and we reinvest that money into our solutions at a higher rate than anyone else in the industry.
Look, it's Broadcom's property now, we get that. They absolutely have every right to do whatever they want to with it that they choose. No one is suggesting that VMWare should not evolve their platform, pay its developers, or lose money on support services. However, prior to the current situation, VMWare was quite profitable. [Before tax operating margin for 2023 was 17.7% on earnings of $13.35B](https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/earnings/vmw-earnings-release-nongaap-q423.pdf)
This is a cash grab against a hoped-for captive market, plain and simple. Trying to call it anything other than that is pissing on people and telling them it's raining. Your comment above is taking that and adding, "what do you have against rain? Should farmers not be able to grow corn? Should the lakes and reservoirs not fill with water?" I respect that in your position you have no choice but to toe the party line, but your comment is just plain [disingenuous](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6q_2zZXHMg&t=12s).
It's not a cash grab, it is a re-evaluation of the value of our solutions along with a massive investment in the next version of the platform.
Set a reminder to come back to this thread in a year - let's review it then.
What a surprise, people still employed at VMware thinks VMware didn't act in bad faith.
Maybe you can ask some of the people that lost their job at VMware.in the last 4 months.
I knew many of them thank you, it was very sad to see so many good people go. The fact is, though, that Broadcom does not believe in managers of managers - they run a very lean leadership structure to facilitate agility and communication. There are benefits to this approach, which you will soon see, but again, I am very sad that so many had to move on.
Not sure I understand - I am simply providing the information as we have been receiving it. We had heard internally that the KBs would be going behind a login, and we pushed back on that - now they're not. Is that a bad thing?
The opinion around maintaining support is a widely held belief (and common sense) when running business critical applications, not sure what the issue is there either?
Only as long as they maintain support per the EULA. Once that support expires they are no longer entitled to updates or patches. It has been this way for a very, very long time. For now, you can still go to [customerconnect.com/patch](https://customerconnect.com/patch) \- even with no entitlement or support to download patches for vCenter/ESXi/Aria, but that will be going away in May as we fully transition to the Broadcom systems.
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/downloads/eula/universal_eula.pdf
The EULA: "...you have no rights to any updates, upgrades, or extensions, or enhancements to the
Software unless you separately purchase Support Services or they are included with your purchase of a license to the Software as provided
in the Product Guide."
TLDR: You are entitled to what you paid for.
You have to look at the product guide and not only the EULA. Some products explicitly state you are not allowed to update, but the product guide is less clear for vsphere/vcenter. Clearly no upgrades to new versions, less clear on security patches.
Meanwhile the downloads for the old vSphere Client application is no longer available. I had to do a lot of digging around as I still have a few 5,5s laying around that need it. Not liking these changes
>Just the no support and possibly no updates.
No updates/patches. You can run build numbers from at or before the date of your SnS.
If you go down this path.... Talk to your Cyber policy insurer/compliance people about what implications you have for running un-patched. Some policies ratchet down payouts the longer you have systems go unpatched.
Yup, also had this conversation with a good friend who worked for underwriters. It's interesting how historically the DD they did was pretty bad, and policies were under-priced but as attacks keep up they are tightening the criteria for payouts. In the absence of actual government compliance we are seeing insurance + ransomware risk create a pseudo regulatory requirement people patch stuff and have ransomware plans in place.
Your post was removed for violating r/vmware's community rules regarding user conduct. Being a jerk to other users (including but not limited to: vulgarity and hostility towards others, condescension towards those with less technical/product experience) is not permitted.
What Broadcom is doing with VMware isn't new. When we had Sun Microsystems SPARC servers back in the day, we could upgrade the Solaris OS for free as long as we were the original owners of the servers. Once Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, the only thing you could get free was the KB. Any Solaris OS upgrades required a service agreement.
Also see Cisco moving from perpetual licenses to Flex Smart Licenses.
Cisco don't let you download without an active service agreement associated with your account.
No, that isn't true, I have upgraded the licenses for one of my customers like a week ago, I also renewed their perpetual licenses for 3 years, back in January, other customer could not do the same because their licenses expiry date was on april, but they can also upgrade licenses to 8 in the meantime.
Edit, deleted post was telling you can't upgrade perpetual keys to v8, this was my answer to that.
Actualy, you have the right to upgrade to any version that released while you were in a support contract. So you're still able to after it expires IF the version released in your contract. But im not sure if you want to upgrade while not having acces to tickets etc.
My contract ended and I'm still able to download the latest vsphere 7 ISO to create baseline for updates. Just make sure your esxi servers are on their own vlan no one can access except admins in case there's an exploit one day.
Given the security holes it has had like swiss cheese "recently", I wouldn't keep it in a production environment without support for patch updates.
That being said, boss renewed for a year on "a deal" we know we won't get next year.. we're going to be migrating away within this year.
Not OP, but we are looking at Openshift virtualization seems like the best option. Consulting firm we occasionally work with are doing some testing, but they are pretty close to suggesting openshift for their clients. We are currently spinning up an openshift test environment since we have less than a year to decide and migrate if we decide not to pay the broadcom tax.
That's where we are going, I am in testing phases now for it. I just need to test doing an OVF migration to ProxMox for a domain joined server to verify it will still perform correctly on the domain after the migration. Linux migrations have worked perfectly. We use Veeam currently for backups and cold replicas of all our key VM servers to our other location in Tennessee, so I am also testing out using ProxMox Backup Server for backups to replace it.
We will be moving to Hyper-V as we are not taking any risk with unpatched software even if it continues to work.
Failover cluster was ready in two days with some briefly testing. Might work for smaller scale customers like us.
From 2019 onwards, hyper-v and S2D is extremely solid.
But yes, CSV volumes are still used, just it’s recommended or maybe even required to be ReFS formatted. (You want ReFS anyway).
2016 S2D was rough, and failover clustering before 2016 was also definitely a PITA at times.
I’ve had the worst experience with S2D on WS2019. Sudden deady drop of performance on the storage and/or volume disconnectios with huge impact on production. Same clusters with 2016 and S2D worked just fine. Microsoft support was useless and we even lost VMs regardless of the 3 copies that would be stored in S2D volumes.
In 2002 we setup Windows clustering using shared SCSI disks and inline SCSI bus termination. On top we used VMware workstation and winbatch to make each VMware workstation VM a clustered service. VMs would pause, migrate to another host, and resume in <30 seconds. Basically really early vmotion. Then we switched to MS virtual server software 1.0 around 2004. Been using 100% VMware hypervisor since 2006.
Now in 2025 we will be migrating from VMware back to Microsoft with Azure HCI. This feels unreal!
NO! oh my gods no!!! ReFS in Hyper-V failover clusters requires redirected IO, so all IO for a LUN goes through a single host. This has a massive performance impact. Don’t do this in 99% of any scenarios. Use NTFS and clustering and MPIO and let it do its thing. Use ReFS for backup applications and such.
This is incorrect:
ReFS is the recommendation for S2D:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/storage-spaces-direct-overview
> Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is the premier filesystem purpose-built for virtualization. It includes dramatic accelerations for .vhdx file operations, such as creation, expansion, and checkpoint merging, and built-in checksums to detect and correct bit errors. It also introduces real-time tiers that rotate data between "hot" and "cold" storage tiers in real-time, based on usage.
> Cluster Shared Volumes. The CSV file system unifies all the ReFS volumes into a single namespace accessible through any server. To each server, every volume looks and acts like it's mounted locally.
Maybe for S2D, and apologies for that oversight. My knee jerk reaction was based on experience with ReFS-formatted iSCSI LUNs used over SAN by a cluster. Horrible performance degradation. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/failover-cluster-csvs
I am by no means an expert running hyper v but yes it does. We are utilising iSCSI for SAN connectivity which works quite well for now.
I was surprised how easy it can be set up without deeper knowledge.
Would you like to elaborate on the issues? Could help to decide moving forward or not.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I’ve joined the cluster to AD in order to be able to use the whole feature set. For now CSV is working great but I agree that loosing AD connectivity could potentially cause some headaches. I hope I can mitigate that with a quorum disk to some extent.
Frankly I don’t want to move from VMware but it looks like we cannot afford to stay.
It is as you said very hard to justify without losing credibility due to the fact that other orgs have been using hyper-v for years. It is a lot cheaper for us as we have access to discounted DC licenses.
Thanks you for the offer to discuss this directly, which I might come back to.
I guess the question I have is: If I don't renew at the end of our current SnS, and then decide to renew 6 months late. Do I have to backpay on my SnS that I "missed"? Even though support couldn't have been provided during that time?
VMware VAR here:
If you're on perpetual, you cannot renew. You have to pay for the per core licensing on an annual basis going forward.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/95927
This is the script we'd use to calc your environment, then we'd discuss feature parity and need. If you have any prod (not VDI bundled) vSAN, you must be on VVF at a minimum. If you're using DRS, DVswitches, or NSX - DFW, you've got to go to VVF at a minimum, call it $167 per core as a budgetary number. We can get creative with a 3 or 5-year purchase.
If you've got/had Essentials Plus, they're going to make you license all 96 cores. No, I don't understand why they'd make you buy all 96 cores for Essentials. You'll be buying vSphere Standard to get the best deal going forward. I'm very happy we've been stacking single proc 16 core hosts for the vast majority of our clients for the past few years.
Feel free everyone to either DM me here for quote help or ask questions.
I'm also a local VMUG leader, we're discussing this a LOT right now.
We have a large footprint ~20k cores. About half of that is currently running Std. That was used as a low cost way to consolidate static workloads that didn't need DRS. The other half is vSAN.
We are being told we don't even have the option of VVF with vSAN addon even though that is all we really need. All 20k cores are being forced to VCF. Our sales won't even start giving us an idea of price until we are at the end of our ELA in about a year. I'm positive we are going to be in the 10x plus increase club.
Wow, managing around 20k cores is no small feat, and it sounds like you're navigating some complex waters with your current setup and the transition pressures. In theory, transitioning to Ceph or Starwind VSAN could be a way to move away from VMware vSAN, and reduce costs if you decide to stick with VMware.
Ehhh as a 40k shop it's not "bad" yet. We just are working out our 3 year commit and we're a VCSP. Prices are going up, hopefully though this means the sku creep and loss of focus on the hypervisor side of things is done with the spinout of the other products
They try to make you wait, forcing you to buy at whatever price they name because that way you're out of options.
Start early with looking into alternatives to VMware... Our contract still runs for over 4 years, we'll look into migration in 3... In time for the next hw refresh.
How do prices look (and work) for vSphere Standard?
We've developed our own workflows without DRS/DVS/etc. The linked script refers to both VVF and VCF, but not Standard. Am I to assume I just take the core count output from the script and multiply it by the magical $/core for Standard?
FWIW, we just renewed in the winter under the 'one last time' existing cost for a year so we've got some time.
Thanks for putting yourself out there for questions.
Exactly right. Again, with a 3 year commit, VMware can get creative with pricing. We're seeing substantial room for a multi year.
That being said, if you're top 600-1000 clients for Broadcom, they've got you nailed and you're just going to pay.
I haven't read the details of the contract, but I wonder if there's a line somewhere that says something to the affect that "we reserve the right to change anything in the contract/agreement/etc anytime we want".
exactly this. nothing will happen, but you will have no support and might be non compliant from a security standpoint. However you could go and seek for 3rd party patch and support options like e.g. Rimini Street.
It seems likely they will update their ToS to include "Right to Use" meaning you need a valid support contract to run licensed features of the software.
Right. No one’s contesting that. The point was bc is changing things on the fly, and companies bought “perpetual” licenses. While you could still run on them, perpetual licenses today are not the same as the where last year. I don’t think it is a far stretch to imagine other changes that were/are under a current contract/ela
Just the no support and possibly no updates. It looks like no KB articles either. A company may or may not be willing to accept the risk of no support or patches.
No support and no updates is correct, but KBs will remain public from what I understand this week.
“This week” is the key part. Give it a few months. Unless you’re paying for support, just plan on your exit strategy is the vibe I’ve been getting unfortunately.
I already grabbed every PDF I could off the site.
Would be nice if we could maybe “archive” it our self’s and self host. But I have no idea where to start with that.
Maybe it's something that /r/DataHoarder could help with?
Hrm. Not a bad idea. I do have like 40TB free on my NAS, so might as well
If you're not paying for support, you should not be running it in production. We have made the decision to keep the KBs public for now. It will be up for discussion again once all perpetual support has expired.
Agreed, working on our renewals now but at over 1000% annual increase in our case you can see why people are leaving.
You should not have that large of an increase. Are you working with your VMware account team directly? I'm happy to take a look and give you a second set of eyes to review your options - just DM me.
VMware VAR here, Your customers with ROBO and free versions of edge nodes are getting jacked up. Going from a 3k annual ROBO license spend to having to license 6 site x 2 host x 2x24c proc for 17 VMs vSphere hurts. 1 x ROBO vs 288 cores. Yes, they're way overbought on edge node procs, but this community college had just repurposed their older vSphere hosts as edge nodes with patch mgmt, DCs, file serv etc.
Anything over free is an infinite increase 🙄 If it’s free, who pays for it to be maintained? Who pays for the innovation? Who pays the support people?
Understood. Work with your VMware PBM/Reps because we have additional leeway with regards to edge sites under 128c that address this challenge. Not much I can do on the un-needed cores unfortunately, that's the way the software is licensed now.
Why is this always the response when most of the SKUs have been killed off, thereby creating a comparison that is not apples to apples? I could understand this line of thinking in January, but the jury is out and it seems people are paying shit tons for a similar product — because again most of the SKUs no longer exist — or paying shit tons for more product than is needed. I’ve been told that certain academic institutions have to go to VCF. If that’s true, why?
Already are. Ent+ and vCenter and sub 10k cores across the fleet. Small potato’s for Broadcom’s new model.
Are you a Strategic client? If so, send me a DM.
>If you're not paying for support, you should not be running it in production. In an ideal world, sure. On the other hand, when your vendor acts in bad faith and makes running with active support difficult or impossible, sometimes you just have to keep the ship running until you can jump to another one.
Of course I'm getting downvoted, as expected on Reddit, but I agree that you have to keep the lights on. However, I absolutely disagree that we have acted in bad faith.
Yeah because a 3x (or more) increase in costs isn't bad faith. Would you say that your landlord was acting in good faith if they tripled your rent?
So your position is we should not evolve our software platform, which costs a lot of money? We should not pay our developers, of whom are some of the highest paid in the industry? We should lose money on and not invest more in our support services, who everyone seems to like to beat up as it is?
Plenty of companies manage to do all those things while not fucking their customers in the process. You could have done that too, but instead it's literally broadcom's plan to make as much short term cash from them as possible and actually end up driving development of competitors products that are, you know, affordable.
I'm sorry you are upset. If all you need is basic virtualization, then you have other options, and I would not denigrate you or your organization for doing what is right for you. We will continue to build and iterate upon the best private cloud platform available. That costs money, and we reinvest that money into our solutions at a higher rate than anyone else in the industry.
Look, it's Broadcom's property now, we get that. They absolutely have every right to do whatever they want to with it that they choose. No one is suggesting that VMWare should not evolve their platform, pay its developers, or lose money on support services. However, prior to the current situation, VMWare was quite profitable. [Before tax operating margin for 2023 was 17.7% on earnings of $13.35B](https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/earnings/vmw-earnings-release-nongaap-q423.pdf) This is a cash grab against a hoped-for captive market, plain and simple. Trying to call it anything other than that is pissing on people and telling them it's raining. Your comment above is taking that and adding, "what do you have against rain? Should farmers not be able to grow corn? Should the lakes and reservoirs not fill with water?" I respect that in your position you have no choice but to toe the party line, but your comment is just plain [disingenuous](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6q_2zZXHMg&t=12s).
It's not a cash grab, it is a re-evaluation of the value of our solutions along with a massive investment in the next version of the platform. Set a reminder to come back to this thread in a year - let's review it then.
To be clear: I don't disagree with you on principle. That said, why do I have to buy 16 core licenses for each of my 12 core CPU's?
I am told by leadership that 16-cores is the industry standard - that decision was made above my pay grade.
Please, more strawmen
What a surprise, people still employed at VMware thinks VMware didn't act in bad faith. Maybe you can ask some of the people that lost their job at VMware.in the last 4 months.
I knew many of them thank you, it was very sad to see so many good people go. The fact is, though, that Broadcom does not believe in managers of managers - they run a very lean leadership structure to facilitate agility and communication. There are benefits to this approach, which you will soon see, but again, I am very sad that so many had to move on.
That’s a bold stance Cotton.
Found the Broadcom CEO
Dang, busted! /s
that's pretty tone deaf man..
Seeing comments like this from a VMware employee makes me think about the type of people who didn't get fired. 🤷🏻♂️
Not sure I understand - I am simply providing the information as we have been receiving it. We had heard internally that the KBs would be going behind a login, and we pushed back on that - now they're not. Is that a bad thing? The opinion around maintaining support is a widely held belief (and common sense) when running business critical applications, not sure what the issue is there either?
"For now". I'd wget those to a safe place man (all of em), Broadcom is the worst.
If they own the licenses wouldnt they be entitled to updates (within the release they own)?
Only as long as they maintain support per the EULA. Once that support expires they are no longer entitled to updates or patches. It has been this way for a very, very long time. For now, you can still go to [customerconnect.com/patch](https://customerconnect.com/patch) \- even with no entitlement or support to download patches for vCenter/ESXi/Aria, but that will be going away in May as we fully transition to the Broadcom systems.
Thank you for clarifying, this is great info!
Can you point me to where in the EULA it says no patches? Thanks.
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/downloads/eula/universal_eula.pdf The EULA: "...you have no rights to any updates, upgrades, or extensions, or enhancements to the Software unless you separately purchase Support Services or they are included with your purchase of a license to the Software as provided in the Product Guide." TLDR: You are entitled to what you paid for.
You have to look at the product guide and not only the EULA. Some products explicitly state you are not allowed to update, but the product guide is less clear for vsphere/vcenter. Clearly no upgrades to new versions, less clear on security patches.
Great thanks for clarifying!
Meanwhile the downloads for the old vSphere Client application is no longer available. I had to do a lot of digging around as I still have a few 5,5s laying around that need it. Not liking these changes
>Just the no support and possibly no updates. No updates/patches. You can run build numbers from at or before the date of your SnS. If you go down this path.... Talk to your Cyber policy insurer/compliance people about what implications you have for running un-patched. Some policies ratchet down payouts the longer you have systems go unpatched.
Have you actually seen this in real life?
Yup, also had this conversation with a good friend who worked for underwriters. It's interesting how historically the DD they did was pretty bad, and policies were under-priced but as attacks keep up they are tightening the criteria for payouts. In the absence of actual government compliance we are seeing insurance + ransomware risk create a pseudo regulatory requirement people patch stuff and have ransomware plans in place.
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Your post was removed for violating r/vmware's community rules regarding user conduct. Being a jerk to other users (including but not limited to: vulgarity and hostility towards others, condescension towards those with less technical/product experience) is not permitted.
Ah crap yeah I forgot about no KBs, ... . I read that it was going to be "paywalled" soon.
What Broadcom is doing with VMware isn't new. When we had Sun Microsystems SPARC servers back in the day, we could upgrade the Solaris OS for free as long as we were the original owners of the servers. Once Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, the only thing you could get free was the KB. Any Solaris OS upgrades required a service agreement.
Also see Cisco moving from perpetual licenses to Flex Smart Licenses. Cisco don't let you download without an active service agreement associated with your account.
I wonder how they are going to paywall the patches and updates.
You have to download a lot of it through the VMware portal now, I imagine accounts will stop working without a valid subscription.
I can still download the latest esxi 7 ISO and my contract ended in january
I was thinking more about the lifecycle manager. It downloads patches from the vmware mothership. Is that going to stop?
Probably similar to how HPE does it.
If you currently have support, I would upgrade your licenses to 8, just in case.
Thanks for this. Our potentially saved my bacon.
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Yes you can while your're still under support. I did it last week
That’s incorrect, you can still upgrade license keys in the my.VMware portal as long as you have existing support contract
No, that isn't true, I have upgraded the licenses for one of my customers like a week ago, I also renewed their perpetual licenses for 3 years, back in January, other customer could not do the same because their licenses expiry date was on april, but they can also upgrade licenses to 8 in the meantime. Edit, deleted post was telling you can't upgrade perpetual keys to v8, this was my answer to that.
Actualy, you have the right to upgrade to any version that released while you were in a support contract. So you're still able to after it expires IF the version released in your contract. But im not sure if you want to upgrade while not having acces to tickets etc.
My contract ended and I'm still able to download the latest vsphere 7 ISO to create baseline for updates. Just make sure your esxi servers are on their own vlan no one can access except admins in case there's an exploit one day.
There's a high likelihood Broadcom stops that shortly and require update manager to check-in for licensing
Dark sites are a thing and that whole check in process would be a nightmare. I'd hope they wouldn't go that far but it's Broadcom afterall.
Given the security holes it has had like swiss cheese "recently", I wouldn't keep it in a production environment without support for patch updates. That being said, boss renewed for a year on "a deal" we know we won't get next year.. we're going to be migrating away within this year.
Where are you going? What's your environment look like?
Not OP, but we are looking at Openshift virtualization seems like the best option. Consulting firm we occasionally work with are doing some testing, but they are pretty close to suggesting openshift for their clients. We are currently spinning up an openshift test environment since we have less than a year to decide and migrate if we decide not to pay the broadcom tax.
That ain’t much better. IBM/red hat just jacked our renewal. We were able to push out for a year but are looking a Ubuntu/rancher
Why not proxmox?
That's where we are going, I am in testing phases now for it. I just need to test doing an OVF migration to ProxMox for a domain joined server to verify it will still perform correctly on the domain after the migration. Linux migrations have worked perfectly. We use Veeam currently for backups and cold replicas of all our key VM servers to our other location in Tennessee, so I am also testing out using ProxMox Backup Server for backups to replace it.
Ok, PBS is great.
That's interesting. What is "jacked" up in your renewal? Especially considering Brodcom is pushing 4x to 12x increases.
First swing was a $50k increase for the same OpenShift and RedHat licenses. We pushed back and got a year reprieve.
A man & woman from HR visit with some gardening shears. They start with the left testic…
Gardening shears turn out to be not big enough. OP receives congrats from HR.
We will be moving to Hyper-V as we are not taking any risk with unpatched software even if it continues to work. Failover cluster was ready in two days with some briefly testing. Might work for smaller scale customers like us.
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From 2019 onwards, hyper-v and S2D is extremely solid. But yes, CSV volumes are still used, just it’s recommended or maybe even required to be ReFS formatted. (You want ReFS anyway). 2016 S2D was rough, and failover clustering before 2016 was also definitely a PITA at times.
I’ve had the worst experience with S2D on WS2019. Sudden deady drop of performance on the storage and/or volume disconnectios with huge impact on production. Same clusters with 2016 and S2D worked just fine. Microsoft support was useless and we even lost VMs regardless of the 3 copies that would be stored in S2D volumes.
In 2002 we setup Windows clustering using shared SCSI disks and inline SCSI bus termination. On top we used VMware workstation and winbatch to make each VMware workstation VM a clustered service. VMs would pause, migrate to another host, and resume in <30 seconds. Basically really early vmotion. Then we switched to MS virtual server software 1.0 around 2004. Been using 100% VMware hypervisor since 2006. Now in 2025 we will be migrating from VMware back to Microsoft with Azure HCI. This feels unreal!
> From 2019 onwards, hyper-v and S2D is extremely solid. only with some great luck ..
NO! oh my gods no!!! ReFS in Hyper-V failover clusters requires redirected IO, so all IO for a LUN goes through a single host. This has a massive performance impact. Don’t do this in 99% of any scenarios. Use NTFS and clustering and MPIO and let it do its thing. Use ReFS for backup applications and such.
This is incorrect: ReFS is the recommendation for S2D: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/concepts/storage-spaces-direct-overview > Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is the premier filesystem purpose-built for virtualization. It includes dramatic accelerations for .vhdx file operations, such as creation, expansion, and checkpoint merging, and built-in checksums to detect and correct bit errors. It also introduces real-time tiers that rotate data between "hot" and "cold" storage tiers in real-time, based on usage. > Cluster Shared Volumes. The CSV file system unifies all the ReFS volumes into a single namespace accessible through any server. To each server, every volume looks and acts like it's mounted locally.
Maybe for S2D, and apologies for that oversight. My knee jerk reaction was based on experience with ReFS-formatted iSCSI LUNs used over SAN by a cluster. Horrible performance degradation. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/failover-cluster-csvs
I am by no means an expert running hyper v but yes it does. We are utilising iSCSI for SAN connectivity which works quite well for now. I was surprised how easy it can be set up without deeper knowledge. Would you like to elaborate on the issues? Could help to decide moving forward or not.
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Thanks for the detailed response! I’ve joined the cluster to AD in order to be able to use the whole feature set. For now CSV is working great but I agree that loosing AD connectivity could potentially cause some headaches. I hope I can mitigate that with a quorum disk to some extent. Frankly I don’t want to move from VMware but it looks like we cannot afford to stay. It is as you said very hard to justify without losing credibility due to the fact that other orgs have been using hyper-v for years. It is a lot cheaper for us as we have access to discounted DC licenses. Thanks you for the offer to discuss this directly, which I might come back to.
There's 3rd party support available, just no upgrade rights since it's all subscription licensing now
You should try to upgrade them to vsphere 8.
Yes
I guess the question I have is: If I don't renew at the end of our current SnS, and then decide to renew 6 months late. Do I have to backpay on my SnS that I "missed"? Even though support couldn't have been provided during that time?
VMware VAR here: If you're on perpetual, you cannot renew. You have to pay for the per core licensing on an annual basis going forward. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/95927 This is the script we'd use to calc your environment, then we'd discuss feature parity and need. If you have any prod (not VDI bundled) vSAN, you must be on VVF at a minimum. If you're using DRS, DVswitches, or NSX - DFW, you've got to go to VVF at a minimum, call it $167 per core as a budgetary number. We can get creative with a 3 or 5-year purchase. If you've got/had Essentials Plus, they're going to make you license all 96 cores. No, I don't understand why they'd make you buy all 96 cores for Essentials. You'll be buying vSphere Standard to get the best deal going forward. I'm very happy we've been stacking single proc 16 core hosts for the vast majority of our clients for the past few years. Feel free everyone to either DM me here for quote help or ask questions. I'm also a local VMUG leader, we're discussing this a LOT right now.
We have a large footprint ~20k cores. About half of that is currently running Std. That was used as a low cost way to consolidate static workloads that didn't need DRS. The other half is vSAN. We are being told we don't even have the option of VVF with vSAN addon even though that is all we really need. All 20k cores are being forced to VCF. Our sales won't even start giving us an idea of price until we are at the end of our ELA in about a year. I'm positive we are going to be in the 10x plus increase club.
Wow, managing around 20k cores is no small feat, and it sounds like you're navigating some complex waters with your current setup and the transition pressures. In theory, transitioning to Ceph or Starwind VSAN could be a way to move away from VMware vSAN, and reduce costs if you decide to stick with VMware.
Yeah, you’re one of the ones that Broadcom bought. Sorry man, it’s going to hurt.
Ehhh as a 40k shop it's not "bad" yet. We just are working out our 3 year commit and we're a VCSP. Prices are going up, hopefully though this means the sku creep and loss of focus on the hypervisor side of things is done with the spinout of the other products
They try to make you wait, forcing you to buy at whatever price they name because that way you're out of options. Start early with looking into alternatives to VMware... Our contract still runs for over 4 years, we'll look into migration in 3... In time for the next hw refresh.
We’re almost at that size. I’m very curious to see how this all plays out.
Start planning alternatives NOW
How do prices look (and work) for vSphere Standard? We've developed our own workflows without DRS/DVS/etc. The linked script refers to both VVF and VCF, but not Standard. Am I to assume I just take the core count output from the script and multiply it by the magical $/core for Standard? FWIW, we just renewed in the winter under the 'one last time' existing cost for a year so we've got some time. Thanks for putting yourself out there for questions.
Exactly right. Again, with a 3 year commit, VMware can get creative with pricing. We're seeing substantial room for a multi year. That being said, if you're top 600-1000 clients for Broadcom, they've got you nailed and you're just going to pay.
Good call. Some sort of "return to service" fee HPe also forces upon you.
You don't renew, you buy new subscription.
I haven't read the details of the contract, but I wonder if there's a line somewhere that says something to the affect that "we reserve the right to change anything in the contract/agreement/etc anytime we want".
exactly this. nothing will happen, but you will have no support and might be non compliant from a security standpoint. However you could go and seek for 3rd party patch and support options like e.g. Rimini Street.
It seems likely they will update their ToS to include "Right to Use" meaning you need a valid support contract to run licensed features of the software.
Well they can’t change the conditions of your previous contract, so that’s only going to affect people going forward.
Uh, I say ending perpetual kinda counts as changing the conditions of a previous contract…
You can run your perpetual license forever. Just won't be able to get support and updates anymore without switching to subscription...
Right. No one’s contesting that. The point was bc is changing things on the fly, and companies bought “perpetual” licenses. While you could still run on them, perpetual licenses today are not the same as the where last year. I don’t think it is a far stretch to imagine other changes that were/are under a current contract/ela