Broadcom's Prohibitive VMware Prices Create a Learning 'Barrier,' IT Pro Says (arstechnica.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school. However, the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today differs from the VMware that existed before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.
Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.
However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."
Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware's vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.
However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was "three to six" times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum. For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs) for creating "very easily and accessible" test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it. The IT director told Ars that dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that's too much work for one person," adding: "It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms -- maybe before they were anticipating -- or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side."
The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares about profitability tomorrow? I need big numbers today.
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Re:The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:4, Informative)
Virtualbox is a pretty excellent replacement for VMWares desktop personal VM platform, but its not really suitable for datacenter VM stuff.
Proxmox however definately is up to the task, and works well enough for running both individual VM servers and clusters of VM servers, as well as having all the useful doodads for distributed storage (Ceph), etc. We moved to it at work, and it couldnt have been smoother. A bit of fucking around reconfiguring the VMs but once we got those detailed worked out, the rest was pretty painless.
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Really?
How many VMs / clusters?
My org decided to give Azure Local a try but the server team is having a tough time so it looks like we're stuck with VMware a while longer
Re: The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:3)
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There is also an evolution away from VMware, away from running Windows instances, into assessing workloads, understanding actual virtualization, and migrating away from what was once a revolutionary platform that's now leaden with cost burden and inflexibility.
There are a myriad ways, but the first part of understanding the problem is to understand the nature of workflows. Then assess the platforms. Promox is fine. And so are the steps to move to Docker, Kube, pub/sub models, and flexible infrastructure.
Thi
Re: The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:4, Informative)
100x this, Anyone who says Proxmox is a VMWare replacement has not actually be responsible for a VMWare deployment in the Enterprise space.
I am not saying Proxmox is bad either, or that VMWare and the server architecture it implies vs running lighter weight containers on top of 'less' fault tolerant VMs orchestrated with k8s and similar isnt a more cost effective design strategy just that can't rip and replace VMWare with Proxmox without ground up redesign of your entire enterprise architecture and DR strategy.
If you are in the world of replicating storage to hot sites, fully software defined network topology, and doing VMmotion across data-centers, and structured where different IT organizations within the organization have ownership of virtual infrastructure nothing else beside maybe Zen really offers the feature set you need. I am also not saying you could not build it with pick your favorite DevOps platform but if you did it would probably make the TCO on VMware look cheap even now.
For the Small to Medium Business space, yeah there are lots of more open solutions they can probably migrate to with out much more outlay than a one-time cost of hiring some consultants to migrate everything and retrain their IT staff, or maybe just paying their IT staff some overtime to spend a few weekends getting up to speed and then migrating infrastructure.
Anyone that thinks the Fortune 500 community can just migrate off of VMWare in less a decade-long time scale is just profoundly ignorant of what all VMWare's enterprise tier offerings actually do.
Re:The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The crackpipe of subscription licenses (Score:2)
The difference here is that with a database ecosystem you can lock in your customers while with a virtualization environment your applications don't depend on which hypervisor you use.
Broadcom knows this and is very aggressive with the pricing to reap off profits quickly and leave an empty shell that they close as non-profitable.
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But Oracle has a free developer program where you can get access to their products for development purposes. This basically gives them a pipeline to getting people familiar with their software.
Heck in university they had courses which used Oracle software you could download, run and develop at home through these programs - they encouraged students to download and play with their software
Real world IT (Score:3)
Is not name brands but concepts and theory. Name brands come and go. This is a perfect teaching experience. chances are the students may teach the school board something.
THEN STOP USING IT! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a problem that solves itself. If VMware isn't in your price range then STOP USING IT. Problem solved.
As a result, the district's migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects
THEN STOP USING IT!
It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms
Why would you wait to be forced when you can simply make the transition on your own terms right now? STOP USING IT!
The funny thing is that companies expect IT admins to be super flexible and learn new systems as needed but it seems these people who are teaching it are unwilling to adapt.
Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side.
THEN STOP USING IT!
What the hell is wrong with this guy?! He knows the answer but he seems to be fighting tooth an nail to keep from recognizing that the school district should stop using VMware products!
Re:THEN STOP USING IT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you understand that "migration from VMWare" is synonymous with stopping using it?
Migrating away is a process that requires a lot of work, which means it is "taking IT resources from other projects."
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Re:THEN STOP USING IT! (Score:4, Insightful)
And please stop saying it because trying to compare VirualBox and vSphere just shows how little you know other than a simple user.
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This is a common pattern on Slashdot. People saying, "Why doesn't everyone switch to <completely inadequate substitute>?" and getting moderated up. The answer is usually that it doesn't do what people need. There are alternatives to vSphere, but VirtualBox definitely isn't one of them.
Re:THEN STOP USING IT! (Score:4, Interesting)
>"There are alternatives to vSphere, but VirtualBox definitely isn't one of them."
Indeed it is not. This isn't about running a desktop virtualization for a single user. It is about virtualization of services on servers. A much better comparison would be to XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra and Proxmox. They are powerful, open-source, optionally-commercially-supported, free to low-cost, feature-rich, and have a good track record. But they are lacking some of the very high-end services that some of VMWare's products offer (which are especially important to really large installations). Yet, in lots and lots of cases, they can be an adequate replacement. In other cases there are workarounds. As more and more sites are switching, there is more momentum in closing those holes. So the future is not so bleak.
Does the situation suck for sites like this school district and others like them? Yes. Could it have been predicted? Maybe so, probably not. I don't think they did anything "wrong" with their selection, but there is always risk when you choose any platform to lock yourself into. Sometimes what they think is the popular and safe bet, because "everyone is doing it", isn't necessarily the best in the long-run. Open systems/platforms have some real advantages that need to be considered.
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I am not defending or condemning anyone here, but as a practical matter if you are not IT industry I am not sure that Open Systems/Platforms are appreciably better in terms of leaving you to deal with unplanned migrations.
it isn't as if FOSS projects don't lose momentum and just sorta fizzle. It isn't like they don't bogged down with management and political problems that cause them to stall or fracture, it isn't like these projects not tied to big clients writing checks don't decide to abandon features th
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I've had this argument with a number of public institutions; the bias should be towards opensource products due to the ever present threat of vendor lock in.
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Read my entire comment, namely this part: "If it can provide the same service". I don't know enough about to the two, but I do know that VirtualBox does provide virtualization.
You're right. You don't know enough about the two.
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I said it above: VirtualBox. If it can provide the same service
Actually VirtualBox cannot. Loading up VirtualBox with a bunch of servers would definitely cause performance and downtime issues. Virtualbox is not a stable platform for large-scale virtualization, And does not have crucial cluster management features such as HA, DRS, and network virtualization options.
VMware vSphere is used for business-critical servers that need to be performant, stable and run 24x7 without downtime.
KVM? Podman? (Score:2)
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This seems like a problem all these school districts could come together and solve.
THIS. The foundation is mostly there (ex. Proxmox et al). State colleges and/or ivy league schools could get together and make a Berkeley Software Distribution version of VMWare. It's certainly within their capacity to do so. Add a graduate level course in each for people to join and contribute to it.
This /. thread, and others like it, make clear there are fairly well defined areas that are lacking in existing solutions/replacements for VMWare. They could even follow the existing product roadmap - just look
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Yes, the OSS community perhaps including Universities and the like, SHOULD come together to fill the gaps VMWare currently can fill. But that doesn't solve the problem for schools/organizations who already can't afford to keep their VMWare instances licenses or more importantly patched.
And for crying out loud, VirtualBox does not replace ESXi/vSphere/vCenter AT ALL! It's similar in feature set to VMWare Workstation, but VMWare Workstation isn't the thing anyone is complaining about.
Vendor lock in (Score:4, Insightful)
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Before you adopt any technology you need a contingency/exit strategy as part of the plan.
Unfortunately many places don't do that, and worse they just go for "big name" rather than doing a proper assessment of their needs and the cost/benefits of multiple options.
There are many smaller places that paid big money to have the vmware name but never made use of any of the more advanced features, and now they're facing either a huge price increase or a migration to something else. They have only themselves to bla
Broadcom STOP killing me (Score:2)
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I've been running proxmox since the 0.x days, and the recent moves by broadcom seem to have driven a LOT of users to proxmox. I see a lot more third party software supporting proxmox now, and the activity on the proxmox forums has exploded.
Anyone who didn't see this coming (Score:3)
I found Proxmox to be a good replacement for vSphere, though maybe not as polished. But TONS of features nonetheless.
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>"a good replacement for vSphere, though maybe not as polished. But TONS of features nonetheless."
XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra and Proxmox can be adequate replacements for a large majority of sites. Great performance, lots of features, robust, stable, and great track records. They should be the first things to examine after being burned by VMWare. And the open platform nature and low (or zero) cost of both should be a HUGE comfort and advantage that can make up for some of what they might be lacking or the pa
Sounds like a dumb IT manager (Score:1)
2019 2022 (Score:1)
"Sounds like a dumb IT manager who is both begging for more money, and desperately trying to cover his own ass. Anyone with half a brain could see this coming a mile off.
demonstrates that you're a condescending prick that doesn't know wtf he's talking about
Move away from a dead product (Score:2)
If you do not, all effects of that are on you.
Nope (Score:2)
I worked in a school district for many years in a similar role as this guy. Microsoft products are dirt cheap, if not outright free, for them. Hyper-V is an obvious migration path for them that could be done in a short amount of time.
There is also plenty of open source options available as well. Will anything be a 100% drop-in replacement with every single bell and whistle? No. Will you care in the long run? Probably not.
The article also says that their current offering is only from 2019, meaning any migrat
Omnissa is working to fill the void (Score:1)
Why did they pick VMware? (Score:2)
3 to 6 times higher?!? (Score:1)
That is so disgusting. Sure, "capitalism for the win" or whatever, but seriously that is just despicable.