Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.

And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america.

I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.

It has decent presence in some parts of South East Asia as well via JVs e.g. Tesco Lotus in Thailand.

Looks like proxmox has well-fleshed-out documentation for migrating from vmware:

"Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well."

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE

It’s ok, UK courts are mainly rigged and likely to favour a home company over a foreign one (see Tesla v bbc as an example).

Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….

I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.

OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.

Used to do those migration in a previous life.

Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

I don't work at this level, but there's lots of things you can do.

a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once.

b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration.

c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration.

d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion.

e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases.

There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work.

Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.

We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.

Hire me, I'll be more than happy to show you! :D I'm an expert at it!

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.

It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.

There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).

[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]

Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

> A lot of work ahead.

Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.

One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.

Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.

I’m sure they don’t care. They were pretty up front when they bought VMware what the play was

The ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency.

I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.

>VMWare is still basically the only option

The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.

I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)

I work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months.

In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)

Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.

Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.

I can't speak to this particular case, but most of the delay is likely to be organisational rather than technical at this kind of scale.

Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:

* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor

* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime

* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team

* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime

* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire

* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above

I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.

I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.

It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.

From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?

Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible

Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.

Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.

Honestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.

Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s

there is no risk since spring boot is open source.

any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something

What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?

VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.

... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?