Fear and Loathing in Broadcom: A Story of Financial & Technical Pain

The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has led to significant financial and technical distress for many formerly loyal VMware customers. As clients receive their new subscription proposals for VMware on-prem environments, the shock is palpable. We understand the pain, and we have some solutions to offer.

Financial Pain: "Naked vSphere" Customers

The most significant financial impact is being felt by "naked vSphere" customers—those using VMware solely as a hypervisor, perhaps with vCenter for management. Broadcom now requires a 16-core minimum purchase per CPU, and forces clients to purchase their VMware products bundled at an increased premium. For vSphere clients, and clients with 4, 8, or 12 cores per CPU, these unnecessary overheads lead to inefficient resource allocation and increased operational expenses.

However, these customers are also in the best position to move their workloads. At Kudzu, we offer Migration Services to help these clients transition smoothly. Since their environments are not encumbered by additional VMware products like NSX (Software Defined Networking) or vSAN (Storage), they can easily migrate to another type-1 hypervisor such as KVM, Xen, Proxmox, or Nutanix AHV. We encourage clients to consider Kudzu on KVM and manage their new environment with CloudStack as a direct replacement for vCenter.

Technical Pain: VCF Customers

Customers who invested in the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack, including storage, networking, management, and automation, are experiencing the most technical pain. Under Pat Gelsinger’s leadership, VMware aimed to make their stack indispensable by selling beyond just the hypervisor. Broadcom’s acquisition has only reinforced this strategy, making it challenging for these customers to move away.

These clients face a multi-month or even multi-year exit strategy and will likely need additional IT budget just to maintain operations during the transition. It is crucial for VCF customers to begin the migration process immediately to avoid an emergency data center evacuation down the road, which could incur high costs.

The Way Forward

Regardless of whether you are a "Naked vSphere" or a "VCF" customer, it's time to start your journey away from VMware. We recommend including Kudzu in your evaluation process. We can help make this transition as smooth as possible.

Contact us for more details and let us help you navigate this challenging situation.