The world we live in it is fair to say, develops and changes at a moments notice, at breakneck speed, in directions nobody predicted until 5 minutes after it happened.
Sure, of course some things are predictable, some things do meander along a well-defined path, without being ‘the kind that blindside you at 4 PM on some idle Tuesday‘.
Continuing in the words of Baz Luhrmann we have to ‘Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old– and when you do, you’ll fantasise that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders‘
Now that’s across the whole world, but we do have our own little slice of it in the Technology sector that seems to see often bizarre developments as a challenge to try to one-up and take it even further.
The elephant in the room at the moment in our sector is of course the completion of the Broadcom acquisition of VMware.
Nobody really thought it would ‘just’ be another big fish consumes smaller fish but ultimately that life goes on. Broadcom, however, managed to exceed all expectations (fears) in a few short months.
- The initial reshuffle of the portfolio into four divisions, marketing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as a headliner provoked a laugh here as a victim of VCF over the years. The big(ger) shock however was the brutal honesty that Broadcom are looking for a buyer for the VMware End User Compute (EUC) business unit.
- The next development was less of a surprise, force these pesky customers (hostages) and their perpetual licenses over onto a subscription model. This development was delivered along with a message of ‘cutting the cost of subscription licenses’ to try and sweeten the deal, or at least take the edge off of it.
- Bundling of products together under VMware vSphere Foundation (VFF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and removing the ability to buy a-la-carte products like vRealize/Aria, NSX, and vSAN.
- Putting a stop to all renewals, we had (still have 8 weeks later) customers who were expecting to renew their ELA at Christmas told that in meetings that VMware colleagues unfortunately could not provide a quote before the end date. They were assured however, that when (after the end date of the contract) they did receive their new subscription powered quote it would be competitive. The maths from what is available online (list pricing of course nobody pays list) paints a devastating picture compared to previous ELA/SnS renewals.
- Then there was the decision to end the VMware Partner Program (announced late Dec 2023, to happen in Feb 2024) and move to the ‘invite-only’ Broadcom Advantage Partner Program. Still reeling from the modelling of customers from perpetual to subscription licensing, partners then find out that they are probably for the chop anyway.
- And finally, a few weeks later in January 2024, a notice was sent to the VMware Cloud Service Providers (those folks who run VMware as a service for their customers) that they too were being terminated. They too, may be invited to the invite-only Broadcom Advantage Partner Program, but they won’t find out for a while yet.
Broadcom with a ‘hold my beer’ has single-handedly managed to alienate customers, reseller partners, cloud service provider partners, and channel analysts alike in 8 weeks. I don’t hold out much hope, but we might wake up in a few days to be told ‘it’s all OK, it was just a really bad dream‘.
So, whilst that has been happening, folks have been busily trying to work out options around exit strategies for customers relying on the now-unloved VMware EUC portfolio, and inevitably ramped up costing vSphere platform. Citrix (sorry, Cloud Software Group) announce they’re culling ~12% of their workforce, just a year after culling ~16%. That puts a bit of fear into folks who had any plans to migrate Horizon to Citrix. Unless CSG was to buy the Horizon business? I suspect the regulators would have a bit of a field day over that but it could happen…
With VMware’s whole offering up in the air, layoffs at Citrix, it doesn’t paint a very pretty picture for customers of one, or worse, both of these leaders. Nutanix has a compelling story around the platform/infrastructure piece, especially when they can play nicely with both VMware and Citrix at various levels. The problem is if you’re at all skittish about “Citrix AND VMware” together and want a single vendor solution, Nutanix don’t have one anymore, since Frame was sold to Dizzion. A sensible move to allow Nutanix to be fairly neutral.
Of course then there’s the EOL HPE Moonshot (RIP) customers out there also who may be leveraging Citrix and/or Horizon for the broker-layer already investigating their next-generation offering. We see a lot of interest in vGPU powered high-end VDI desktops as the solution to the Moonshot demise.
That said though, Nutanix plays nicely with Citrix, Nutanix plays nicely with vSphere, and Nutanix can play nicely with Horizon (on top of vSphere) so its not at all a bad idea. I just hope that whoever acquires The VMware EUC business realises the potential in Horizon and makes it easier to consume non-VMware hypervisor environments.
Moving onto some more positive thoughts though, we do have other vendors in the space who make great products that play well with others too. I will dig into some of these offerings in future posts but have to call out a few:
- Parallels RAS (I remember when it was 2X RAS, I’m that old) a desktop and application delivery product that speaks to multiple hypervisor platforms including VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, MS Hyper-V, Scale, & MS Azure.
- Inuvika OVD Enterprise (I remember when it was an open-source product from Ulteo) is another desktop and application delivery product that is predominantly Linux based for management saving licensing fees but can broker access to Windows and Linux systems. I’ve built out Inuvika’s OVD on Nutanix AHV, works a treat.
- Proxmox PVE, a KVM (VM) and LXC (Containers) hypervisor that uses the same type of x86 hardware that we use everywhere else. Built in clustering, capable of creating and managing Ceph shared storage in addition to consuming traditional iSCSI/NFS/FC external storage. ZFS and LVM options also make it a very versatile and compelling offering.