Comment Re:Win win (Score 1) 39
I have a hunch that VM wanted less to no longer support a product but rather get people to pay the extortion fee to continue using it.
Well, I'm sure that Tan would like nothing more than for every VMWare customer who's ever existed to write him a $10,000,000 check, daily. He said the quiet part out loud, and likely too early on in the process, that the goal was to keep the top 600ish customers and squeeze everyone else out.
In other words, I doubt that they're happy about people easily dumping their crap.
There's a subtle difference, I think: Tan is more likely to be unhappy about the fact that he doesn't get to pick which customers can easily dump their crap. In a world perfectly suited to Broadcom's wants, the VSphere Essentials customers and high-call-volume customers would be able to easily migrate elsewhere, because VMWare doesn't want them.
The bigger issue is that the companies VMWare *does* want to keep are the extremely large ones. Extremely large companies can afford skilled personnel. Those skilled personnel can spend their days moving at least *some* of the workload to other solutions, whether it be Hyper-V or Proxmox with its CLI tools, or Nutanix or XCP with conversion scripts or backup/recovery tools...the companies that are large enough to be the 'whales' Tan wants to keep, are large enough to be able to throw enough people at the problem to resolve the matter in a way that *doesn't* involve Tan getting those renewal checks written.
The Proxmox tool is unlikely to alter the calculus that much under these circumstances; it's more likely to help the smaller companies VMWare didn't want, and perhaps accelerate the timetable since the conversion will be simpler, but will it hurt VMWare? Only if VMWare suddenly wants the small and medium businesses back...and the odds of them being able to do that at this point are pretty remote, since it's become pretty clear that Broadcom's direction for VMWare is one that approximately zero customers see as acceptable.
Proxmox has been a name that has gotten a lot more traction over the past several months; between this migration tool and the rumored Veeam compatibility, it may accelerate its status as the go-to replacement for smaller VMWare deployments, but it was likely going to trend that way regardless.