Company Claims 1,000% Price Hike Drove It From VMware To Open Source Rival (arstechnica.com) 102
An anonymous reader shares a report: Companies have been discussing migrating off of VMware since Broadcom's takeover a year ago led to higher costs and other controversial changes. Now we have an inside look at one of the larger customers that recently made the move.
According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but "the majority" of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported.
Beeks' head of production management, Matthew Cretney, said that one of the reasons for Beeks migration was a VMware bill for "10 times the sum it previously paid for software licenses," per The Register. According to Beeks, OpenNebula has enabled the company to dedicate more of its 3,000 bare metal server fleet to client loads instead of to VM management, as it had to with VMware. With OpenNebula purportedly requiring less management overhead, Beeks is reporting a 200 percent increase in VM efficiency since it now has more VMs on each server.
According to a report from The Register today, Beeks Group, a cloud operator headquartered in the United Kingdom, has moved most of its 20,000-plus virtual machines (VMs) off VMware and to OpenNebula, an open source cloud and edge computing platform. Beeks Group sells virtual private servers and bare metal servers to financial service providers. It still has some VMware VMs, but "the majority" of its machines are currently on OpenNebula, The Register reported.
Beeks' head of production management, Matthew Cretney, said that one of the reasons for Beeks migration was a VMware bill for "10 times the sum it previously paid for software licenses," per The Register. According to Beeks, OpenNebula has enabled the company to dedicate more of its 3,000 bare metal server fleet to client loads instead of to VM management, as it had to with VMware. With OpenNebula purportedly requiring less management overhead, Beeks is reporting a 200 percent increase in VM efficiency since it now has more VMs on each server.
Only one explaination (Score:5, Insightful)
Broadcom wanted to buy VMWare so they didn't have to pay for it.
They didn't want to sell it as a product, so they're pricing out all the customers.
If the price gouging pays for the aquisition before all the customers are lost... it's a net win
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That would be destructive and evil on an impressive level. On the other hand, it is Broadcom.
Re:Only one explaination (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be destructive and evil on an impressive level
That's modern capitalism. Short-term profits while ignoring both long-term revenues and externalities. This is not always the case, but it's usually the case, and this is the case which is rewarded by the market (which, again, focuses on short-term profits).
At investor calls for Costco, investors often complain that Costco overpays their employees and could increase immediate profits by paying employees less. Of course, Costco employees are rabidly loyal and the company has an incredibly small internal theft rate, which is great for the long term. So, you learn to respect the companies that aim for the long-term. Which is not Broadcom.
Re:Only one explaination (Score:5, Insightful)
Enterprises that are in for the long haul are pillars of society. The short-term greedy ones just make some assholes rich and society as a whole much poorer.
Re: Only one explaination (Score:5, Insightful)
The short term also have a habit of taking out those "pillar of society" companies.
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Unfortunately, yes.
CVS has something call "Buy & Close" (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that's Broadcom's goal. Open source software might mean it doesn't work, but it's hard to say since we've had almost no anti-trust law enforcement and this last election has killed off what little there was.
Re: CVS has something call "Buy & Close" (Score:2)
For VMware, the core customers are so change adverse they will pay a lot of money to keep things exactly the same, as change is risk.
See also, mainframe. For the values it provides, customers are mainly those that embraced the platform when it was popular and are terrified of any change.
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If they were honestly "terrified of downtime" they would have kept their application in development and got it onto something more modern that VMWare - probably splitting it between some on premises system and backup systems "in the cloud". No doubt you will tell me that that's expensive, but it's nowhere near as expensive as triple redundant independently implemented systems on a decision bus, which is what people who are really terrified work with.
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I was referring to mainframes WRT to downtime, not VMs on commodity hardware.
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You can have no-downtime with alternative infrastructures. You have plenty of non-mainframe strategies to zero-downtime, relative to the workload. The vast majority of no-downtime experiences in the modern era don't have mainframe involvement.
While mainframe might provide the most bullet proof hardware layer, we have developed a number of software strategies to be less dependent on the hardware layer resilience.
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That's great, good on you.
I joyfully anticipate your report on replacing banking and insurance mainframes with "non-mainframe strategies to zero-downtime, relative to the workload"
Or not. If banks, insurance companies, airlines, and others with a nine-nines uptime requirement could replace their mainframes with "non-mainframe strategies", I'd be happy to read about it.
Really? You don't think banks would have moved off the mainframe world if they had been able to find a replacement that was just as reliable
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Very change averse businesses have stuck with the mainframes that were the choice when they embraced tech.
While the mainframe must provide resiliency, the primary driver for sticking with those systems is that IBM is pretty much the only game in town credibly offering perfect compatibility to run their applications from decades age without any 'porting' effort required. The business implications for a screwed porting effort, time for a transition, and/or discontinuity between a 'new' and 'old' system outwei
Re:CVS has something call "Buy & Close" (Score:5, Insightful)
That kind of shit is why Adam Smith was adamant that free markets only work well if tightly regulated (And would have been appalled at all the illiterate randites that try and claim him) to protect competiton and workers. ("People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick [sic], or in some contrivance to raise prices.).
Shit like buying and closing down pharmacies to jack up price are *exactly* the sort of anticompetitive behaviors that regulators should shut down. They dont benefit the public, and they dont benefit the market.
Same, by the way, goes for certain console makers buying up all the studios, to extract some IP and then shut them down. But thats a different discussion for elsewhere.
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However Brodacom stock did not do that bad either https://www.google.com/finance... [google.com] . 426% increase over 5 years only can be done by self destructive company.
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Broadcom is not that self-desctructive. They destroy others and harm society. And all the assholes riding with them share the blame in the evil. Yes, evil does pay. In the short term. And in societies too stupid to get it under control.
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I think it's more likely that Broadcom wants to be an Oracle. They don't want the high cost of supporting customers that actually need a lot of hand holding, so by pricing things high enough, the companies that can switch away do so, leaving only the big fish that need little support, but pay big money just in case they do at some point in the future.
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I think it's more likely that Broadcom wants to be an Oracle. They don't want the high cost of supporting customers that actually need a lot of hand holding, so by pricing things high enough, the companies that can switch away do so, leaving only the big fish that need little support, but pay big money just in case they do at some point in the future.
Hmm, MySQL meet MariaDB?
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Or the big fish that need a lot of support, by way of expensive Broadcom supplied consultants.
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I thought Larry did that as a favor to his buddy Steve Jobs, so he good go thermo nuclear against android/google via java and hinder the growth.
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I thought Larry did that as a favor to his buddy Steve Jobs, so he good go thermo nuclear against android/google via java and hinder the growth.
Doubtful. I'm pretty sure the acquisition of Sun screwed Apple very badly. They were likely inches away from releasing a snapshotting filesystem (ZFS) that was originally developed by Sun, and then the Oracle acquisition started, and almost immediately, Apple shut down the whole project. After that, it took Apple eight years to develop an replacement. By the time they finally released APFS in 2017, they had been the only major operating system without a snapshot feature for the better part of a decade.
N
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I mean, that's literally what Oracle did to Sun. They figured it was cheaper to buy them than pay the licensing.
Sure, though there was a lot more to it than that. They sued Google over Android just 7 months after completing the acquisition, so it seems likely that they were frothing at the mouth hoping that their acquisition would give them significant money from Google; one Sun Java engineer described the look of glee in the Oracle lawyer's eyes during the meeting with Sun's engineering team during the acquisition.
And Apple dumped the deal to ship ZFS on the Mac right after Oracle began their acquisition, so I can
Re:Only one explaination (Score:4, Insightful)
Buying a company with 38K employees to avoid paying for software licenses seems like an expensive way to go. Actually laying off everyone except the core engineering is going to be more work than simply taking some open source project and staffing it up. Almost any size staff is doing to be smaller than the barest minimum you could trim a bloated company like VMware down to.
I think Broadcom had some kind of plan in mind with the purchase. Perhaps some bundling of products (although that can lead to antitrust issues).
That said, if you crank up the fees 10x and lose 80% of your customers, the math still works out to your advantage in the short term. Pumping the brakes on company growth and start collecting profits instead of re-investing, is probably the only way for them to recoup the purchase price. But man, they dug themselves quite a big hole to get out of.
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All else is just collateral damage in the pursuit of that goal.
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That makes perfect sense, until you see how much they paid. $69billion can pay for a *lot* of VMware licenses, especially before the price hike.
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It is more likely that Broadcom wants to keep highly profitable customers and dump the rest. There could be a high maintenance customers or or VMWare products that prov
Nope. Wrong. (Score:2)
They wanted to cash out before further visualisation and industrialization of IT makes the product completely obsolete. Those who are tied to VMware due to organisational reasons will begrudgingly pay the price. The others moving out will likely move to M$ @zur3 or other offerings of companies that the investors of broadcom also hold stock in.
It's a win-win situation for them.
This is why you inherently cannot trust any property software related vendor in the long run. Because it will always be more financia
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I love how people justify the reason for a proprietary product with "it's supported by the vendor"
Great, now we're stuck with specific, obsolete versions of dependencies, as they're the only "supported" vendor configuration.
We also can't use software developed by other parts of the business, since they don't use prehistoric versions of frameworks.
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Broadcom wanted to buy VMWare so they didn't have to pay for it.
They didn't want to sell it as a product, so they're pricing out all the customers.
If the price gouging pays for the acquisition before all the customers are lost... it's a net win
Occam's Razor says that they thought VMware was so dominant that they could charge whatever they wanted and companies would have to pay. And since other rival products don't yet have the management features that VMware has.... so far their bet has paid off.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd be knee-deep in making world class enterprise management software for their Hyper-V stuff for big business. Same for Oracle and VirtualBox stuff. But neither are, at least nowhere near the level of software that VMware offer
The new corporate buyout reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Corporate merger/buyout playbook:
At some point, we should just accept that companies being allowed to buy/take over other companies is almost always a net loss for humanity, and ban the practice entirely. I can't think of very many counterexamples, and by very many, I mean any, at least when looked at with a long-term view.
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You know, I'd never considered the no-buyouts way of dealing with the creeping domination of all aspects of life by a few hundred corporations, but it's got some merit.
Excellent idea to ban takeovers (Score:2)
Not only does it fix the corporate takeover problem, but also makes the whole concept of shell companies redundant
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My organization owns a dozen or so LLCs.
They're not "shells", they're liability shields, as intended.
If you want to argue against limited liability- that's fine, but arguing that companies shouldn't own companies is the most hamhanded approach to the problem I can even imagine.
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You probably can make this work with "you can own companies you created" rules, or making acquiring copyrights and patents a royal pain in the ass that makes buying completely different companies a pain in the ass.
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Any system qhich requires liability shields is inherently broken and needs to be fixed so they're not needed.
Whether or not it's hamhanded, it solves a whole slew of problems while only requiring one fix. And that fix should be done anyway.
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Any system qhich requires liability shields is inherently broken and needs to be fixed so they're not needed.
You are effectively talking about the elimination of capitalism as the main way of running the economy, which I'm fine with as long as you can first show a working alternative. Given that nobody's done that yet, an LLC is the only reasonable way to do big complex unforseeable business like building aircraft, computers and spacecraft. What is needed is a clear understanding that an LLC is formed by government law, is controlled by government regulations and is part of the government and LLC overreach should
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Except I'm not effectively talking about that at all. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that requires liability to be handled in this daft way. And in fact, that liability can be managed in this way is a huge part of the problem with the current splodge built on top of capitalism.
If the capital actually had to include the liability it carries, pricing of it would be a lot more sane, and it would be a lot easier - in fact unavoidable - to handle environmental concerns and externalities directly in the
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Except I'm not effectively talking about that at all. There is nothing inherent in capitalism that requires liability to be handled in this daft way. .
This is a situation which has developed after trying most of the other alternatives - private liability - failure to enforce liability etc.
The point is that, if there is full liability, when unexpected things go wrong, that will bankrupt the owners. That's leads to extremely conservative behaviour and basically makes interesting technological advances and key risky businesses like health care, aerospace, food and public services impossible.
If the capital actually had to include the liability it carries, pricing of it would be a lot more sane, and it would be a lot easier - in fact unavoidable - to handle environmental concerns and externalities directly in the system instead of trying to smear it on using a legal framework which is then nullified through shielding by shell companies.
At that point you would have to have government programs carrying lo
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Except there hasn't ever been private liability attached to capital in any major society anywhere.
And yes, if there is full liability, that will bankrupt the owners if they breach law and go against the public good. Thanks for stating the obvious. That's the entire point. The key here is, you skip over the bit where they do unlawful things and get punished for them, and then treat the punishment as if it's somehow undeserved.
It's not. That's the entire point. You cause harm, you get punished. That's how san
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You outline rational problems with limited liability- no argument with those.
But then you pretend like limited liability isn't the literal vessel that capital investment in the entire fucking world rides upon.
If you were to outlaw a company/corporation from owning an LLC, you would see the largest capital flight in human history.
I'm not going to spin up a new network in some municipality if it not working out also tanks my entire company. That's a risk not worth taking.
An
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I pretend nothing of the sort. The whole point is that the entire world rides on a broken system where externalities are carried by the public while the capital gains the profit from ignoring them.
And that's why limited liability is evil.
And if you're such a crappy manager you can't even handle a network rollout, you shouldn't be running a company.
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I pretend nothing of the sort. The whole point is that the entire world rides on a broken system where externalities are carried by the public while the capital gains the profit from ignoring them.
Externalities have nothing to do with limited liability.
That's an entirely separate problem space.
And that's why limited liability is evil.
Then your assertion is based on a false premise. Not a lot of hope for your argument at this point.
And if you're such a crappy manager you can't even handle a network rollout, you shouldn't be running a company.
There's a reason I am, and you, clearly, are not.
I'm beginning to think you don't understand what limited liability really is.
A single damages suit can tank anything that isn't a Fortune 500 company.
Operating in any space opens you up to that reality.
Limited liability insures that only the venture and its as
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You're arguing that externalities have nothing to do with limited liability with a straight face, and then try to lecture me.
You must be trolling. Seriously. What the hell.
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You're arguing that externalities have nothing to do with limited liability with a straight face, and then try to lecture me.
Externalities in the context you're using them are about reducing the cost of operations, and thus increasing profit margin.
That is entirely unrelated to limited liability, and the corporate veil.
Externalities are a functional part (for better or worse) of capitalism, and they exist with or without limited liability.
Troll, no. Just better educated than you.
Though if you perceive everyone thus as a troll, that would explain the bubble of thought reality you've constructed for yourself.
Social Market Economy (Score:1)
aka "strictly regulated capitalism". Seems to work quite OK for Germany and others, all things considered.
The problem with you USians is that what you call "Capitalism" effectively isn't one. It's more of a corporate socialism.
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US corporations are more regulated than some, and less than others- you're not wrong about that.
But calling it "corporate socialism" is worthy of rolling eyes.
Also, the denonym is American. Amerikanisch, if you're in Germany.
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I'm not against reform in the LLC domain.
It's just absurd to think "outlawing companies owning companies" is going to result in anything other than near-fucking-immediate economic collapse, as all capital is pulled out of the economy and immediately stuffed under pillows.
Re:The new corporate buyout reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup
Acquisitions NEVER benefit customers or employees and press releases that say "nothing will change" are lies
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Yup ...
Acquisitions NEVER benefit customers or employees
Never say never: sometimes a larger company will buy a smaller company that's on the verge on going out of business, preserving some of the jobs, and continuing the products or services the smaller company produced/provided. For a recent example, the reason you can still buy Twinkies is because Hostess was bought by another company (Smucker's). The customers benefit (if you want to call it that) by still being able to buy Twinkies, and the employees who were retained benefit by not losing their jobs. It'
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What's not clear to me is why lenders keep falling for this. The same thing happened over and over again in the UK, often with formerly public utilities. Sold off, asset stripped, loaded up with debt, and then allowed to fail.
But who is stupid enough to lend these companies money, knowing that the end-game is to go bankrupt and that creditors aren't going to get their money back?
Some of them seem to be pension funds. Maybe they expect the government to bail them out.
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Something similar happened to a quite well known web/internet company in Germany.
But they did not get bought. They wanted to reduce workforce. But simply firing people was not so easy.
So they spun of a daughter company, convinced enough to switch job to there - and that on quite amount of stock options for reduced wages.
Two years later they filed for bankruptcy - I mean the spin off - and hence got rid of underpaid employees with worthless stock options.
The company still exists, but got bought by a competit
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> we should just accept that companies being allowed to buy/take over other companies is almost always a net loss for humanity,
Indeed. That was the 1st tragedy: When companies were allowed to buy another one.
The 2nd tragedy was: When companies were ruled to be a legal person.
Excessive greed will be America's corruption & downfall from within. :-/
My rented vservers have been on KVM all along (Score:3)
I have several from two large providers, one primarily selling to business customers. For the last 5 years or so, they have all been KVM, with zero problems.
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I'm pleased Broadcom is as hostile as they are to VMware/ESXi/whatever users. Qemu/KVM is great and it deserves many more users, contributors and attention. The fact that Broadcom is chasing away all the freeloaders and making them rethink their expectations is a pure good.
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I've found VirtualBox limiting at times
VirtualBox doesn't rely on Qemu/KVM. Different type and implementation of hypervisor entirely.
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I frankly don't understand how companies like Citrix and VMWare even stayed in business.
Azure, I kind of get, simply because of licensing benefits they provide to the not insignificant amount of Windows-centric stacks... but in the everything-else-category, there's never been a great reason to not use QEMU+KVM as opposed to the other hypervisors, at least in the cloud era.
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Indeed.
As to why Citric and VMWare stay in business, I think it is kind of a defect in their customers that think commercial stuff _must_ be better and do not even look at alternatives. Might also be some "authoritarian follower" thing where some type of defective people believe that the market leader must have a good product, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Might also be bribery. Intel and Microsoft, for example, have used that to great effect.
Serves em right (Score:2)
Subject (Score:2)
We're still using VMWare at work because in an Enterprise environment it works pretty well (and honestly as a developer I don't handle that in my professional capacity anyways - the Infrastructure team does the virtualization stuff).
As someone who used to use ESXi at home for personal stuff though, yeah I've definitely migrated away from it to ProxMox. Not sure if it scales as well to manage multiple hosts, load balancing, etc, but just for cramming a bunch of VM's onto a single piece of hardware it works
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Not sure if it scales as well to manage multiple hosts, load balancing, etc
It does not. Does not even have a feature for automatically distributing or moving workloads.
There is a lot of valuable stuff Proxmox lacks. However; Since the cost of VMware just shot up 10X per unit of hardware Per year and changed from a Perpetually owned license to an Annual subscription.. It is probably going to be more economical to just buy 5 times as much hardware.
Put it this way: With the old VMware licensing mode
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It does not. Does not even have a feature for automatically distributing or moving workloads.
While not an official offering from proxmox.com (which doesn't matter - Proxmox is open source anyway), there is ProxLB [github.com] which uses the Proxmox API to automatically load balance VMs across nodes. But I agree with what you say.
Overprovision and you won't have to worry about it. Disclaimer: I have not used ProxLB as I haven't needed it.
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Re: Subject (Score:2)
Wake up!
https://www.veeam.com/company/... [veeam.com]
Re: Consider yourself woken up! (Score:1)
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I know for a fact that RAM provisioning. Encryption of VMs can also be done in several different ways. It also supports Multipath iSCSI [proxmox.com] and am pretty sure it can do that with various SANs as well. Block storage across clusters? Why?
Oh, and for backup you can use Proxmox Backup with does everything, including support tape drives, encryption, compression, and de-duplication.
Broadcom is just all-in on VMware Cloud Foundation (Score:3, Insightful)
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If they just want that, why not spin off everything else, perhaps open source? There are true treasures with VMWare, like VMFS, its FT VM structure, vSAN, and many other parts. For example, if VMFS were mainlined in Linux, it would make iSCSI clustering quite easy, and the vSAN stuff would provide compression and deduplication. With that, one could just grab a bunch of Supermicro servers, stuff them with drives, throw ZFS on them and have vSAN take it from there, making a redundant, multiple-controller S
Sorry, not 1000% (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never met a journalist who can correctly calculate increases or decreases as a percentage change.
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If the price goes up by a factor of 10, that is an increase of 900%, not 1000%.
Says who?
1000% = x10
The article doesn't actually give any dollar figures, but going by what the company said, if they previously paid $90 for a VM instance and now pay $990 that is, in fact, a 1000% ($90 x 10 = $900 + original $90) increase (no one said it was any sort of 'ratio' of the original price).
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(final value minus initial value) / (initial value) x 100 percent
What you have calculated is simply the ratio of final value to initial value, and then multiplied it by 100 and called it a percent. Not mathematically correct at all.
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bill for “10 times the sum it previously paid
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Math isn't your strong suit, I see.
n + p = 10n.
Solve for p.
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It is 1000% *of* the original price.
It is a 900% *increase* over the original price.
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No, the article is wrong, and your distinction is bullshit. Reduce it to a trivial case: say you start with $100. What is 100% more than $100? What is 0% more than $100?
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Geometric is increasing by factor. If you have 200% of $100, how much do you have?
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You can chant "geometrically" all you want, but percentages are by definition arithmetic ratios. It's right in the name: per centum, out of each hundred. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I notice that you didn't even try to answer my questions.
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Oh, so it's only a 900% increase. Well that's all right then.
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Journalists can do this just fine. What they do is simplify things for their readers. If you looked into the actual numbers I would bet you my kidney that it is neither a 900% or 10x increase either. But readers actually don't give a shit. 900% 1000% it's irrelevant. THey could write a "big amount" and it would be equally releavnt to the story.
That doesn't mean journalists can't math, it means you can't journalist.
Proxmox (Score:2)
Let's not forget proxmox for the smaller business space; that's where we jumped to early on. More feature rich than the formerly free version of esxi, there was little reason to keep hooked up to the vmware ecosystem.
Nowadays it's hard to argue against given it's feature set, which includes the ability to find admins ( linux admins can be trained in under a day to support proxmox effectively ).
Re:XCP-NG/Xen Orchestra (Score:2)
Or XCP-NG/Xen Orchestra, which is based on open source Xen. Xen is essentially the hypervisor used by VMWare's ESXi and has some advantages over Proxmox/KVM.
So there are at least two strong, open-source contenders for perhaps 80% of the market VMWare (Broadcom) is destroying/alienating. Both have free/community versions, both have commercial support versions, both are exploding in user-base, and both are getting better all the time...
https://linbit.com/blog/compar... [linbit.com]
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Proxmox has a lot of things going for it. Coming from VMWare-land, having something similar to NSX-v where one can do firewalling on a separate layer, coupled with being able to choose a lot of backend storage algorithms is a nice thing. I still am new to Ceph, but so many VMWare and Hyper-V systems use NFS or SMB, so using that for the backend VM disk I/O isn't a bad thing.
To boot, it is getting better, the control plane is becoming more enterprise-y with a fairly straightforward UI.
The makers of Proxmox
Broadcom, where tech goes to die (Score:4, Interesting)
We already figured Broadcom's intent is to milk VMware and kill it, so we've started swinging out the boats to leave VMware.. it'll take a bit of time, but I forecast in 3 years there will be no VMWare where I'm at.
Bit sad about it, I first started pitching it at some other job back in 2003, it was seen as witchcraft, but I was allowed to continue the experiment. When it proved successful, they let us get a real fiber san and our first blade chassis... and it was good.. ..and then it was commonplace, ...and now it's dead man walking. Broadcom, and your shareholders and CEO, I hope you live in truly interesting times.
More interesting what we have now, I mean.
TL;DR I hope you (Broadcom and shareholders) lose your shirts in the market and end up in the bread lines like 1929.
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VMware will still be around in 5-10 years, easy.
The companies they're dealing with will pay whatever price, because by the time "we should have switched years ago" becomes cost effective, the current CEO of that company will be out the door. And their successor will be dealing with a sunk cost fallacy. Lather, rinse, repeat.
See also: Oracle customers (also know as "hostages").
FFS, Symantec still has antivirus customers and they've been through two PC refresh cycles since the Broadcom takeover. How hard
Are they trying to kill it? (Score:2)
I've been using VMWare Fusion for the best part of a decade. I recently tried to upgrade, which is now supposedly free (so why not?), but it seems impossible. My licenses in two accounts don't show up in my new Broadcom accounts. Links to articles on their support site are broken. Finding the actual link to the downloads is in exercise in patience. And once you find and click the download link, it claims you need to be screened, collects some data and then you don't hear back. After three weeks of wai
OpenNebula != free (Score:2)
OpenNebula is still pitched as a commercial service even if it runs some open source tools and provides a community edition. The community edition likely requires people to pay for their own cloud / private backend to provide VMs. In subscription form it might still be significantly cheaper than VMWare which is a major incentive but the "we're using open source" angle probably isn't what convinces people to try it.
VMWare is sticky. Citrix is sticky (Score:2)
The writing was sort of on the wall for VMWare and Citrix... People working in certain industries demand a certain workload. Medical and banking with CITRIX and some companies cant easily move away from VMWare. Those two companies have some very sticky customers and were ripe to be bought with prices increasing tenfold. Many companies had moved their needs to the cloud. Those that remained were likely not able to migrate. Those fish in the barrel are easy to exploit. This is similar to hiking up medicine p