Broadcom hasn't said how many people will be affected, or much of anything else.
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Broadcom cuts at least 2,800 VMware jobs following $69 billion acquisition
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Not nice.
Didn’t something similar happen when Dell bought EMC? Feel for the people I met who work there but morale seemed low after this was announced.
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Containers and VM's serve two completely different purposes. Sure, you can do similar things between one and the other, but there are an awful lot of things that containers can't do that VM's can.
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Every interaction I've had with VMware made me assume morale was already low across the company.
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Cloudfoundry - TAS - Tanzu Application System and TAP are vmware container based systems
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"Hi, VMware. I'm Novell, and this over here is SuSE. CentOS, get VMware's jacket, would you? Please, have a seat, have a drink, and let's get you familiar with this place..."
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And yet VMWare runs most on premise infrastructure. Yes, there are on premise servers still.
Broadcom will learn from Oracle: more lawyers, higher prices every year, and of course legal traps in the license use terms.
Broadcom will learn from Oracle: more lawyers, higher prices every year, and of course legal traps in the license use terms.
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No surprise after a number of M&As that this company has done in the past (starting even before the one that included the Broadcom name). Hock Tan has been very frank about his acquisition philosophy. He wants to be #1 or #2 in each market niche. If he sees a company with a market-leading product, he will buy the company, keep that line of business, and cast off every other part of the company. (Usually he will make cuts within that line of business too. Nothing immediately fatal, but prioritizing margins over growth.)
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My memory told me that the workstation products were already busted down to a skeleton crew (though in reality this was quite a while ago, when Dell acquired EMC and VMware along with it):Will they ditch VMware Fusion for macOS?
VMware Fusion, Workstation team culled in company restructure
Company says it's just "transitioning" as part of reorganization, products will be supported.
arstechnica.com
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It's been an absolute cluster for us since nearly all our subscriptions are due up the next couple of months with VMware's cloud products. We can't even get quotes, and we are losing half our of sales team. Not a great start with Broadcom in the enterprise.
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While its true Broadcom is trying to build its cloud software service subscription business, it's also true they have a long reputation of buying companies in order to aggressively trim them, keep what they can use, and resell the rest in parts.
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Pretty much good on Dell they made a decent chunk of change of it and how were able to get rid of the product that got to the point of kneecapping two sides of the business because the concepts competed against each other. Dells problem was trying to everyone wanting to have someone else run the datacenter backend. When Dell's goal is equipment sales.
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The layoffs are awful, and apparently Broadcom is doing away with any and all remote work. I would imagine morale is pretty bad at VMware right now. I personally am concerned for the future of VMUG. In addition to vSphere being a great platform, it's nice to be able to bounce things off my home lab before trying them at work (we don't have a test environment, naturally.)
VMware has a container platform, Tanzu. That being said, you might be surprised how much of the world still runs on VMware. Just because you don't know much about it doesn't mean it isn't still hugely important in IT.
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If by "world" you mean startups and new developers trying shit out then yes, maybe. If by world you mean "enterprise" then no, no they haven't. If it's not running a full OS in a VM...then they don't understand it. There are of course exceptions, but plenty of enterprise still thinks Server 2019 is too new or RHEL9 is still "unstable" for production and you'll pry their RHEL7 out of their hands when they're good an ready.
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As a mid-size university, we had trouble (months of trouble) getting a quote from VMware to renew our licenses this past year. Don't worry, though, we've already planned our move to Hyper-V.
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Will they ditch VMware Fusion for macOS?
Doubtful. macOS is a preferred system for many, and Fusion is VMware's only presence in that ecosystem. Fusion isn't meant to be a revenue generator itself, it's meant to be a foot in the door. You see someone running Fusion, you start asking about VMware and its other products.
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Avago / Broadcom's acquisition system is pretty much like any of your poisonous private equity deals.
They cut staff and costs to reap some immediate earnings rewards, raise prices, and soak up every last $ they can until the stone runs dry / customers have had enough.
They cut staff and costs to reap some immediate earnings rewards, raise prices, and soak up every last $ they can until the stone runs dry / customers have had enough.
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I'll admit I don't understand the overlap behind Broadcom and VMWare. Did the chip manufacturer just decide that they wanted a virtualization software company for some reason? Apart from just saying "enterprise software" and "synergy," can anyone add some more detail?
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Which is exactly what happened to Symantec customers following that acquisition.
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No there's no magic between the two.
Broadcom does a whole slew of acquisitions of companies that they think they can get money out of, no different than some private equity groups. Sometimes they sell them for pieces, sometimes they keep pieces and just cut costs and raise prices.
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Oddly enough the CEO just got a raise equivalent to the paychecks of 2,800 people...
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Mungus the Unhyphenated
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The problem with VMware is that it's a mature technology. None of the sexy factor left to attract investor money. Trouble is, containers as a technology are maturing too...
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Standard takeover procedure. That is where “synergies” means buying a revenue stream, firing a lot of workers, C-suite bonuses, and then run the new stuff to failure.
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100% this, I've got a homelab and this aquisition has been a worry as to whether I'll be able to continue to get licenses, and what to try/do should the licenses become unavailable. Has there been anything mentioned anywhere about the future of VMUG?
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Broadcom to VMware employees: Merry Christmas! Go fuck yourselves!
God what assholes to be doing that this time of year.
God what assholes to be doing that this time of year.
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Apple ditching Intel for Apple Silicon must have put a big dent in the sales of VMware Fusion - a lot of people used it run Windows, and most of that market disappeared. Sure, you can run an ARM version of Windows but the market for that is considerably smaller.Will they ditch VMware Fusion for macOS?
I know I myself used it for Windows and Linux, at least... and stopped buying it when I got Apple Silicon.
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Broadcom hit a growth ceiling with semiconductors, so it expanded into software. Expansion into a different industry is a common practice in order to grow revenue. It dipped its toes into the cloud waters with the acquisition of CA Technologies. Broadcom's portfolio consists of datacenter products, so it's attempting to leverage existing relationships and reputation in order to drive VMware revenue.
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My workplace is similar, we have about 1,000 cores and 14T of memory running ESXi and started looking at Hyper-V last year. I setup a small Hyper-V cluster a while back just to get the feel of just how a transition would work.
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My cousin is one of the cuts. He got a heavy severance and is chilling over the holidays, then off for a new venture next year.
He said the writing has been on the wall for a long time and that morale shit the bed long ago.
He said the writing has been on the wall for a long time and that morale shit the bed long ago.
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VMWare owns Pivotal, which is the company behind the Spring Framework (and Spring Boot).
It’s one of the most used Java frameworks, I do wonder how (if) Broadcoms’ purchase will impact their product portfolio.
It’s one of the most used Java frameworks, I do wonder how (if) Broadcoms’ purchase will impact their product portfolio.
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The writing was on the wall when the board forced out Diane Greene, and Mendel Rosenblum quit soon after. I stuck around for a few years after, but quit when it was clear VMware was no longer a tech innovator and now just another public company obsessed with financials. There was a notable change in product quality, and customer feedback was increasingly negative.
I'm glad I left when I did, my memories are mostly positive.
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Ghaaaa.
Don't. Please don't. It's not Enterprise ready in any way, shape or form. It's for cheapo installations where some clueless CTO or CEO looks at the licence terms and says "but it's free", like that was ever a good argument for a critical and very technical platform choice.
I've been involved in running 600+ VM clusters on both hypervisors, and I wouldn't touch Hyper-V ever again. Unless it was for a closet-sized installation running a small business on 4 pizza box servers somewhere.
Support for Hyper-V is abysmal as well. When things went haywire and ruined our stability, Microsoft did little to help - essentially stonewalling us for over a month because "the fault is unlikely to be in the Hypervisor" (it was!). All we got was drones in an Indian call centre, in spite of having a proper and pretty expensive support contract.
My current place of work runs slightly over 4500 VMs, all on VMware MSP licenses. VMware is ripping us off big time, but at least it's somewhat stable, and we can get qualified support when something breaks (it occasionally does in an installation this size).
I'd pick KVM on Openstack, or even Proxmox, before Hyper-V. F*ck, i'd run things on-iron before going back to Hyper-V.
Seriously. You'll regret it. Print this post, hang it on the wall, see how you feel in a few years. A couple of changes to your SAN, or a firmware upgrade to core switches, absolutely WILL ruin your day with Hyper-V. I mean, hell, the damn thing won't even continue running the Hypervisor if the host OS has a minor hiccup... and that OS is Windows Server...
Don't do it man. Just don't.
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Damn. Hopefully there's some kind of beneficial equity cash-out, too.
My last company got acquired into an exciting new era of cuts after being bought for $1 billion on ~$150 million in annual revenue.
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No, it's dropping as more people move to cloud-based containers hosted in Azure, AWS, etc.
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