Broadcom ends VMware perpetual software licenses

Hi,

it surprises that no one replied to your posting yet.
More important for me is how CV will react. is it planned to support Proxmox for example?

For myself (we are using VMWare atm) I'll be watching what happens over the next few weeks. Moving to cloud is no option for us because of GDPR regulations.

We are using Citrix and so our possible choices are limited.

I’m very skeptical towards Hyper-V; I don’t think that Microsoft will invest a lot of resources into because in their eyes Azure is the better way.

Migrating back to physical servers like twenty years ago isn’t also a real alternative, I fear :)

We are still waiting for more details as no information was shared yet in regards to changes for the VMware Cloud Providers community. This usage based subscription model for VCP partners based on vRAM was already modern, but as VMware wants to consolidate and simplify their product portfolio I think we will see change. For each and every customer and/or partner the impact will be different, either positive or negative. I do think the push to a standardized platform for larger customers makes sense and that it will benefit customers. In the end customers also have to look broader as in many cases you will get more and this could mean that you can also stop using other supporting software which will save money. For customers who were still on perpetual licenses it will for sure hurt, but I've seen many, many software companies stopping perpetual before VMware decide to terminate it.

Moving over to an alternative is depending on the complexity and size of the environment a BIG step as you ditch valuable knowledge, all self-build automation, supporting software and in addition you will most likely need a stack to migrate towards which means investing in hardware and migration cost. 

I personally also see a lot of ads coming by in my LinkedIn feed, especially AHV. It somewhat makes sense that they are throwing a lot of force against it to get in more customers, however I would be careful. Just a few months ago there were enough posts hinting in the direction that they are for sale and that HPE was considering to acquire AHV. One other candidate to take over AHX I think would be Cisco and in both cases you will also get uncertainty. 

Depending on size and complexity the challenges with Proxmox and especially Openstack I see for many companies is the learning curve and the challenge finding engineers with the right skill set. 

VMware have amazing product set, tremendous brand value and single-handedly created an entire industry segment.

Luckily, Commvault supports way more hypervisors than any other product I am aware of, including the first to market with AHV support back in 2016 which seems to be the front-runner in terms of product parity for the Enterprise.

That being said Proxmox seems to be a hit with the home lab community, but I am not personally convinced organizations have widely adopted it above other distributions that leverage KVM, like oVirt or RHV, but this might just be the disruption the puts Proxmox in the limelight or at least rapidly accelerates its adoption. Or, VMware will prevail given its market and product strength and there will be no fundamental shift.

I was wondering what hypervisors as used in the field except for ESXi?
Our CV is currently based on ESXi so we definitly need to check alternatives.

Are there any compatibility issues known with other on-prem hypervisors?
Anyone is talking about Proxmox right now, but I’m not sure.. any experience?
The only thing I know is, that commvault does not support backup operations for PM..