Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct

nubinetwork

> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses. What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?

xvxvx

Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming. If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.

sokoloff

If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants. Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.

GlacierFox

Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?

proxysna

Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.

nmstoker

I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!

dzonga

this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot. migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand. if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.

fsuts

”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom” For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores. (2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).

Nikhil37475

extremely effective

chatmasta

If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it. At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19. [0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg

driverdan

As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?

usernametaken29

At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.

elevation

My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to: > procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.

senshan

Interesting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.

Alien1Being

Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware. He talked about "Broadcom lies.."

kbar13

i just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart

firesteelrain

I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.

puskavi

Imagine paying for virtualization software when open source options are almost industry standard

bdavisx

They also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts. They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.