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

BBender about 2 hours ago 37 commentsRead Article on arstechnica.com

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fsuts•38 minutes ago

”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…).

lmm•4 minutes ago

Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.

sokoloff•about 2 hours ago

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.

fsuts•30 minutes ago

It’s ok, UK courts are mainly rigged and likely to favour a home company over a foreign one (see Tesla v bbc as an example).

Unlike USA, we don’t have Juries for corporate cases and generally filings are private so the Judgement can say pretty much anything….

nubinetwork•about 2 hours ago

> 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?

naturalmovement•about 1 hour ago

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

nikanj•30 minutes ago

Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.

Interesting times.

Fordec•about 1 hour ago

I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.

cloudie78•about 1 hour ago

OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.

OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.

Used to do those migration in a previous life.

p_l•21 minutes ago

The latter is IIRC rebadged KubeVirt

Flere-Imsaho•about 1 hour ago

Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.

nick__m•about 1 hour ago

Proxmox for 40k vm would be surprising also veeam support Proxmox.

proxysna•about 1 hour ago

I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.

digitalsin•about 1 hour ago

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

proxysna•about 1 hour ago

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.

rwmj•about 1 hour ago

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.

It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.

There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).

[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]

Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

stackskipton•36 minutes ago

>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.

Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter

If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.

sokoloff•14 minutes ago

The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)

jamesfinlayson•24 minutes ago

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.

Nikhil37475•11 minutes ago

extremely effective

nmstoker•about 1 hour ago

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

GlacierFox•about 1 hour ago

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

laserDinosaur•37 minutes ago

From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

LastTrain•15 minutes ago

Broadcom has paying customers - they sell chips to companies that have no paying customers.

fsuts•28 minutes ago

VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?

simonjgreen•about 1 hour ago

Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible

windexh8er•12 minutes ago

Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s

dzonga•about 1 hour ago

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.

bijowo1676•24 minutes ago

there is no risk since spring boot is open source.

any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something

lijok•about 1 hour ago

What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?

ickyforce•8 minutes ago

Mostly 30 years of people writing code.

Nikhil37475•11 minutes ago

effective

xvxvx•about 2 hours ago

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.

tjwebbnorfolk•about 1 hour ago

VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.

mjr00•40 minutes ago

... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?