this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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214
Broadcom lays off VMware employees after closing its $69 billion acquisition of the company (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 67 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Well, sounds like VMWare is dead now then.

Hope those new ex-C suite billionaires enjoy the damage they've done to a previously reputable brand and product πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ glad I went with libvirt for virtualization instead 4 years ago when rebuilding my homelab

Edit: fix virtualization spelling error

[–] [email protected] 56 points 11 months ago (1 children)

VMware has been dying because of the Broadcom acquisition since last year. They basically looked at all the fortune 500s that used the tech and said "hey guys, our new business plan is to jack up the price 500% because your stack is dependent on us" and ever since there's been a ton of positions for migration to cloud services and OpenStack.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Companies shouldn't be going all in on one piece of software anyways. Mine is going to all Azure, and I can see the pain train coming from miles away when they decide to jack up pricing or tank service. Kind of surprised to see so many companies putting all their eggs into one basket.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Its most likely the non-technical employees being laid off. The accountants, lawyers and sales. Broadcom already has those departments, they dont need duplicates. The developers will probably stay though. i'm sure vmware products will continue to be just as unreliable as they have always been...

Its kinda suprising how bad virtualisation front end software is. I use libvirt at home as well, virt-manager locks up and crashes frequently, and throws obscure errors if i get the config wrong.
VMware workstation at work will crash weekly, taking down the entire host machine. Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin to keep it alive, and even still requires a lot of downtime.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Years ago, I had a job where we were moving from Citrix to esxi. I was so excited because I had bought into the hype and Citrix had annoyed me to no end. 4 months into the migration project, we hit a major roadblock. Open a ticket - no response. Reach out to our contact for escalation after a week - no response. Our director reached out to the high level person on the VMware side of the deal - no response.

At least with Citrix we usually got a response within 24 hours with information or being told they were escalating. We stuck with Citrix because our director at least didn't fall into the sunk cost fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Esxi/vcenter also seems to require constant admin

It's weird how I've worked in Large-scale Enterprise shops for more than the last decade, and ESX since about 4 has required absolutely no break-fix other than patching and whatever the underlying hardware needed. We're talking thousands of VMs, and flawless metro-vmotion of hundreds of hot-and-running streaming VMs at times, and over years. To see what you've written, it could be a very different product from the one I've used, as I've seen none of what you mention.

I hope you can see the same reliability one day, from the product where you've migrated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I dont do the admin side of it, but as a user we see frequent outages (had one today :( ). I hope to one day I see the same reliability youve experienced :(

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

My experience as well. Yes there are problems sometimes but across 1k+ hypervisors that's going to happen.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Disagree on vCenter/ESXi. Having a competent design, build, and initial deployment are usually the success factors. I've had ESXi hosts and vCenter that only need to go offline for mandatory security patching, and even then, it's easily covered by vMotion.

Agree that VMware Workstation is awful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I had nothing to do with the design and build, or current management. It could well be that my experience is unique. But its not been positive unfortunately. :(

[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Man, a guy I know who has worked for and evangelized VMWare for years and he’s been oddly quiet on Mastodon today. Guess it’s time to reach out.

Update: His job is safe.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Yes, that’s what always happens after a merger. Not sure why everyone is acting so shocked.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Many VMware employees learned Monday that their positions will be eliminated following Broadcom closing its acquisition of the company.

Employees whose positions were eliminated received an email on Monday viewed by Business Insider that said, "Broadcom recently completed its acquisition of VMware.

As part of integration planning, and following an organizational needs assessment, we identified go-forward roles that will be required within the combined company.

We want to make this transition as smooth as possible, including offering you a generous severance package and providing you a non-working paid notice period," the email continued.

VMware had already begun job cuts prior to the acquisition closing, BI previously reported.

In the past year, several top VMware executives have left the cloud computing company.

The original article contains 333 words, the summary contains 121 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Non-paywall/Nagwall/Whatever that stupid thing was Archive.org link.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The price is nice but I don't get why they don't round it. Same with activision acquisition.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Well the difference between 69 billion and 70 billion is 1 billion.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Tom Scott’s video on 1 million dollars vs 1 billion dollars highlights how crazy 1 billion dollars really is for those that need easy to understand comparisons like me.

https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg?si=EVLrBrWSVYptf3r8

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Damn, this must be why I'm not a billionaire. I keep forgetting to do this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I can believe that they didn’t add 420 million to it…