'Negative' Views of Broadcom Driving Thousands of VMware Migrations, Rival Says (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0181502054
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/04/09/2053215/negative-views-of-broadcom-driving-thousands-of-vmware-migrations-rival-says
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/04/nutanix-claims-it-has-poached-30000-vmware-customers/
> Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, [2]SDxCentral , a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.
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> Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said.
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> During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, [3]The Register reported . The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them."
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> Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/04/nutanix-claims-it-has-poached-30000-vmware-customers/
[2] https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/nutanix-ceo-targets-majority-of-vmwares-customer-base/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/08/western_union_vmware_nutanix_migration/?td=rt-3a
Proxmox FTW (Score:3)
Having been out of the game for a while I'm very surprised and pleased about proxmox and it's functionality gains, especially with ceph instead of big expensive SAN units.
Re: (Score:3)
For our organization, we're hoping automatic cluster load-balancing will be implemented soon in Proxmox. VMware calls it "DRS" and it's a very expensive add-on.
Proxmox already has a vMotion-like migration function.
Re: (Score:2)
There are two issues I have with Ceph:
1) management complexity. Proxmox is pretty easy to manage, very little to surprised a seasoned admin. Ceph, while easy to implement, can be deceptively difficult to administrate if something goes sideways. I usually recommend small businesses avoid it if at all possible.
2) SANs are often faster. Ceph has enough overhead to be noticable.
That said, it is a very nice feature and well worth learning how to administrate if you're already a linux admin. If you are going
Yes, Migrate from Vmware (Score:5, Informative)
In researching this, the main choices were basically Nutanix or Proxmox. Since Proxmox was free/open source, I went to try that out.
I have replaced 2 of our smaller VMWare systems for Proxmox and like it so far. Ceph integration is basically vSAN, raiding storage across multiple servers, so don't need a SAN or RAID cards. Next will be our main system.
Broadcom (Score:2)
It got so bad that I even stopped pirating it!
Re: (Score:2)
I'd imagine most that are or were pirating it were doing so to run in home labs for knowledge building. If VMWare is now a dead end you'd be stupid to continue to build knowledge in it's use, rather than learning up some competitor product whose skills you can use to market yourself
Swiped Customers? Funny! (Score:5, Insightful)
They drove customers away with the changes and price increases. TBH only the willing captives are using VMware at this point.
Re: (Score:3)
To be fair to broadcom (I know... give me a little space on this), they said that is what they wanted.
Essentially, VMWare went to "for everyone!" to "If you have to ask the price, you cant afford it".
VMware was developed to help share server resources and reduce physical server need.
Broadcom thinks you should pay for the physical server without the physical server, not just once, but every year you have their software.
The sad thing is, they sit on patents that they will do nothing with, but charge othe
Re: (Score:2)
They gave away vmware at the prices before the acquisition. That's the problem. They didn't get big and expensive enough to make an acquisition prohibitive.
Every time we get a great tool that is good, fast and cheap it's bought up by one of these clowns and falls into the 2/3 rule at best. ScreenConnect is another excellent example. DameWare is probably another good example. There's been tons like this.
Now we'll see a ton of money going to AHV, a bit going to hyper-v, and then proxmox will grow exponentiall
Re: (Score:2)
> If VMware had not sold to Broadcom but had just let its business continue on its course, it would have gone through round after round of 15%-20% layoffs and they would ended up in the same place - almost no employees left,
This is completely untrue. You don't know wtf you're talking about.
Re: (Score:2)
Broadcom has always been a shit company, from the very beginning.
Re: (Score:3)
> TBH only the willing captives are using VMware at this point.
And those organizations for which the migration is going to take time (often a lot of time) due to the organizations priorities and funding.
Re: (Score:2)
This is probably the biggest segment of remaining VMWare users. Those that have environments so complex that it's going to cost significantly more to migrate than to just bend over and take the price increase. There's also not having enough resources for such a project and having to hire resources with existing knowledge or train existing resources on a new virtualization product.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly, it was fortunate that so many VMware products were based on open source releases, which facilitated migration away from Broadcom's "monetization" exercise