Euro-cloud provider Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scale and Significance of 12,000 VMs

  • Commenters generally see 12k VMs as “medium to large” but not extreme in VMware terms; some single enterprises run ~30k+.
  • Impact depends heavily on context: VM size, workload density, and number of customers behind them.
  • 12k VMs could represent full stacks for thousands of SMEs or a substantial portion of a country’s healthcare infrastructure.
  • Hardware estimates vary widely: from a single dense rack to many racks, depending on utilization and power per rack.

Migration Complexity and Process

  • Difficulty is less about technology and more about people, documentation, and ownership.
  • Single-tenant vs multi-tenant:
    • Single large customer: easier coordination but messy internal estates, missing docs, unknown app owners.
    • Cloud provider: has clear customer contacts but less control over guest OS and must persuade customers to cooperate.
  • Example Red Hat consulting experience: 12k-VM conversions take 1–3 months, with per-VM downtime from a reboot to many hours.
  • Anexia’s case was eased by:
    • Existing KVM-based know‑how via another hosting brand.
    • Data already on NetApp, independent of VMware storage.

KVM, “Homebrew Platform,” and Tooling

  • “Homebrew KVM platform” is read as a KVM+QEMU+libvirt stack with custom orchestration, not raw KVM alone.
  • Many note that when people say “KVM” they usually mean the full libvirt/QEMU ecosystem.
  • VMware’s main advantage has been integrated networking, storage, and management; replicating this with OSS is doable but staff-intensive.

Alternatives to VMware

  • Options discussed: Proxmox (improving but not VMware‑level for large deployments), OpenNebula, OpenStack, KubeVirt, oVirt, and generic KVM.
  • Some workloads that once used VMware now run on Kubernetes; others still require certified VMware environments (e.g., large enterprise apps/healthcare).

Broadcom Strategy, Lock‑in, and Customer Reactions

  • Broadcom’s price hikes and shift to large upfront payments are widely seen as rent extraction based on lock‑in.
  • Views differ on whether this is rational monetization or value‑destroying short‑termism.
  • Many report organizations either actively migrating off VMware or planning to, though some large or highly entangled environments will likely just “pay up.”
  • Tactics like huge renewal quotes are described as forcing C‑level attention, sometimes backfiring when customers choose to exit.