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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Broadcom’s steep price hikes and licensing changes for VMware are prompting large enterprises like UK supermarket giant Tesco to migrate tens of thousands of virtual machines to alternative platforms. Commenters examine candidate replacements (from Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Nutanix to Proxmox and OpenStack), noting trade-offs in features, scale, and backup compatibility, and emphasize that the real bottlenecks are organizational risk, legacy dependencies, and migration logistics rather than raw tooling. Many see Broadcom’s approach as a private‑equity style cash‑extraction strategy that will accelerate the long‑term decline of traditional enterprise virtualization in favor of more open or cloud‑native stacks.

What Tesco Might Be Migrating To

  • Commenters speculate about alternative virtualization platforms: OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt-based), Nutanix, Proxmox, OpenStack, and XCP-ng are mentioned.
  • The article’s note that Tesco’s new platform is incompatible with existing backup tools makes some rule out specific products (e.g., Morpheus, Proxmox + Veeam, which are known to integrate).
  • No consensus emerges; the specific replacement is unclear.

Scalability and Technical Fit

  • Several argue Proxmox would be unwieldy at 40k VMs; practical cluster sizes are reported around a couple dozen nodes, implying many clusters.
  • Others counter that multi-cluster Proxmox at that scale is feasible (tens or hundreds of clusters), but possibly operationally painful.
  • OpenStack is cited as having proven large-scale deployments (e.g., CERN), and Nutanix/OpenShift are viewed as more “enterprise-ready” for this size.

Migration Effort and Timelines

  • A practitioner from a vendor side notes that 40k VM migrations are now routine but still large; 500–1000 VMs/day is possible once tooling and planning are in place.
  • Organizational factors (procurement, compliance, legal, coordination between old/new infra teams, user training) are seen as dominating the 18‑month timeline more than raw technical work.
  • Data movement, storage constraints, legacy OSes, weird appliances, and downtime windows (e.g., shutting production lines on weekends) all add complexity.

Broadcom/VMware Business Model

  • Broadcom is widely portrayed as deliberately milking a declining but sticky VMware base: massive price hikes, cost-cutting, aggressive compliance/enforcement.
  • Many report enterprises renewing at “insane” rates because they can’t move quickly; others view this as foreseeable and blame poor long‑term planning.
  • The strategy is likened to private equity: acquire cash-generating products, slash investment, raise prices, accept long-term customer loss.

Vendor Lock-in and Alternatives

  • VMware is described as having been “in a league of its own” and deeply embedded (backups, monitoring, networking, storage, Tanzu/NSX/VSAN), making exits hard.
  • Alternatives (OpenShift Virtualization, Nutanix, Proxmox, KVM on Linux, OpenStack, XCP-ng) are considered increasingly viable, but often with reduced or different functionality compared with full VMware stacks.

Scale of Tesco’s Infrastructure

  • Some are surprised a retailer needs 40k VMs; others point to thousands of stores, per-store clusters, logistics, analytics, and multiple environments (dev/test/stage/DR) as easily justifying that magnitude.
  • Whether “40k workloads” maps to VMs, servers, or something else is noted as somewhat ambiguous.