VMware: Broadcom loses another major customer due to high costs

With the British cloud provider Beeks, Broadcom has lost another major VMware customer, as reported by the IT specialist service The Register. Following a tenfold price increase, Beeks switched to the open source alternative OpenNebula. The service provider operates in 30 data centers and runs more than 3,000 servers and 20,000 virtual machines. Other reasons for the switch were a lack of innovation and poor support quality, Head of Product Management Matthew Cretney told The Register.

Some of Beeks' customers preferred physical servers for lower latency and greater isolation over VMs, according to the report. Because the company doesn't want to use two programs, it needs software that can manage both virtual machines and physical servers. vSphere is unsuitable for this task, as it only supports virtual machines. To switch to OpenNebula, Beeks had to implement new interfaces and its own resource measurement tool, but was able to triple the efficiency of the virtual machines.

Stable sales despite customer losses

Since the takeover of VMware by Broadcom, numerous customers have been considering a switch. Small and medium-sized companies in particular cannot afford the price increases. Broadcom introduced the "Enterprise Plus" subscription for them in October in order to deter them from switching. Despite critical voices and customer losses, the takeover seems to have paid off for Broadcom. In the third quarter, the company recorded a 47 percent increase in turnover with the influence of VMware.

The CEO of OpenNebula, Ignacio Llorente, told Ars Technica that several well-known organizations had switched from VMware to the open source solution. OpenNebula can be used to manage private and public cloud infrastructures. The tool prefers KVM hypervisors, but also supports Xen, VMWare and Amazon's microVMs Firecracker.

(sfe)