from the maybe-wireless-will-finally-work-in-my-linux-VM-now? dept.
Broadcom to acquire VMware in massive $61B deal – TechCrunch:
Sometimes when there is smoke, there is actually fire. Such was the case with the rumors of Broadcom's interest in VMware this past weekend. It turns out that fire was burning hot, and today, Broadcom announced it is acquiring VMware in a massive $61 billion deal.
The deal is a combination of cash and stock, with Broadcom assuming $8 billion in VMware debt.
With VMware, Broadcom gets more than the core virtualization, which the company was built on. It also gets other pieces it acquired along the way to diversify, like Heptio for containerization, and Pivotal, which helps provide support services for companies transitioning to modern technology. At the same time it bought Pivotal, it also acquired security company Carbon Black.
That touches upon a lot of technology, but it begs the question, where does it all fit with Broadcom (which has spent a fair amount of money in recent years buying up a couple of key software pieces prior to today's announcement)?
[...] VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram put the typical positive spin on the deal about the two companies being better together. "Combining our assets and talented team with Broadcom's existing enterprise software portfolio, all housed under the VMware brand, creates a remarkable enterprise software player," he said in a statement, referring to those two other pieces Broadcom already owns.
Also reported at:
Previously: Broadcom in Talks to Buy Cloud Computing Firm VMWare
Related Stories
Broadcom In Talks To Buy Cloud Computing Firm VMWare - Benzinga:
Broadcom Inc is reportedly in discussions to take over cloud computing company VMWare Inc.
VMWare denied commenting, while a Broadcom representative wasn't available immediately, according to Bloomberg.
Broadcom has been on the lookout for big software acquisition, noted Bloomberg. In 2018, the Hock Tan-led company announced the acquisition of infrastructure technology company CA Technologies for $18.9 billion in cash. The following year it purchased Symantec Corporation's enterprise security business.
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies Inc, along with Silver Lake are top investors in VMWare, according to Bloomberg.
Also reported at:
- Broadcom to buy VMware 'on Thursday for $60 billion'
- Broadcom's Pursuit of VMware Takes Page From Michael Dell
- Broadcom in Talks to Acquire VMware, the Cloud Computing Company
SEC Charges VMware with Misleading Investors by Obscuring Financial Performance:
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Monday it has charged cloud computing company VMware Inc. with misleading investors by obscuring its financial performance.
The company was charged with misleading investors about its order backlog management practices, which the agency said enabled it to push revenue into future quarters by delaying product deliveries to customers, thereby concealing the company's slowing performance relative to its projections.
Without admitting or denying the findings in the SEC's order, VMware consented to a cease-and-desist order and will pay an $8 million penalty, the SEC said. VMware confirmed in a statement of its own that it reached a settlement with the SEC and agreed to pay the penalty without admitting or denying the SEC's findings.
[...] "The SEC Staff has confirmed that it does not intend to recommend enforcement action against any current or former VMware officers or other member of management in connection with the investigation, and this settlement concludes the matter," VMware said in its statement on Monday.
See also: Broadcom to Acquire VMware in Massive $61B Deal
One of biggest (and dullest) big tech acquisitions ever may be blocked by the European Commission:
The European Union plans to carry out a full-scale investigation of Broadcom's $61 billion bid to buy VMware. Following a preliminary probe, the European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, announced on Tuesday it believes the proposed acquisition may allow Broadcom to "restrict competition" in the markets for network interface cards, fiber channel host-bus adapters and storage adapters.
Specifically, the EU is concerned Broadcom may harm competition in those markets by limiting interoperability between rival hardware and VMware's server virtualization software. [...]
The Commission will also investigate whether Broadcom could hinder rivals like NVIDIA and Intel from developing their own smart network interface cards. Here it points to VMWare's involvement in Project Monterey, an industry-wide effort the company announced in 2020. "Broadcom may decrease VMware's involvement in Project Monterey to protect its own NICs revenues," the Commission notes. "This could hamper innovation to the detriment of customers." Another concern is that Broadcom could start bundling VMware's virtualization software with its own mainframe and security tools, a move that would reduce choice in the market.
Previously:
Broadcom to Acquire VMware in Massive $61B Deal
Broadcom in Talks to Buy Cloud Computing Firm VMWare
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @01:56AM (14 children)
What's broadcom's plan here?
BTW, broadcom is old HP's spunned-off chip division, right?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @04:28AM (13 children)
Broadcom already revealed their plan. They are immediately getting rid of perpetual vmware licenses, and going to a subscription model and plan to double past revenue from vmware.
Prediction: Broadcom walks this back like when vmware tried to gouge customers by trying to license based on oversubscribed "virtual" memory amount. Or, this subscription BS + the recent vmware licensing change where they charge additional socket licenses if you have more than 32 cores on a processor (already doubling licensing costs for shops using 48 or 64 core Epyc processors), will get a bunch of current customers to abandon vmware-- The MS centric shops will go to MS hyperV, and others will go to KVM (probably with a front-end like proxmox or ovirt) or maybe Citrix's branded Xen offering. And, a decent number might decide that "cloud" is looking more attractive. But, I don't see how this ends up well for vmware if Broadcom sticks with the plan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @04:30AM
Forgot to add link to parent comment:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/27/broadcom_vmware_subscriptions/?td=rt-3a [theregister.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @11:35AM (2 children)
Broadcom can take advantage of customers that are locked in to the VMware ecosystem. It's not trivial to move to hyperv or kvm with equivalent function. Especially when you have decimated your it staff. The real competition to VMware is cloud not kvm or hyperv.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday May 28 2022, @03:49PM
I would embrace and extend your remarks with its not just running the same old stuff on cloud instances, but abandonment of servers in favor of SaaS.
You could set up a farm on premises of linux boxes living in openstack and accessed by Apache Guacamole.
Or run windows desktops in vmware and access via guacamole. I used that for some years at one client.
Or go to the ENORMOUS effort of setting up VMware Horizons which lets you basically run Amazon Workspaces -alike locally.
Or go to the EVEN LARGER effort and expense of tossing your entire vmware horizons system onto AWS because AWS supports a managed vmware solution.
Or just say "F it" and set up Amazon Workspaces for your users in an hour or less and it don't cost that much.
Its the same thing with databases... you could set up mysql on bare metal hardware on premises. Or put it in an image on premises. Or run it in docker on premises. If you're going cloud you'll be tempted to replicate that setup from on-premises but on the cloud, take that vmware image and turn it into a cloudy EC2 image. But the real way to do it is get out of the DBMS game and spin up an AWS RDS where you pick your version of MySQL for amazon to manage for you, your demarcation point WRT responsibility is TCP port 3306 and everything past that is Amazon's problem not yours. That's the way to go when you convert to cloud.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 30 2022, @04:55PM
If you've decimated your IT staff it's not trivial to move to cloud either. The lower fail method is move to cloud THEN decimate your IT staff not the other way around.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 28 2022, @12:13PM (7 children)
Remind me: are there tangible benefits of VMware over solutions like VirtualBox?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @01:45PM
Many years ago for me it "just worked." They also introduced a wonderful feature where you could clone a Windows machine while it was up and running. I had grand plans to clone several older Windows machines where I was too lazy to properly go through and find and pull out the stuff I wanted to keep, since hard drive sizes were such that it would be trivial to just keep those old machines around as VMs all on one hard drive. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as advertised for a Win 2000 laptop, erroring out with annoying errors that you can’t turn up search results for, so I ultimately did what I should have done from the first and just blow away the old hard drive (because I’ve realized that "stuff" that I’m too lazy to go through and pull over isn’t stuff that I’m likely to ever go back into anyway) and got rid of the old machines.
TLDR: it was simple and it was "free" and it worked (until it didn’t and I jumped to VirtualBox).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @02:52PM
VirtualBox is only equivalent to VMware Workstation/Player.
The closest free (GPL with paid support) equivalent to VMware ESXi/vSphere would be Proxmox VE.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Saturday May 28 2022, @03:36PM (4 children)
People who don't use their stuff think all VMware sells is a workstation virtualizer or a really expensive version of openstack.
But they actually sell, seemingly, everything AWS offers, and VMware never sells "the one true official corporate orchestration solution" they always sell like five different incompatible orchestration systems. So there's literal VMware Orchestrator, Cloud Director, vmware automation server, probably more, it all does the same task but for different licensing costs and restrictions.
Remember list price for Log Insight is a nice used car, but actual sales contract price is usually "sign and get LI for free" which further distorts comparisons. Its not just ESXi vs Openstack, and its not ESXi plus LI vs Openstack plus a foss ELK stack, its ESXi plus LI at a discount to retail price vs openstack and ELK and LI is a load and go appliance whereas none of your IT people have experience with ELK although its not exactly hard to figure out.
Virtualbox, BTW, is an absolute joke compared to ESXi with vCenter, and even openstack is kinda pitiful in comparison.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 28 2022, @11:19PM (2 children)
When Virtual Box serves all your needs, it's no joke. We evaluated VM Ware as an alternative and saw nothing remotely interesting to us.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by recourse on Monday May 30 2022, @02:18PM (1 child)
Does Virtualbox provide live migration between hypervisor hosts?
(Score: 1, Redundant) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 30 2022, @07:58PM
Don't know, has nothing to do with our use case (embedded system hosted on Linux needs a 'doze GUI).
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @07:26PM
that may be true, but vmware is gpl-violating scum who should be ostracized, if not worse. They are a perfect match for the slaveware peddlers at broadcom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2022, @07:14PM
That is straight out of Computer Associates (CA) playbook - buy up software vendors selling legacy mainframe software and jack up the price. Most of the customers were banks and insurance companies relying on old mainframe systems, and they are loath to muck around with their IT systems, and so they mostly gave in and bent over.
Wouldn't you know, Broadcom bought out CA back in the days, and I am guessing some of its management team made it into Broadcom's c-suite.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2022, @07:22PM
They can make pretty good virtualization software (running Solaris 7.4 under ESXi right now to type this), but their website is a God-forsaken busted nightmare.
Try to download vSphere after registering and jumping through the hoop to create the account (yes they even verify if the phone number is from the correct area code and the street address and the zip code for the part of the city [WTF talk about anal]), register to download the free vSphere (includes ESXi) the download link is busted! It just doesn't do anything! I had to look the shit up on reddit to get a working link and it's been this way for over 10 months now.
ITS FUCKING BAFFLING! QUITE COMICAL! GOD DAMN!