[tdr2d]

Hi, im a presales engineer for OVHcloud, a cloud provider. OVH is a "pinacle" VMware partner, we are a huge reseller of VMware licenses, and were able to secure a 3-5 years contract with broadcom with only 5 to 15% of price increase.

Of course, the clients I talk with are mostly interested in moving to the cloud or are already in the cloud, so it won't be applicable to you if you'd stay on-prem. I wanted to share my experience.

For some clients, change of technology would be more expensive than paying a bit more to VMware. You'd have to re-train half your IT department, and the migration could be long, risky and complexe. So in this case, a lift and shift move-to-cloud can be competitive, and frankly a serious option.

I see a lot of projects with Nutanix, but you'd be surprise of the price, which is almost the same as VMware. Nutanix comes with way more features than vanilla vsphere which explains the cost increase. You'd have NSX and vSAN packaged, plus replication features. Nutanix offers a great alternative. Actually, OVH proposes Nutanix too, so we can be agnostic and have a sort of leverage over Broadcom.

Some clients are ok to move to public cloud (equivalent AWS/Azure..). The smaller the infra the easier it is. It can be very cheap at OVH. Also it's great if you do containers because of the universal nature of them, they are easy to migrate. However, If the client has a lot of Windows Server, the cost is actually higher (at OVH the price of the Windows Server Licence is higher than at Azure..) because we cannot leverage the Windows Datacenter licenses

The cheapest viable option is to go to Proxmox on Baremetal servers. The features are close to a standard vSphere environnement. The lack of enterprise support is the thing that stops most clients to do this move.

[anakaine]

All good points, except perhaps the cost of the move. With VMWare licences anecdotallty increasing ~8x, the cost of moving could well be recovered quite quickly. Organisations tend to think and react strategically, and this will mean 3-5 year (or more) financial projections for major projects. If a $1m VMWare annual bill is now $8m, over 5 years thats $5m vs $40m. A change to a $1m annually cluster isn't going to cost you $35m, so you should definitely look at changing to minimise your expenses, assuming you get the support etc that you need elsewhere.