European cloud provider Anexia has had it with VMware under Broadcom, migrating 12,000 virtual machines away toward its own KVM hypervisor.
Anexia managed to migrate integrally away from Broadcom last year, even though VMware was a crucial part of its infrastructure. Since Broadcom acquired VMware, the company has unilaterally transformed its portfolio, partner model and licensing toward a system equivalent to a financial drain on just about all but the very largest customers.
No option to stay
European cloud provider Anexia, with about 12,000 virtual machines running on VMware, does not fall under Broadcom’s definition of large. Alexander Windbichler, CEO of the Austrian company, told The Register that staying with VMware was not an option. Although Windbichler did not cite figures, The Register knows that licensing costs had risen 500 percent since Broadcom moved in.
Moreover, Broadcom requires its customers to pay not by the month, but in advance for a two-year contract. Anexia is not the only one who had to cough up an astronomical amount of money so suddenly. “Something like that would have put extreme pressure on our cash flow. Moreover, we would no longer have been competitive.”
Since the acquisition, Broadcom has largely gotten away with practices previously labeled by European cloud providers as akin to extortion. After all, VMware is a crucial part of many a customer’s virtualization infrastructure, and migrating is not a given.
Opensource-KVM
Anexia did start a process, and was able to call on a subsidiary that was already working with a KVM hypervisor. All the experience was needed because the provider wanted to migrate to its own solution before the huge license fee was due. That implied that the migration path could only take a few months.
Windbichler then feared that customers would be skeptical of the plans. He wanted to sell the migration as a cost-cutting measure, but that turned out not to be as necessary as expected. “We said we’re fighting for a good cause,” said the CEO “I didn’t think customers would care about that, but that turned out to be the case.”
Broadcom’s practices were viewed negatively by Anexia’s customers, making them entirely willing to cooperate with a departure. Anexia then built a migration tool that allowed customers to see when a VM was ready for migration. A push of a button was all it took to fully migrate a virtual machine to KVM, although that involved a reboot of the VM.
Anexia faced some technical challenges, but was able to overcome them all. In the end, the provider managed to move all customers and all their VMs, totaling 12,000 virtual machines, away from VMware by May 2024.
‘Not to work with such a company’
“I don’t think Broadcom will be successful,” Windbichler still told The Register, referring to the price increases and customer-unfriendly strategy. “They’ve lost all confidence. I’ve talked to so many VMware customers, and they say they can’t work with that type of company.”
In any case, Anexia is showing that it pays not to stand by and stand up to unfair practices. The company has more budget since the migration, has not lost customers and has become independent.