We recently had a meeting with our new (as in 4th in a year) rep. They let us know ROBO licensing is moving away from the VM Pack method it is now to per socket licensing. Minimum of 16 core per socket purchase, and you can't stretch a license across multiple cores.
We about blew a gasket when we were told this. It is going to make our ROBO license jump from about $2K up to $30K PER YEAR. We were told changes to Ent+ are coming too, but details were not known. We are in the process of looking at how moving to another option would look like. Either Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV.
I guess we can see how Broadcom is making their money back. By screwing over their customers.
It’s a multi stage transition, and we are nearing the end of phase 1, rebuild in AWS using equivalent EC2 instances. This is not cheap by any means, but it gets us out of VMware, and also gets us away from our abysmal capacity management problems. Being able to keep up with business growth on-demand is worth the extra cost over the medium term.
Phase 2 is rearchitecting and consolidating our major overlapping LOB applications into fewer, more cloud-native designs. This should reap cost savings eventually.
Yeah, we’ll never be able to afford a full lift and shift to the cloud. Too much OpEx required.