Broadcom's VMware pricing got you down? See how one Fortune 500 sysadmin spent 23 months migrating 15k VMs to OpenShift & Hyper-V. Pure survival lessons.
Ever since Broadcom acquired VMware and went full vampire mode with their pricing, the IT world has been scrambling. While most sysadmins are crying in the server room over their new bills, one absolute madman on Reddit just dropped a tactical nuke: fully migrating over 15,000 VMs to escape the Broadcom trap. Grab your coffee, let's spill the tea.
Our OP is an infrastructure wizard working at a Fortune 500 company. When the insane new VMware pricing hit, they didn't just roll over and take it. Management actually green-lit a full-blown exit strategy.
It took 23 grueling months to yeet VMware entirely. The final stack choice is surprisingly pragmatic:
Of course, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Leaving VMware meant losing VROPS. They're making do with Dynatrace, but OP admits it doesn't pack the same punch. For backups, they rely on Cohesity. The funny part? OpenShift wasn't even supported by Cohesity at the time, so they literally bullied the vendor into fixing it. The final result: Millions of dollars saved and completely dodging the Broadcom bullet.
The comment section turned into a group therapy session. Here is the general vibe:
The Anti-PE Squad Many users agreed that this is classic Private Equity behavior: sacrifice long-term strategy for short-term profit margins. Ironically, this greedy move is pushing the whole industry toward Open Source models faster than ever. As one user pointed out, pulling off a massive migration like this is the ultimate flex for your resume.
The "My Boss is Delusional" Crew One poor soul (ubrtnk) commented: "Are you me? Literally had this meeting Thursday. Have about 12k VMs and they wanna try to do it in 5 months..." OP replied with cold, hard truth: "It's doable, but you have to have a solid plan. We moved 5K VMs in about 2 months. Lot of sleepless nights, but glad its behind us."
The Support Rant Another sysadmin shared their pain of moving to AWS and AVD. The consensus? Moving the "easy" workloads is quick, but the legacy spaghetti code requires massive cross-team coordination (read: endless meetings and pointing fingers). To top it off, this user roasted the big players: "With VMware we didn't really have to open support tickets much. AWS support isn't great, but Microsoft support is fucking terrible."
You can curse Broadcom all you want, but that's how corporate sharks play the game.
The real lesson here is the danger of vendor lock-in. The moment you are handcuffed to a single proprietary ecosystem, you're just waiting to get milked.
For sysadmins and DevOps engineers, this chaos is actually a ladder. If you know how to architect and execute a massive escape route like this, you can basically write your own paycheck right now. Stop slacking, grab your Free $300 to test VPS on Vultr, spin up some OpenShift or Proxmox labs, and get your hands dirty. The Great Migration has begun.
Source: Reddit
