I don't pretend to know the true actual reality of what's going on here, but an article about the end of non-subscription licensing from December of last year is linked in the original article.

The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.

Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.

Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.

That VMware KB article says the subscription version of those applications is no longer available either.

    The following products are at End of Availability (EOA).  All licensing options
    including ... subscription, as well as all editions, suites ... are included
    in this announcement.

It sounds like those ones are going away rather than just forcibly transitioning people to a subscription model.

And the linked blog post: https://news.vmware.com/company/vmware-by-broadcom-business-...

You should tell whoever wrote this kb and the associated articles that the language is opaque, confusing and contradictory.

Your potential customers will not enter your sales funnel with this kind of strange and misshapen noise happening about your products.

I work at a Fortune 50 company and the pendulum for us has already swung back around. 5 years ago it was all "move everything to public". Now, we're building a bunch of on-prem infra and there are huge projects to move workloads back.

For us, on-prem is about half the cost for compute and storage vs public cloud.

I don't think this is a concern of theirs - the new owners don't appear to have any plans for it to be around long enough to need another generation of people to run it.

It's likely that for whatever products remain after this purge, there will be no more major releases, only security patches and ever-more-expensive extended support contracts.

I think people underestimate the long term impact of this kind of thing. Giving the people who use and maybe more importantly influence the purchasing of expensive commercial products the ability to easily play with them on their own is essentially free advertising. And taking that away after you've offered it is even worse since now those same people not only can't experience your product firsthand as easily, but they now actively dislike your company for screwing up their home lab.

Maybe the bet here is that VMWare is so entrenched or the time horizon of the people making the decisions is so short that it won't matter to them personally. But I bet long term it has significant impact and makes room for competitors with more foresight.

I'm already not going to renew my VMUG membership, and am planning to switch my VSphere cluster over to Proxmox.

I wonder who vSphere users can even go to

[dead]

It's not really shuttered it's just become subscription only.

That just got a lot easier for them.

why? loving aws right now, which products do you think they would keep vs kill

The company we purchased from is pretty sure VMware is cutting them off. We used to deal with CDW, but cdw’s service went to crap

Check out www.apporto.com - silicon Valley startup. Simple dashboard, low pricing, great service. 100% recommend on Gartner.

Hate to be that guy but you were probably warned about going full VDI. Those people were right to warn you.

Here is a twitter comment from Nov... https://nitter.net/odrotbohm/status/1730356168755703945?t=xG...

Make of it what you will...

Lets see, this is main the advantage of Java EE (now Jakarta) over Spring, plenty of companies to chose from.

Very much so afaik.

This is the discontinuation of all non-subscription licenses. I.e. vSphere (the software) isn't discontinued rather vSphere (the perpetually licensed product) is continued. You must purchase the new subscription items if you want to renew support. For more minor products there may not be a subscription bundle but for anything in common use there should be.

Most but not all vSphere SKUs are listed. Instead of having 30 different vSphere "products" they'll have a handful and do price differentiation in different ways.

Given that it's broadcom it's safe to assume that this won't be a good thing for vSphere customers, but VMWare's vSphere product line was pretty batshit insane and consolidating it seems sensible.

> Realistically these products aren't being killed; they'll still be available in subscription bundles just not as perpetual licenses.

But the OP says:

> Listing the 56 VMware products and platforms being killed off, VMware said: “All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

I've heard Broadcom is also (dishonestly) pushing a sudden and harsh RTO plan that will probably lead to a huge amount of staff turnover.

According to VMware/Broadcom in the article: “All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

It reads like these products and any way to purchase them have been axed. What am I missing? - if the expectation is that these products will be bundled into future product offerings, that’s a big if and if I’m not mistaken I don’t think we have any concrete information about that yet.

I don't think that's correct - from the article:

“All licensing options including Perpetual, Support & Subscription (SnS), SaaS/hosted and subscription, as well as all editions, suites and pricing metrics of each product, unless otherwise noted, are included in this announcement. These products are no longer available for purchase.”

Honestly, looking at the list, I'm not sure what they actually still sell.

Yuck. The subscription everything model of everything just feels dystopian and a step backwards. It’s everywhere .. even silly simplistic applications and add on’s all subscription.

I don't think Workstation is changing. ESXi is only available in a subscription bundle now. Free ESXi is gone.

People don't know what vSphere is? Sure bud, and no one's heard of Microsoft Office either

a lot of it is vcenter/vsan/vrealize so pretty big stuff. That being said, they aren't killing it off just killing off the perpetual ownership of those products when you buy a license, now it's subscription based