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Broadcom faces challenges with the latest versions of VMware

Posted on by darion

Many enterprises are hesitant about continuing to use Broadcom’s VMware software, and analysts say major changes recently made to the hybrid cloud platform are unlikely to change that stance.

This week, Broadcom, which acquired VMware last November, rolled out an update to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that consolidates dozens of products and suites into one platform. Broadcom plans to release VCF 5.2 in late July.

The unified platform for computing, storage, networking, security and cloud management is covered by a single subscription license per core. According to Broadcom, gone are the perpetual licenses that enterprises held for individual VMware offerings, which included 168 editions and product suites and nearly 9,000 SKUs.

Broadcom’s massive changes to its VMware product portfolio are a turning point for many enterprises. In the face of such disruption, CIOs are taking a hard look at the VMware portfolio, weighing the potential benefits of change and deciding whether to stay or leave the competition.

“It brought attention to a lot of things that may have gone unnoticed before because of the rise of (VMware),” said Tony Lock, an analyst at Freeform Dynamics.

VCF 5.2 requires the enterprise CIO to make an organization-wide purchase and commit to VMware’s product roadmap, said Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst for VMware at Forrester Research. This may not meet the needs of networking, server, storage and application teams who are accustomed to purchasing what they need separately.

“They have their own needs, their own drivers and their own challenges,” Chhabra said. “Is VMware an innovator and leader across the board? The answer is no.”

Additionally, the VCF subscription license represents a four- to seven-fold price increase for enterprises that have paid for a perpetual license for a single product in the suite, Chhabra said.

The backdrop for mass product consolidation is the changing data center market, dominated by the VMware server virtualization platform. Enterprises are moving to more modern architectures that include cloud-native technologies such as containers, microservices, and serverless computing.

Forrester stands by its prediction from late last year that one in five VMware customers will gradually abandon the platform in favor of cloud-native alternatives and architectures that compete with VCF.

In public clouds, VCF competes with Google Compute Engine, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure virtual machines. In private cloud data centers, rivals include Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, DigitalOcean and HPE Private Cloud, which added KVM virtualization at the Discover conference last week.

Broadcom is trying to retain VMware customers

Still, VCF 5.2 includes features that encourage enterprises to stay with Broadcom. VCF Import enables companies to leverage the vSphere compute virtualization platform, vSAN virtual storage, and NSX virtual networking stacks into a single VCF deployment that simplifies management by providing universal updates and patches.

VMware also lets organizations stay with their virtualization platform if they want to. The company this week introduced vSphere Foundation 5.2 virtualization technology.

VCF and vSphere Foundation are the only two VMware platforms offered by Broadcom.

For cloud-native application developers in VCF, Broadcom has separated Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), making it easier to ensure product compatibility with Kubernetes updates. TKG is the runtime for Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system for managing container workloads.

Time will tell whether Broadcom’s product consolidation strategy will be successful against its rivals.

“I would say that alternative ecosystems are probably much more mature than they were three, four, five, six years ago,” Lock said. “In terms of the competitive landscape, it is much more competitive now than before.”

Antone Gonsalves is the editor-in-chief of TechTarget Editorial, writing about industry trends that are key to enterprise technology buyers. He has been working in technology journalism for 25 years and lives in San Francisco.