In the wake of widespread customer confusion over a series of license changes announced in December, Broadcom Inc.’s VMware subsidiary is positioning the moves as simplifying its product portfolio and accelerating development while making it easier for customers to move to virtual and cloud-native constructs.

The company has realigned operations around its VMware Cloud Foundation private cloud portfolio and data center-focused VMware vSphere Foundation suite and no longer sells discrete products such as the vSphere hypervisor, vSAN virtual storage and NSX network storage virtualization software. It has also eliminated perpetual licensing in favor of subscription-only pricing, with VCF users getting vSAN, NSX and the Aria management and orchestration components bundled in whether they use them or not.

“Broadcom is clear that the focus is streamlining and simplifying VCF to deliver an improved private cloud stack offering,” said Andrew Lerner, a distinguished vice president at Gartner Inc.

The changes were outlined in a blog post published today by Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, he explained that the moves are part of a broader effort to simplify a complex internal structure at VMware that made it difficult for customers to integrate products.

Breaking down siloes

“When people aren’t aligned in a certain direction, you end up with products that don’t provide an integrated experience,” he said. “We had five general managers with five entities, each building their own products. We refocused on best-of-breed silos.”

Under the new packaging and licensing plan, updates will be delivered across VCF components at the same time. The company is also introducing a license portability plan that allows users to migrate VCF workloads from on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud without incurring additional license charges.

License portability currently only applies to the Google LLC cloud, but Shenoy said other public cloud providers are expected to sign on shortly. The company is also reducing its VCF subscription pricing from $700 per core per year to $350.

“It’s a big advantage for customers who don’t want to have siloes for traditional applications and cloud-native applications,” he said.

Calming customers

Broadcom faced a backlash last month over the license changes and its layoff of 1,800 VMware staffers in an apparent bid to boost profitability. It also announced that 59 products will no longer be available on a standalone basis, with fewer than half being replaced with similar features in VCF or VSF.

Although the licensing changes are positioned as saving customers money, Gartner’s Lerner said the opposite is more likely. “We expect these changes to result in increased spend for many current customers,” he said. “Furthermore, the feedback we’ve received from customers facing a renewal post-acquisition has not been positive, with many customers facing large cost uplifts of up to 2X and higher.” Factors in the higher costs include the shift from perpetual to subscription licensing, metric changes from CPU to core, and different product bundles.

Shenoy said the company’s historical practice of managing a large portfolio of standalone products was neither efficient nor customer-friendly. “Customers have a networking team building a networking silo, a compute team for running their workloads, a storage team with their own set of products and a hodgepodge of swivel chair management,” he said. “That has caused some extreme Frankenstein-like architecture to be built.”

He said the repricing and repackaging initiative is also intended to hurry along customers who are reluctant to virtualize their infrastructure stack beyond the hypervisor.

Convincing the box-huggers

“It’s been hard to have that [virtualization] conversation with folks who, for the last 10 years, have built storage arrays and are what we call box-huggers,” he said. “We are working with our customers to show the value in a step-by-step journey and make sure they understand we are there to help make that journey happen for them.

“We are not saying you need to rip and replace your storage,” he added. “We’re saying we can help you optimize storage areas even better by deploying vSAN and still support your existing environment.” Migration plans will be hammered out on a customer-by-customer basis.

Broadcom has committed to increasing VMware’s research and development budget by $1 billion per year with a particular focus on security, disaster recovery and the Tanzu cloud-native application development platform, Shenoy said. “We have thousands and thousands of engineers working on this product and a very focused set of products,” he said.

Free vSphere no more

Among the products withdrawn from general availability is the free version of the vSphere hypervisor. Although limited to supporting only two physical CPUs, the freeware has long been popular with enthusiasts and home users as well as information technology professionals with home software labs.

Shenoy said a free version will still be available on a limited basis to customers with demonstrated business needs, such as testing new features. “We are putting a program in place that we will unveil very soon to tell those people how they can [get a free version of ESXi] for running home labs, et cetera,” he said.

Photo: Broadcom