Sudden disturbing moves for IT in large companies, mandated by CEOs

This is Reddit, so taking any claims with a severely hefty earth sized grain of salt..<p>&gt; <i>Odd part 1: ... moving large numbers of VMs (100,000-500,000) over to Linux based virtualization in very short time frames.</i><p>&gt; <i>Odd part 4: Every one of these requests involves moving the VMs off VMWare or Hyper-V onto OpenShift, specifically.</i><p>As a Solution Architect at Red Hat, no sane sales rep would ever recommend or propose moving VMware footprints of that size onto OpenShift via OpenShift Virtualization[0]. As amazing as that payout would be, that would literally be account suicide if it ever got signed off on. The whole purpose behind OpenShift Virtualization is to aid in organization modernization as a way to consolidate workloads onto a single platform while giving app dev time to migrate their work to containers and microservice based deployments.<p>We are working on making OpenShift Virtualization as capable as we can (considering we&#x27;re killing the Red Hat Virtualization product [upstream project: oVirt]) but it&#x27;s not really meant, especially right now, to be a VMware replacement. That&#x27;s what solutions like Nutanix are for.<p>This entire thing, if at all true which is unlikely, would smell of typical negotiation games to attempt to gain better pricing&#x2F;discounts when it comes time for their VMware renewals. We see this a lot in attempts for customers to try and get better pricing when it comes Red Hat products, and potential customers the other way around with their existing vendors. Business is business and everyone will try to get the best deal they can, but the games do get annoying after a while.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;cloud-computing&#x2F;openshift&#x2F;virtualization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.redhat.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;cloud-computing&#x2F;opens...</a>

My suspicion: these CEOs are trying to scope out the cost of adopting OpenShift, so that, when they&#x27;re negotiating prices with VMWare, they can show how much money they would save with OpenShift in the long term. This may be essentially just an attempt to gain some negotiating leverage in the face of potential VMWare price hikes.

We have an open source tool for moving off VMware to KVM: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libguestfs.org&#x2F;virt-v2v.1.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libguestfs.org&#x2F;virt-v2v.1.html</a><p>It installs virtio drivers into Linux &amp; Windows guests and updates configuration and registry, so the VM will boot straight away on the target.

Interesting, it does seem plausible that the cause is the VMWare price hike; as they specifically stated aiming at large enterprises because they’re slow to move, I wonder whether they may be overplaying their hand.<p>On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine these enterprises moving have a million of VMs before the end of the year, so they probably do have a point. But it just seems like short-sighted short-term thinking here, giving up enterprise market share in exchange for some additional $ now.

I am struggeling so hard... IT departments of two customer companies just moved VMs with a one week deadline to Azure and everything stopped working and I have the responsibility as external developer...<p>Weird SSL errors I have no clue how to fix. I think they are talking about my clients in this reddit post.

Fantasy fiction of a sysadmin that uses anonymity on the internet to craft themselves into someone more important than they are in real life.

What’s strange here is OpenShift as a target. The last I looked, VMs were just getting initial support - certainly not enough functionality or proving to encourage one to rehost 100k VMs onto it as a platform. Also why the assumption that IBM would treat them better than Broadcom&#x2F;CA?

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that when the current war in Ukraine started the Moscow&#x2F;Russian employees of a big US networking hardware company of which everyone on this forum has heard about had their access cut off instantly, as in the invasion started at around 2AM and when the employees tried to get to work that morning they found out they could no longer access the company’s resources.<p>Which tells me that that company’s HQ had already put a sort of kill switch in place for cases like this.

Possibly related to recent VMWare SEC fraud charges<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32834988" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32834988</a>

How is this disturbing? People moving away from Windows must make everyone happy in my book. Probably just leverage in contract negotiations with VMWare as other comments have pointed out though.

Top comment:<p>&gt; VMWare had a price hike in August and is going to a very aggressive subscription model so that may play a role here.<p>Sounds like CEOs trying to gain leverage in negotiating with VMWare.

This is a possibility when pushing companies from perpetual licenses onto subscription and then upping their subscriptions. Wall street is heavily pressing SW companies to increase their ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) or some call it, you will own nothing and be happy. Switching to free software is looking more appealing at the enterprise level.

I would suggest scanning through a few pages of OPs history to determine for yourself whether this is legit or not.

This looks fake. I just imagine someone shorting VMware’s stock on the other side of the keyboard… but who knows.

They know something you don’t. That’s how most people make money. In all seriousness this appears to be cost cutting. They sat down with their CTOs and asked give me a list of cost cutting measures right down to the bone. The CTO says boss we pay for windows licenses, we could move to Linux and save a zillions of $$. CEO says “what are you waiting for do I have to tell you to get a new toilet roll if you run out of one ?”

Redhat acquisition of Makara (Aug 2021) probably enabled a sweeter price point for CxO to buy and virtual host themselves.

Has anybody considered that this could simply be a marketing tactic for OpenShift to get people talking about it.

The idea that Fortune 500 CEO&#x27;s are cold-emailing companies to ask about assistance in re-platforming VM&#x27;s is plainly ridiculous.<p>Leadership taking a strategic decision to shop around for options following the VMWare price increase isn&#x27;t so crazy. In fact, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s expected.

Looks like this is related.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32834988" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32834988</a>

This definitely feels fake. Either just a fabulist or someone mad at VMware and wants to scare them. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies do not know about the Linux virtualization market.