Time to make a phone call to Dell

Yes sir do it. I hopefully a contract between you / Vates and Dell is on the horizen. Really hope XCP-ng comes as the standard for Virtualization just like ESXi once was.

Time to make a phone call to Dell

How'd that call go?

@Midget The XCP-ng 8.2 LTS (for Current Production) along with Xen Orchestra has lots of features. Including at least some that can't be found at all in VMware products and also in Proxmox. Plus Vates is very responsive and willing to work on additions either alone or with your employer's Development team.

Oh I know. The team here has been phenomenal in helping me setup my lab environment for XCP-ng with XOA.

But we have a lot needs we need to make sure work. Which I plan on discussing here after I put it through it's paces.

@john-c Well when I get my quote after jumping through their hoops, I'll let ya'll know how expensive it is roughly. We have to license 576 cpu cores. We're getting quotes for Standard and Cloud Foundation.

I have yet to seriously try Proxmox, but that is next after I am done testing XCP-ng. I have till September of 2025, which seems like a long time, but it goes quick when trying to find a replacement for VSphere.

@Midget The XCP-ng 8.2 LTS (for Current Production) along with Xen Orchestra has lots of features. Work is also proceeding on producing the XCP-ng 8.3 (currently beta), to result in a non-LTS stable release. Which will stabilise the features likely for inclusion in the next LTS.

Including at least some that can't be found at all in VMware products and also in Proxmox. Plus Vates is very responsive and willing to work on additions either alone or with your employer's Development team.

I have yet to seriously try Proxmox, but that is next after I am done testing XCP-ng. I have till September of 2025, which seems like a long time, but it goes quick when trying to find a replacement for VSphere.

Unless they go to grovelling (cap in hand) to these larger and largest providers to pay what ever these ask for in price. So these providers and Broadcom can charge large fees to people locked in to their offerings.

Also additionally there's a minimum of purchasing and licensing twelve cores with their offerings. So even if you have less than that, say from 2 core up to 10 cores, then you will have to pay for 12 cores per host.

Plus additionally they also have killed the free VMware ESXi Hypervisor product. This means there won't be any future upgrades, so as each of the currently supported versions 7.0 and 8.0 reach end of life, people will either need to pay £210 or $210 per year for VMUG Advantage. Which adds up to a very large amount of money (note what I said about subscriptions).

This means even more home lab owners can potentially be coming here as one of the options.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/13/broadcom_ends_free_esxi_vsphere/

@olivierlambert May also be time to contact and see if the article above can be updated to include XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra (Vates) as options. To increase publicity and help further to get the word out so more business customers know about Vate's services.

The initial link required a registration, but The Register has the story about Dell terminating the distribution agreement as well.

We use Dell a lot in our datacenters but buy VMware licenses from another software vendor. However, I am concerned about the new pricing and subscription model.

Too right to be concerned as subscriptions mean that your leasing the instance of the software (not owning), but your also paying more over a longer period for the privilege. Rather than once then done, also subscriptions can go up and rarely go down or stay the same. Cancelling the subscription then also means if its the only way to be able to use the software, then you need to also remove all instances of the software from every part of your data centre (and/or organisation) in case of audit.

This is especially problematic as Broadcom can essentially really hike up the price and/or cost of the subscription, making the VMware product capable of being priced out your budget.

Time to make a phone call to Dell

Good luck with that call!

We use Dell a lot in our datacenters but buy VMware licenses from another software vendor. However, I am concerned about the new pricing and subscription model.