> Revenue may be increasing, but their customer base is decreasing, and any customer who's paying attention is now looking for an exit strategy.

VMware in 2024 had 96% of the virtualization market and 500k customers. The above is somewhat true but also kind of like saying "the USA is in decline"... okay, but it's so big that it's going to take a very long time, and not every arrow is pointing down.

Broadcom focusing on higher margin larger customers hurts the 10+ year horizon but at the same time they're closing massive (9 figure) deals 5 years out including some very large expansions. Everyone is going to look for an exit - as they should! - but that doesn't mean they actually WILL exit.

(I don't work for VMware, though I did years ago, I am an independent).

> I spec'ed, installed, and ran a VMware cluster for a few years and it was never very stable. After a while I stopped installing the software updates because they would usually break something.

I would gently suggest this isn't really much of an anecdote. This is like saying "I ran Linux once and it never seemed stable, so I stopped updating it".

There's VMware customers that range from a dozen VMs on a cluster to literally hundreds of clusters each with 10-20 hosts each with 100+ cores and 2 TB+ RAM and thousands of VMs... adding up to 500k+ VMs at the largest customers.

> More than once, after applying an update, I had to re-install the licenses for each server and its associated CPUs, which is a painful process.

This is not something I have encountered in 20+ years or could find an KB about online to indicate it was a widespread issue (though maybe it was if you have a link). Broadcom moved all licenses to subscription recently, which caused issues here but otherwise this feels odd.

> We initially installed using an external DNS, but the cluster was so flaky that we had to switch to their recommended configuration of local DNS.

I am not sure I understand, What do you mean by local vs external DNS? I am familiar with Kubernetes clusters having local CoreDNS and a plugin for plumbing external records called External DNS, however these aren't vSphere concerns. Vsphere uses standard NTP and DNS and doesn't ship with a DNS server, it doesn't have any recommendations on where or how it runs other than it being highly available.

Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct