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

6/18/2026 at 2:24:12 AM

I’m surprised by the comments here.

The Broadcom business model (outside the chip business) had been pretty well known, and they don’t really hide it.

They are tech bottom feeders. They find large businesses with a decent moat and free cash flow but are in long term decline (and wasting cash trying to find something new). They buy them, cut development, support and marginal products. Raise prices and squeeze as much as they can.

by lokar

6/18/2026 at 3:28:24 AM

It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.

by SlightlyLeftPad

6/18/2026 at 3:32:15 AM

KKR bought Avago, which bought Broadcom and took the name.

They are a PE firm

by lokar

6/18/2026 at 5:43:43 AM

Someone really needs to build an "Evil Companies" list with flowcharts showing the date/time of demonic possession.

by lenkite

6/18/2026 at 5:49:50 AM

I started building one some years ago, until a friend pointed out that I’d be unemployable and probably targeted.

by port11

6/18/2026 at 9:17:44 AM

I guess one of the people who made their millions and retired should do it

by saagarjha

6/18/2026 at 1:01:19 PM

Sounds hard to do from a yacht...

by ethbr1

6/19/2026 at 12:00:00 AM

With Starlink, now CEOs can use AI to make decisions from any water in the world!

by SlightlyLeftPad

6/18/2026 at 6:10:02 AM

Do it anonymously?

by fauchletenerum

6/18/2026 at 8:05:48 AM

Calling @cstross as technology and demonic possession seem to be some of his core competences.

by rbanffy

6/18/2026 at 11:58:30 AM

Is @catross generally responsive to beetlejuicing of this nature?

by Obscurity4340

6/18/2026 at 12:56:47 PM

Crowdsource it - do it on Wikipedia?

by thisislife2

6/18/2026 at 2:22:07 PM

still easy enough to target, and with the added benefit of non-stop internecine wikipedia arguments + the marketing depts of these firms edit pages + potential lawsuits

by red-iron-pine

6/18/2026 at 4:10:33 AM

I think KKR sold Avago/Broadcom years ago but the same CEO and private equity mindset is still there.

by wmf

6/18/2026 at 4:55:06 AM

Wikipedia's ownership section on broadcom is stale 2024 data but back then at least 10 investment firms and banks owned about 40% of it.

by asdff

6/18/2026 at 6:30:36 AM

Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).

You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.

None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.

Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVGO/holders/?p=AVGO

by ddeck

6/18/2026 at 10:50:07 AM

> None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.

So a public(ly-traded) private equity firm. :)

by throw0101a

6/18/2026 at 8:29:36 AM

[dead]

by Annatar

6/18/2026 at 7:03:42 AM

That's what Constellation Software do and they're in the top 20 biggest software companies. It's not a niche thing for sure

by gste

6/17/2026 at 10:45:22 PM

”Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom”

For any non Uk people, it’s the largest supermarket in Uk. Combination of large stores and smaller high street convenience stores.

(2nd largest was owned by Walmart who sold it recently to private equity and so now it’s saddled with debt and being ruined…).

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 2:22:19 AM

And it has no US comparison. The tesco meal deal concept, the literal wall of choices, just doesnt exist in north america.

I did a big work trip to the UK a couple years back with over 100 people. I tried to explain meal deals and nobody believed me. Then our people basically stripped the meal deal shelves of the tesco express beside our hotel.

by sandworm101

6/18/2026 at 6:38:40 AM

Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them.

Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.

by SCdF

6/18/2026 at 7:13:59 AM

What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.

by cryo32

6/18/2026 at 9:20:22 AM

Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere theres zero reason to be subjecting yourself to a supermarket meal deal, we've got an overabundance of independent food places in towns in the uk.

by esskay

6/18/2026 at 7:52:21 AM

Local food markets offer much better options than Pret to be fair

by nasretdinov

6/18/2026 at 9:01:35 AM

True, but it avoids any unknowns when the office manager is organising a senior leadership lunch meeting. "Nobody ever got fired for buying Pret".

by cjrp

6/18/2026 at 8:03:52 AM

It varies. They have cranked the prices up in the last couple of years.

by cryo32

6/18/2026 at 5:56:24 PM

A great Pret baguette is like £5. Food from a food market is £10 or more these days. They massively increased in price after covid.

by IshKebab

6/18/2026 at 11:29:59 PM

Fortnum and Mason were cheaper than food markets for quite a while.

by zeristor

6/18/2026 at 9:38:13 AM

This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler.

Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.

by pjc50

6/18/2026 at 1:55:15 PM

No, Konbini, and Japanese food in general, is much much healthier than the equivalents in the West. Especially the Anglo West.

by Thraway198

6/18/2026 at 10:34:34 PM

Konbini have more unhealthy stuff than you'll find in the ready-to-eat section of Tesco, although the sushi is better in Japan.

Both are way ahead of the USA.

by Symbiote

6/18/2026 at 11:28:39 PM

Not M&S though

by zeristor

6/18/2026 at 5:55:31 PM

I wouldn't say they are sad. They're a handy option when you're in a pinch. Sad if you're having a meal deal every day of course.

I imagine the positive reception is because the US doesn't have them so it's kind of novel.

by IshKebab

6/18/2026 at 7:49:55 AM

The meal deal was a Boots invention around the turn of the century. It's amazing that now it's a thing in every supermarket and petrol station.

by petepete

6/18/2026 at 3:34:10 AM

What's so unbelievable about meal deals? It seems like a really straightforward bundle purchase.

by pdpi

6/18/2026 at 4:12:30 AM

A sandwich, bag of crisps and a drink for £5 is an actual deal. Sandwich alone in U.S. would be $10 and the “$15 Meal Deal” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

by nixgeek

6/18/2026 at 5:39:16 AM

Gosh, it used to be £3 not that long ago. About £5 for a wrap at Prêt if I couldn't be bothered to go fight with the tourists to cross the road down Kingsway.

by lbreakjai

6/18/2026 at 7:14:53 AM

It's £3.85. Not that much more.

by cryo32

6/18/2026 at 10:29:37 AM

£5.50+ is for the better “main” options, some of which used to be in the base deal, in most places that do a meal deal.

by dspillett

6/18/2026 at 9:40:54 AM

There's a lot to complain about in the UK, but food price/quality is actually pretty good. Not the absolute best, but far from the worst and certainly not Scandinavian prices.

by pjc50

6/18/2026 at 6:17:47 AM

Costco sells really good hotdogs with a large coke for $1.50.

by 8ytecoder

6/18/2026 at 7:36:14 AM

Mechanically reclaimed meat and a half gallon of high fructose corn water isn't much of a comparison.

by swarnie

6/18/2026 at 4:40:09 PM

I honestly can’t understand why not wasting meat is such a bad thing?

by 8ytecoder

6/18/2026 at 5:24:31 PM

Sure from an efficiency point of view its fantastic, personally i like some texture from my meal deal.

by swarnie

6/18/2026 at 11:37:25 AM

[dead]

by cucumber3732842

6/18/2026 at 7:49:11 AM

[dead]

by sandworm101

6/18/2026 at 4:33:58 AM

Mmh, you can get 3 el cheapo sandwiches for 1.99€, a 100g bag of chips for 0.99€ and a liter of water for 0.90€ or flavoured /coke for 1.99€ in Germany

Considering a £ is more then a €, supposedly at last - it doesn't sound like a good deal to me

by ffsm8

6/18/2026 at 5:34:31 AM

I don't think I could find a sandwich anywhere around here in Canada save maybe one of those awful gas station ones for under $6

by mikestorrent

6/18/2026 at 10:40:01 PM

The ones being discussed in the UK are in the triangular box like that, but there's so much competition between the shops that they're ok.

It's also a dense enough country that they will be at most a day or two old.

by Symbiote

6/18/2026 at 10:37:53 PM

Can you give an example, as I'm not sure it's a fair comparison?

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/262308005

by Symbiote

6/19/2026 at 5:23:39 PM

honestly, they depend on the store you chose to go to. they always taste the same. and the last time i ate one of the sandwidches in the UK they tasted the same there too - but it's been a pretty long time, admittedly (like 20 years or so)

eg https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/ja-bacon-ei-sandwich-160g/7878218 cheap sandwidches (2€)

https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/lay-s-chips-red-paprika-150g/8940... chips 150g (99c)

https://www.rewe.de/shop/p/coca-cola-1-5l/6730574 cola, 1.25l (1.19€)

personally i'd skip the sandwiches in all cases - the wraps, baguettes or ready to eat salads are way better and cost the same. and i'd skip the chips too. i mean thats just pure calories. rather eat a great salad for 3€ instead of the el cheapo sandwidches and chips :)

by ffsm8

6/19/2026 at 7:30:26 PM

Then I misunderstood, I thought you meant you could buy 3 sandwiches for €1.99, 67¢ each.

Tesco also have four choices for £1.50 each (€1.73), several 100-200g bags of crisps/tortilla chips for less than £1, and 2 litres of cola for 49p. This would be cheaper than the "Meal Deal".

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/fresh-food/chilled-s...

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/treats-and-snacks/cr...

https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/browse/drinks/fizzy-and-sof...

by Symbiote

6/19/2026 at 8:08:25 PM

Aldi-Nord often has packages with 3 in them for 2€, I was just unable to find them through the website, but I frequently see them as I often buy the 3€ salad right next to them - but they're not separately packaged if that was the misunderstanding

by ffsm8

6/18/2026 at 4:30:52 AM

Incorrect. Maybe you familiar with the high cost of living areas. There are similar $5 deals in the United States. The US is a big place and has many, many businesses offering very similar deals.

by sam345

6/18/2026 at 5:42:32 AM

Thing is, the meal deals are _everywhere_ in the UK. There is no "high cost of living" priced Tesco. Or Sainsbury's. Or 5 other supermarkets.

by nrki

6/18/2026 at 7:43:29 AM

Meal deal prices are higher in certain places, like motorway service stations. If there's a captive market, they'll sneak the price up just like every other company. If there's competition they'll use lower pricing.

by ralferoo

6/18/2026 at 5:03:42 AM

If you want a shitty sandwich you can find it for $5 in the US no problem. Plus some variation of the sausage roll that will clean you out just as well.

by wil421

6/18/2026 at 5:15:16 AM

And by "clean you out" you mean financially or both?

by mattoxic

6/18/2026 at 5:33:52 AM

Oh, you'll be able to afford it... but you may end up having to spend some time instead

by mikestorrent

6/18/2026 at 6:31:16 AM

Meal deal = main + snack/side + drink

The "main" has expanded to Huel, salads, wraps, sushi, even hot food

The "snack" can be more than crisps: small bags of fresh chicken, 2 boiled eggs, small sushi pack, gyozas etc

The "drink" includes quality smoothies, acceptable vending machine coffee etc

Meal deal value maximizing is the whole game lol. There are also lots of healthier options if you choose carefully

In certain Sainsbury's you can get hot food as the main such as a small green curry or chicken goujons, and wedges or hash browns as the side

But the price creeps up £0.50 practically yearly. I think it's £5.50 already in Sainsbury's

It's better to view it as a cheaper alternative to eating at a restaurant rather than somehow saving money compared to bringing in leftovers. People who think £5.50 a day for lunch is saving money versus cooking themselves are delusional

by gib444

6/18/2026 at 8:19:37 AM

£3.85 in my nearest central-London Tesco, it even includes some premium energy drinks like Tenzing that alone would get close to the cost of the deal.

by jpfromlondon

6/18/2026 at 10:20:30 AM

Ah thanks I haven't been paying close enough attention. That's good

by gib444

6/18/2026 at 11:31:52 AM

$6.5 is about what you'd spend to get a bag of chips, hot or cold sandwich and drink from any Walmart that's been renovated recently enough to have a "Grab and go" or whatever they're calling it.

by cucumber3732842

6/18/2026 at 6:56:21 PM

A sandwich, a bag of crisps, and a drink at the grocer near me is $8. I don't exactly live in a super low cost of living area, nor is it one of the most expensive in the US.

by vel0city

6/19/2026 at 5:09:47 AM

Not ashamed to say that visiting the UK again for the first time in about 12 years, getting some Boots/Tesco/Greggs meal deals was on my to-do list. Something I missed moving to Australia. Not that they are _good_, just that they are so readily available, cheap, and have a lot of choices. Woolworths in AU have started doing premade sandwiches, but they are just bad, and don't come in a deal. I doubt they would even try to hit the A$10 price range if they ever did introduce deals.

by EspadaV9

6/18/2026 at 8:23:23 AM

Garment section is also amazing, british ppl are so classy while having timeless thick pieces

I ended up flying back home with some oxford shirt from the Tesco, and it's really cool (vneck pull over - tie - shirt sets were sold out with my size unfortunately)

by hinata08

6/17/2026 at 11:19:44 PM

Walmart had already ruined ASDA to be fair, it's not like private equity is doing worse.

by lmm

6/18/2026 at 1:48:04 AM

The fifth largest (Morrisons) was also sold to PE with predictable results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrisons#CD&R_takeover

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 8:09:28 AM

In really grinds my gears that the buying companies take out the debt to take over against the companies themselves.

So many well-known UK companies have been sunk by debt interest on loans taken out to acquire said companies.

By all means use the companies to secure loans, but the liability should be on the books of the parent companies not the companies being acquired!

There have even been cases where the companies have been effectively asset-stripped by "sell and lease back" of property, leaving the companies a shell of their former selves with no meaningful assets, so as soon as there are any unexpected headwinds they collapse.

by eterm

6/18/2026 at 8:14:48 AM

It should simply be illegal.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 12:33:54 PM

It's the bank's problem. The bank is supposed to determine whether it's likely to be repaid in full, and if not, don't issue the loan which blocks the sale.

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 8:29:00 AM

We need a private equity tracker so we can get alerts on these and track the debt loading and looting.

by stuaxo

6/18/2026 at 6:05:34 PM

Was Morrisons ever any good?

by illwrks

6/19/2026 at 7:51:48 AM

Pretty damn good; not least because each store (aside from the smallest) has their own on-site butcher and fishmonger. Not to mention a decent deli.

by GJim

6/19/2026 at 4:08:09 PM

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll pop by one over the coming weeks.

by illwrks

6/18/2026 at 10:55:38 PM

Their fish & meat counters are much better than the other supermarkets. Better selection and much fresher.

by rwmj

6/19/2026 at 4:07:42 PM

I never knew that! I'll try one out next time I'm passing.

by illwrks

6/18/2026 at 1:44:58 AM

It has decent presence in some parts of South East Asia as well via JVs e.g. Tesco Lotus in Thailand.

by noisy_boy

6/18/2026 at 5:09:01 AM

FWIW, Tesco just divested from all of the Lotuses… now it’s the awkwardly named Lotus’s.

by nxobject

6/18/2026 at 3:10:59 AM

Didn’t realize they were behind Lotus. I also liked the refrigerated meals they would heat up for you right in the store.

by lovich

6/18/2026 at 8:32:01 AM

[dead]

by Annatar

6/18/2026 at 2:18:25 AM

I worked in software acquisitions for a large organization and it was really eye opening to see how insane some of these companies are when it comes to pricing customers out. I always wondered - what is the motive? They make pricing structure changes that aren't even considerable for any organization that has any fashion of a budget. VMWare was one example where our already insane costs that had nearly tripled over the previous 4 years were quoted to triple at the end of the period.

Another was a Java SE licensing change that went from around $1k per instance, of which we had about 5. Mind you there is little to no maintenance support provided here. The increase was to $5.25 per organizational employee per instance, whether they used the instance or not - of which we had 100k. The choice was obviously a simple one.

I can only assume very few organization stay on the ride for those kinds of changes, but obviously they must - but why?

by sqircles

6/18/2026 at 3:04:43 AM

It might take a large org several years to migrate off core systems like VMWare. If you think the customer is likely to churn within a few years anyway it makes economic sense to hike their fee.

by alexjurkiewicz

6/18/2026 at 8:41:32 AM

At any one time, something like 90% of all enterprises are engaged in at least one multi-year strategic move away from an abusive vendor. In the tech world, these might be Oracle, Broadcom, (formerly) IBM, or (even more formerly) Computer Associates.

Typically you're looking at a year or two of discovery, audits and planning, another year or two to cover the main transition, and then up to five years of mopping up.

There are other near-ubiquitous vendors (eg. Microsoft and Cisco) who manage to be tolerated as annoying rather than outright abusive. I guess they take a slightly different view of how hard to squeeze their customers.

by roryirvine

6/18/2026 at 2:25:41 PM

used to work at a company that was tied to literally all of those. life was miserable.

then oracle cut costs on next gen exo-data stuff and agreed to waive some license costs this time and bam just doubled down on them again. ugh.

by red-iron-pine

6/18/2026 at 3:59:32 PM

I did a gig at a Fortune 500 that had actually succeeded in entirely eliminating Oracle. Life was still miserable.

They lived in fear of something slipping through the net. So print servers were switched off because they contained an embedded Oracle JRE. And deployment pipelines that used Hashicorp's Packer had to be rewritten to eliminate the VirtualBox plugin (despite it not being used). Office coffee machines were looked at with suspicion.

Every vendor had to be queried, every piece of software had to be tested and have appropriate controls put in place. There were pre-emptive audits and endless compliance procedures.

There was so much work involved that any cost savings must have been fairly minimal.

by roryirvine

6/18/2026 at 6:53:21 AM

This in turn introduces a lot of economic inefficiency, for no good reason. I think regulation would be useful here.

by joelthelion

6/18/2026 at 7:29:09 AM

> I think regulation would be useful here.

Or vendors just abiding by contracts they've already signed!

by remus

6/18/2026 at 10:01:59 AM

Contrast one regulation vs. thousands of litigations by companies who don't always have the expertise or budget to pursue complex legal procedures.

by joelthelion

6/18/2026 at 12:35:44 PM

If you have a contract that says the price is $1k, pay them $1k and don't answer their calls. They can sue you and they'll lose.

If you have a contract that says they can change the price at any time, and you're a business, that's on you.

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 2:55:43 AM

It's hard (=expensive) to change all the internal infrastructure or sometimes even internal processes, and if companies manage to stay just a bit cheaper than their custumers cost to rewrite "everything", they'll get the money. Even if some customers do so, with the price hike, they still earn more from the ones who don't.

by ajsnigrutin

6/18/2026 at 3:09:34 AM

There is also risk introduced by change. Risk is very scary when you are in management.

by _DeadFred_

6/17/2026 at 9:52:49 PM

If Tesco needs character witnesses that Broadcom has done this to many other customers, I think they’ll find plenty of willing participants.

Broadcom’s marketing for Proxmox is extremely effective.

by sokoloff

6/18/2026 at 1:16:57 AM

Looks like proxmox has well-fleshed-out documentation for migrating from vmware:

"Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well."

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE

by m463

6/18/2026 at 5:35:13 AM

Ugh. ProxMox breaks my heart.

Our MSP refuses to consider ProxMox because “we need to support it”… but are happy as clams to throw me outrageous HyperV labor costs.

They’re literally putting me in a position where I either need to fire them because they refuse to use an open source solution and hire people that can read code… or fire them because they want 50,000 to move 15 VMs over to HyperV.

I want an MSP that isn’t scared of things outside of Microsoft.

by SV_BubbleTime

6/18/2026 at 5:37:42 AM

It's honestly been easy as hell to support and upstream support contracts are available for cheap as chips, like a grand a socket a year or less. An MSP could partner with them to offer enhanced support if they were smart! It's just KVM / Qemu / Ceph on Linux, plenty of 3rd parties can provide support for it... just go spin up a cluster in a trio of VMware machines with nested virtualization turned on and take it for a spin.

by mikestorrent

6/18/2026 at 6:21:23 PM

Doesn't the company behind ProxMox sell enterprise support?

by thenewnewguy

6/18/2026 at 6:56:13 PM

Apparently not enough for my lazy MSP to be confident in their service level agreements.

by SV_BubbleTime

6/18/2026 at 5:35:51 AM

Having done this to a number of clusters, it works really well; TLDR you can have it as simple as mounting the remote ESXi as a datastore and just migrating it straight over in the UI. Or automate it if you have 40,000 of them as Tesco does, though tbqh I'm not sure Proxmox is the solution for that scale of workload.

by mikestorrent

6/17/2026 at 10:53:15 PM

[flagged]

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 12:00:04 AM

What are you talking about? Judicial filings in the UK are not generally confidential and when they are it is usually only about specific documents.

by malfist

6/18/2026 at 1:59:13 AM

In USA you can go on a website and download the filings for PDiddy or Tate or whoever

Show me the uk website.

Oh what’s that? There isn’t one you say…

There is a lot that goes on that the media and the professionals involved don’t speak about.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 2:22:43 AM

Not automatically published on the internet, and confidential aren’t the same thing.

Phone, email or visit the court registry.

by bigfatkitten

6/18/2026 at 2:57:46 AM

You need permission of the court(I.e. Judge ) as per CPR

Phoning will get you the national Contact centre, emails may or not any not be replied to… court registry needs an appointment…

It’s all very nuanced. Until you know how it all works, you don’t know

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 12:05:20 PM

There's a hell of a difference between "court filings are secrete and the media is censored to not talk about that" and "there's a process, but I personally don't know how to follow it"

by malfist

6/18/2026 at 3:57:55 PM

The takeaway is the appearance of justice has been carefully maintained over decades.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 8:47:59 PM

You can go to the court house, sit in the gallery during a trial and literally watch justice being done, anytime you like.

by bigfatkitten

6/18/2026 at 12:36:52 PM

What's the purpose of the process?

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 1:39:55 PM

Irrelevant to the question at hand: Are UK court proceedings secret.

by malfist

6/18/2026 at 11:50:15 PM

I think it's quite important. If they make it hard to get the information, that's soft censorship.

by inigyou

6/18/2026 at 2:05:05 AM

https://www.bailii.org/

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 2:11:34 AM

That’s judgements (What the judge said)

The filings by the parties are made public in the USA and other countries. So you can actually see the arguments and evidence.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 2:14:40 AM

You can get court transcripts but (just like the USA) you have to pay for them. Things could be improved, but in no way are normal UK court cases secret as you claimed. You can also visit the courts and watch cases from the public gallery. You're basically wrong and doubling down on it, for what reason I cannot say.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 2:40:37 AM

My friend, please don’t act like an expert when you happen to be talking to one…

Magistrates court trials are not recorded so no transcripts. So a malicious prosecution is easy to pursue.

When one files for a transcript in courts that are recorded, the transcript is first sent to the Judge and the judge is allowed to change anything they like, with no transparency. They can also refuse a transcript if they feel like it.

I’m not going to respond any further to you as you for some unknown reason are talking about things that you do not understand…

Have a good day.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 9:36:42 AM

Mags courts are for petty offences, nothing like this. Contract law and Torts will be heard at the High Court, and transcripts are available via EX107.

The only exceptions are when the judge imposes reporting restrictions or anonymisation (unlikely in a non-criminal case as it's meant to protect the identities of complainants or sensitive witnesses) or for ex parte actions (which are very limited, eg. to cover an emergency injunction to prevent imminent destruction of evidence).

by roryirvine

6/18/2026 at 1:10:50 PM

Everything you have said is off the mark.

Magistrates don’t deal with what you term petty offences, their powers have been steadily increasing over time. And indeed any conviction has serious affect on a person even after spent.

The rest of your post is also that of a person with very basic understanding of the matters. So not sure why you commented.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 4:47:27 AM

I wonder how the register (the source for this article) managed to even get the information for their article...

by ifh-hn

6/17/2026 at 11:27:59 PM

[dead]

by vr46

6/17/2026 at 11:31:19 PM

>filings are private

That's horrific

by throwaway85825

6/17/2026 at 11:33:36 PM

If uk media were not silenced then yes, everyone would be horrified at what goes on.

by fsuts

6/18/2026 at 12:50:19 AM

It would be if it were true.

by bigfatkitten

6/18/2026 at 1:57:51 AM

It is

Im confused as to why you think you know better

by fsuts

6/17/2026 at 9:41:08 PM

> Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses.

What is a VMware alternative, that isn't compatible with backup software? I'm guessing it's not nutanix?

by nubinetwork

6/17/2026 at 10:34:48 PM

I'm having flashbacks from the late 90s/ early 00s when your company would hire a "Linux guy" that would force a large scale migration to some open source stack no one heard of, then only later worry about if any existing applications worked.

by naturalmovement

6/17/2026 at 10:53:00 PM

Currently in Finland, a major public health provider is moving to chromebooks. By the end of 2026. They won’t even have the test environments ready before Q3 2026.

Interesting times.

by nikanj

6/17/2026 at 9:57:05 PM

I've been hearing that HPE are on a push lately with larger enterprises trying to encroach on VMWare during their pricing changes, might be them.

by Fordec

6/17/2026 at 11:34:15 PM

HPE's VMWare alternative is Morpheus, and it supports both Veeam and Zerto. So it's probably not them.

by d3Xt3r

6/17/2026 at 10:01:07 PM

Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.

by Flere-Imsaho

6/18/2026 at 10:53:35 AM

> Probably Proxmox. Veeam support is relatively new.

As a sysadmin of Proxmox, I do not see how it can scale to 40k VMs. The Proxmox folks themselves have seen "~24" nodes in a cluster (theoretical support is higher), so you'd probably need a lot of clusters for 40k:

* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-with-48-nodes.1746...

For such a size (and sticking strickly with open source), XCP-ng could be an option, or OpenStack. In the closed source space, Nutanix.

As of 2021, CERN had 35k instances/VMs in their OpenStack implementation:

* https://superuser.openinfra.org/articles/scaling-bare-metal-...

by throw0101a

6/17/2026 at 10:22:25 PM

Proxmox for 40k vm would be surprising also veeam support Proxmox.

by nick__m

6/17/2026 at 10:32:23 PM

I'd would assume that this is not a monolithic cluster of 40k vm's but at least tens of clusters. Which puts it in the realm of capabilities of Proxmox.

by proxysna

6/17/2026 at 11:36:52 PM

Before my vacation we (3 colleagues and myself) completedan 8 months long migration (coordination with stakeholders is longer and more complex than migrating a 192TB VM !!!) to 6 proxmox clusters so 20 to 40 clusters for 40k is certainly possible but imo it would be unwieldy.

by nick__m

6/18/2026 at 7:29:26 AM

> 192TB VM

Why? Honest question, what leads to that Kind of size and why cant it use NAS shares or SAN disks for most of that data? Kudos on the migration!

by throwaway270925

6/19/2026 at 1:58:18 AM

I wish I knew ... at least it was a span volume so we could use proxmox support for vmdk and achieve about 30 minutes of planned downtime but a week of storage vmotion followed by another week of the proxmox equivalent.

When I get back to work I will finish the samba configuration of the ceph cluster front-ends to replace those elephants.

by nick__m

6/18/2026 at 5:38:05 AM

Would you do it again (ProxMox)?

by SV_BubbleTime

6/19/2026 at 2:10:29 AM

The FC multipathing was a learning experience and the manual workload placement requires good metrics on your workloads. The built-in ceph is decently configured and more performant than FC if you have 100GBS mellanox NICs and adequate quantity of ram. Veeam integration is serviceable but it's not as mature and polished as the integration available on vmware.

Having tried azure local before (it seems magical but the more you use it the worst it gets, update failed for no apparent reason on only some supposedlyidentical nodes, the sdn was atrocious to deploy and was manageable from wac only), I would recommend proxmox over it anyday.

If you don't have linux expertise on hand and have traditional FC based storage, I would recommend something else, probably nutanix if your budget is big enough.

by nick__m

6/19/2026 at 3:42:54 AM

And if you had to do it one a normal human setup of three hosts and 15 total VMs, no fiber, no san, no special nics or anything like that, just tied in to an ordinary Veeam with the ssd storage on an immutable Linux machine elsewhere?

by SV_BubbleTime

6/19/2026 at 10:49:39 PM

I would choose promox or ovirt (oracle virtualiztion manager is pretty nice, I use it because the licence of the only oracle database of our institution requires it, that and a specialc cores pinning configuration, to avoid licensing every cores in all clusters, https://houseofbrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Oracle-P... ) but it's oracle so we went with proxmox.

by nick__m

6/18/2026 at 1:18:56 AM

I’d guess thousands of clusters. They have over 3k retail stores in the UK, so that could be a 2-3 node cluster in every one.

I’ve worked with a few major US grocers on very similar projects (some hardware only refreshes and one VMware to HyperV/Azure Local migration).

by beniihana

6/17/2026 at 10:17:04 PM

Nutanix has served us well over the last 8 or so years.

by digitalsin

6/18/2026 at 5:38:32 PM

We have migrated from VMware to Nutanix, well, over half way there from a 8,000 VM pool. Nutanix has been a royal pain. LCM updates fubar'ing, Firmware upgrades screwing up UUID numbers of disks so CVM's won't boot, VM's not handling vlan nic and vxlan nic together, our SAN's just now being supported, the amount of bug fixes is weekly and impossible to keep up with, a team's ddos'ing of us with their app caused distributed storage to reboot every VM in the cluster, etc etc etc......I hate Broadcom but Nutanix has been painful!

by twizod

6/18/2026 at 1:24:10 AM

How has pricing been? I’ve heard their renewals can get expensive.

Have lots of customer who run it and would echo your same positive review.

by beniihana

6/18/2026 at 3:27:13 PM

I don't love their pricing but it's not brutal like others I've seen. We run 3 clusters - one of which is an old legacy cluster that was our original and despite Nutanix not supporting it officially (meaning we don't pay for support on it), their support has still been helpful with it and like the other 2 clusters, uptime/stability has been rock solid.

Prism Central has definitely gotten better with the UI since the earlier days. I still prefer Prism Element in some cases, but overall it all works pretty well.

We use HYCU for backups and while I was really skeptical about it in the beginning, it is absolutely solid in a Nutanix environment. Overall we are happy with Nutanix.

by digitalsin

6/17/2026 at 10:00:55 PM

OpenShift as an alternative to Tanzu.

OpenShift Virtualisation or whatever it’s called for the virtualisation part of VMWare.

Used to do those migration in a previous life.

by cloudie78

6/17/2026 at 11:02:01 PM

The latter is IIRC rebadged KubeVirt

by p_l

6/18/2026 at 5:15:59 AM

OpenShift Virt is way more than Kubevirt.

by nunez

6/19/2026 at 6:25:46 AM

It is, I was thinking more of the core of it. In the same way one might say modern Openshift is rebadged kubernetes, but I will admit it wasn't best word choice

by p_l

6/18/2026 at 1:20:13 PM

Running machines under basic Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machines). Veeam have started supporting it, but only on RedHat.

by ndsipa_pomu

6/17/2026 at 10:28:49 PM

Great time to migrate off VMware. All the migration paths are well-trodden by now, but goddamn 40k vm's. A lot of work ahead.

by proxysna

6/17/2026 at 10:32:23 PM

I work at Red Hat and a customer moving 40k servers off VMware is a fairly regular occurrence. It'd be one of the larger migrations but certainly not unusual. We can usually do about 500-1000 guests per day once the migration is fully underway after the initial engagement and a qualification period where the VMs get scoped for anything unusual / difficult to move.

It's all based around open source projects virt-v2v and Migration Toolkit for Virt, and the typical target is OpenShift Virtualization.

There are various zero-copy options if you're using specific storage. In the best case the downtime for each guest can be as little as a few minutes. If the storage stars don't align then it can take a few hours per VM (but conversions happen in parallel, dozens or hundreds at a time).

[I don't have any specific knowledge about where this Tesco account is going. We have plenty of competitors. Everyone is dining at the Broadcom trough right now. Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.]

Edit: Almost forgot that I gave a 5 minute lightning talk about it: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/SN93LG/

by rwmj

6/17/2026 at 10:47:24 PM

>Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates. They are planning on moving but I'd be shocked if they complete it. $LastCompany had VMware footprint I know will be very difficult to move off, deployments, monitoring, backups were all dependent on VMware. There are plenty of US Government entities who are not even considering it at this time.

Also, Broadcom has slashed expenses so I wouldn't be shocked if profit margins are crazy. This article: https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/03/07/bulk-of-big-... indicates over 1 Billion additional revenue per quarter

If you look deeper into the migration article, it's pointed out that they are already facing migration challenges. I wouldn't be shocked if 3 years later, there are some workloads still running on VMware, you can't easily get them off and just renews insane licensing cost for much smaller hardware footprint.

by stackskipton

6/17/2026 at 11:09:06 PM

The extortionate renewal rates I saw as a gift from Broadcom. It made it very easy to price the risk of doing nothing and be sure that the cost of outages during and immediately post-migration would be lower. (Yes, we had a few, due to obscure drivers issues or an app that really wanted a specific CPU or chipset or virtual NIC, and they cost us less than 10%, probably closer to 5%, of what the proposed renewal would have cost.)

by sokoloff

6/17/2026 at 10:59:14 PM

Yeah I'm at a place that is kind of sucking it up, but there is a work-stream to move more stuff into the cloud and another work-stream to move more stuff on-prem but Kubernetes running on bare-metal. There's also work to stop using some component of VMware as well.

by jamesfinlayson

6/17/2026 at 11:04:31 PM

Sure but whole strategy is "Jack up prices by 500%, cut expenses by 70% and make more money in short term"

What about the long term? Who care, massive money made and they can use that to keep going.

by stackskipton

6/18/2026 at 12:45:29 AM

Long term you roll those profits into another acquisition. Rinse and repeat. Scorched earth, no mercy

by sidewndr46

6/17/2026 at 11:21:13 PM

I think Broadcom correctly realizes that no matter what they do there is no long term: In a world of Cloud hyperscalers and containerization, the absolute number of “traditional” virtual machines run by a commercial hypervisor has nowhere to go but down.

by twoodfin

6/18/2026 at 12:07:15 AM

No one's going away from VMs any time soon (if ever). More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 8:56:19 AM

Best of luck. Without revealing any commercially sensitive information it would be fun to know what the age of the oldest VM running is. Windows 2K? RHEL 4?

(As an end-user sort of person, I get a strong smell of Bladerunner from this kind of thing, where you can see old PCs in the background on top of decks with cables running out of them).

by 2b3a51

6/18/2026 at 10:48:03 PM

As I said in another thread, Win95 and RHEL 3 are the oldest we've come across recently. Guests of this sort are not converted, they're copied and run using emulated devices (IDE/SATA, e1000 network etc). We help customers as best we can but don't support these cases.

Usually the story is they're running something like CNC control which originally ran on baremetal, then got virtualized onto VMware when the hardware died (possibly using VDI to make it appear on a terminal close to the machien), and it's still doing the same thing effectively today.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 12:36:00 AM

IBM’s mainframe business is also large and highly profitable.

It’s not growing in any meaningful way relative to other technology businesses.

by twoodfin

6/18/2026 at 12:03:43 PM

> More than half of the workloads we see being migrated are Windows. Many more are odd/ancient RHEL versions running some very specific software where the manufacturer won't offer a newer version / went out of business / the guy who set it up left and no one knows how it's configured / it works and we never want to touch it again.

And number of those has nowhere to go but down too. There is no growth in either of those, because everyone who will at some point try to get rid of them. Not all, not immediately, but the ultimate trajectory is down.

by sofixa

6/18/2026 at 10:49:51 PM

People are still setting up machines by hand, then leaving companies without documenting what they did. The whole "infrastructure as code" is a fantasy at most real companies.

by rwmj

6/17/2026 at 11:35:15 PM

Containers do not reduce reliance on VMs, really. Those containers still need a server to run on, and that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal.

by bigstrat2003

6/18/2026 at 2:40:00 AM

> that server is almost certainly going to be a VM and not bare metal

I understand that this is normal but I've never understood it.

If all the containers are running the same company's applications (so they don't care about security boundaries between them), what's the difference between having all the containers under the same kernel vs separate kernels?

by nix0n

6/18/2026 at 3:13:05 AM

The VM layer gives you an aspect of fungibility that commodity hardware doesn’t. It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

Note: if you want to conflate “containers“ with an entire job management and scheduling system (“k8s”) then you’re not actually talking about the current target customer for VMware.

by donavanm

6/18/2026 at 12:09:43 PM

> It’s being able to over provision, dynamically reallocate hardware resources, or do things like live migration and entire system snapshots. That hardware/system management aspect is what VM’s give you and containers don’t.

None of those matter in the slightest with containers. Why would you need to reallocate hardware resources when the containers can run on another piece of hardware? You would snapshot the relevant storage, not the whole OS and kitchen sink.

VMs as an intermediary between hardware and containers is just a waste of resources - both directly (RAM, CPU, storage to run a useless OS with no benefit) and indirectly (all of those VM's OS needs maintaining and patching).

It's basically a hold over from the olden days of "everything is a VM".

by sofixa

6/18/2026 at 2:27:37 PM

We run everything on VM just for flexibility. Want to stand up a new machine for testing? Boom, run the script, new Ubuntu server. We need to decommission a machine. Shutdown all the guests, move them over to new machine and start them.

Sure, most of what we do is very cattle and we could run on bare hardware but why not take advantage of easy to add flexibility.

by stackskipton

6/18/2026 at 2:38:56 PM

I'm not sure I follow. Ideally your bare metal machines have an easy bare OS with some config that is easy to repave, and are ephemeral-ish (not a lot of state).

Your "machine for testing" would be a container. Decommissioning a container is easy. Decommissioning a physical machine only happens when it's obsolete.

by sofixa

6/18/2026 at 4:46:29 PM

sigh Not everything in the world is containers. Applications running outside of container still exist in many companies for various reasons including political ones.

by stackskipton

6/19/2026 at 12:04:32 AM

Yeah this - I know my container is pushing a lot of things to containers (I think customer-facing web stuff is a reasonable use for containers) but stuff like ActiveDirectory controllers, Exchange servers - pretty much any Microsoft thing running on Windows - will continue to run on a VM for the forseable future.

by jamesfinlayson

6/19/2026 at 5:52:45 AM

Okay, but that's not at all what this thread is about? We're talking about having a VM intermediary between containers and bare metal. Not applicable to cases where you don't have containers because your workloads aren't fit for them.

by sofixa

6/18/2026 at 2:51:55 AM

It's cargo culting. Even 37 Signals fell for it.

by wmf

6/18/2026 at 12:35:21 AM

Sure, but at that level it’s totally commoditized by the hyperscalers. VMWare brings nothing to the table.

by twoodfin

6/18/2026 at 2:14:19 AM

They explained that fairly clearly

by lokar

6/17/2026 at 11:20:26 PM

They make AI crap. The future is Mars.

by Spooky23

6/18/2026 at 12:16:55 AM

But Snickers is Mars with nuts, so it's both healthier and more filling.

The future is Snickers!

by BLKNSLVR

6/18/2026 at 12:01:24 PM

> I know plenty of Enterprise customers who cannot move easily and just renewed 3 year VMware licenses for their cluster at insane rates

Also known as incompetence. Broadcom's business model is public. Their plans for VMware were public from when the acquisition was announced.

Those companies had years to plan how to get rid of everything VMware. Instead they paid through the nose to postpone the inevitable for a few years.

by sofixa

6/18/2026 at 12:42:35 AM

> Broadcom's "strategy" is absolutely baffling to me.

If one believes that they intend to get new VMware customers, or that they intend to have more than single-digit numbers of customers on VMware ten years from now, I can see how that might make their strategy baffling.

They appear to have made a lot of money doing what they're doing, so it looks to be working quite well for them... regardless of what the public or their former customers think about it.

by simoncion

6/18/2026 at 5:42:32 PM

I think your assessment is pie in the sky. I am moving hundreds of VM's per day and the amount of anchors attached to the source VM's is ridiculous. LB's that are mapped via VMware object, VLAN's extended for the migration but not working, SR-IOV enabled, etc etc....you may have the most perfect setup here but in real life I've never seen it that simple so I truly doubt what you're saying.

by twizod

6/18/2026 at 10:52:29 PM

The software deals with all that. It's all open source, you can go & look for yourself! I don't have to prove anything.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 12:50:02 AM

Broadcom is acting like a VC. Quickly milk as much as you can then sell the carcass.

by Shitty-kitty

6/18/2026 at 2:16:05 AM

They don’t hide this

by lokar

6/17/2026 at 11:45:13 PM

Nice. Thanks for the insight!

by proxysna

6/18/2026 at 4:33:09 AM

Trading Broadcom for IBM... what could go wrong?

by throwawaypath

6/18/2026 at 4:36:51 AM

Openshift Virt is fully open source under a BSD license, so you now have legal options to move to a competitor or even manage it yourself (although I wouldn't recommend the latter, even I don't manage OSV myself).

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 12:33:41 AM

> A lot of work ahead.

Lots of orgs have been documenting their moves to KubeVirt over the past year or so. There's KubeCon video recordings on the youtube channel from Amsterdam with lots of this kind of stuff, especially from european end users.

One thing I find consistent is orgs are also looking at the whole stack, this is just another major component of digital sovereignty.

Disclaimer: work for CNCF on this but worked on the first version of VMWare Tanzu so every announcement in this space is interesting lol.

by jcastro

6/18/2026 at 1:15:41 AM

Spoke to a senior guy at a large national bank recently who swore that they will never again get any Broadcom hardware.

He talked about "Broadcom lies.."

by Alien1Being

6/18/2026 at 2:08:07 AM

I’m sure they don’t care. They were pretty up front when they bought VMware what the play was

by lokar

6/17/2026 at 10:29:19 PM

I wonder if it's fair to say Tesco are experiencing being treated somewhat like they treat farmers!

by nmstoker

6/18/2026 at 8:07:01 AM

Not just farmers, they are somewhat abusive towards their customers as well. It's been good watching Aldi/Lidl enter the market and put pressure on them.

by tonyedgecombe

6/18/2026 at 7:57:40 AM

When I was working at Tesco some 7 years ago, the goal was to move to AWS. Surprised they're still not even close.

Good on them for sticking it to Broadcom.

by figmert

6/18/2026 at 3:32:14 PM

What other reasonable choice exist for moving off VMWare for a small to medium size organization? Nutanix and Citrix is just as expensive, and another platform capture. ProxMox is not ready for Enterprise, even as it gains traction from hobbyists. I work with Splunk, and its price is approaching the point of being unaffordable for most organizations. The logging and observability market is consolidating toward BigCo and I'm afraid eventually there's not going to be any choice left, for small consumers and small players. The answer can't be "build your own" for every little adjacent tech you need to run a shop.

by devchix

6/17/2026 at 10:24:21 PM

Why would you self sabotage such a considerable contract? Are Broadcom stupid?

by GlacierFox

6/18/2026 at 1:34:19 AM

I think it's a cultural thing over there. They came loaded for bear with their customers to convert them to the new ARR-based, non-perpetual product lineup.

I've negotiated a lot of contracts and renewals. I've been threatened twice - Oracle, and then Broadcom. We had perpetual licenses, but that didn't matter, according to them we were out of compliance and as a "courtesy" they delayed sending C&D as a precursor to suing us - this was the intro meeting call. There was no budging on price, and they actually priced the cheaper alternative we could have considered ("VVF") at like a 0.1% discount from their core "VCF" product, I think as a fuck-you. It was a great time, our reseller and I shared a drink over that one.

by 9x39

6/17/2026 at 11:48:04 PM

It does seem an odd move. No doubt they're going to milk existing customers for everything they're worth, but they're going to create a generation of people who will never buy anything from them ever again. That guy who's busting his balls to migrate off VMWare because of the price hike is gonna be the CTO in 10 years time, and when he's making that 10m USD purchasing decision they're gonna stay well away from anything with the name Broadcom on it.

by remus

6/18/2026 at 12:27:44 AM

Pshaw! Similar behavior by Oracle has not diminished its footprint nor its sales.

by ternaryoperator

6/18/2026 at 2:45:19 AM

I dont think that's true, a lot of the database market that exists is basically "we're not oracle but we did a thing they can also do for much cheaper"

by hilariously

6/18/2026 at 5:21:30 AM

It has. Which is why they were forced to turn to acquisitions to grow - they can only buy other people's customers, not attract new ones.

by toyg

6/18/2026 at 3:00:10 AM

That's why broadcom bought the company he went with instead.

by Panzer04

6/17/2026 at 11:47:14 PM

Broadcom expects every customer to move off VMware eventually due to technology shifts, by jacking up the price 10x and cutting costs 70% they can print money for a few years from customers that are either too risk-averse or too dysfunctional to switch to another product.

Possibly they’ll do enough brand damage that it turns out to be a negative ROI, but for now they’re printing money.

by quickthrowman

6/17/2026 at 10:46:18 PM

From the followup article "Broadcom is laughing all the way to the bank"

>"Broadcom’s recent $1 trillion valuation is largely related to Broadcom’s expectations of AI"

Who needs paying customers when you have AI?

by laserDinosaur

6/17/2026 at 11:08:33 PM

Broadcom has paying customers - they sell chips to companies that have no paying customers.

by LastTrain

6/17/2026 at 10:55:31 PM

VMware is in its way out and they are milking every penny?

by fsuts

6/17/2026 at 10:28:51 PM

Evidence does tend to point that direction, yes. What they did to the VMware ecosystem is reprehensible

by simonjgreen

6/17/2026 at 11:37:01 PM

Honestly the writing was on the wall for the traditional VM business already. May as well squeeze out what you can where you can.

by lmm

6/17/2026 at 11:11:43 PM

Apparently you've not read about Broadcom's well loved and respected CEO: Hock Tan. /s

by windexh8er

6/18/2026 at 5:36:48 AM

Broadcom shares are performing spectacularly well.

With the new $35 billion dollar AI / XPU deal, Broadcom is looking to ditch the legacy customers and move to the new shiny AI billions.

by Alien1Being

6/18/2026 at 2:54:42 PM

40k server workloads… what a good, objective, quantifiable unit of measure. I’m sure the author’s intent was to make it sound like 40k servers or virtual machines. Either way, those numbers would be insane. Sensationalist clickbait headline.

Could very well just have been that last stubborn server they just never got round to!

by sscaryterry

6/18/2026 at 5:10:32 AM

Why a retailer needs 40k servers? What are they serving? To whom?

What is wrong with system designers these days? Are they designing or just selling?

by whatever1

6/18/2026 at 9:46:13 AM

Online ordering. Backend logistics (like icebergs, most of a supermarket is invisible). Stocktaking. Financials. They've probably got several role-isolated servers per store, each with a backup.

by pjc50

6/18/2026 at 5:22:18 AM

How do you imagine cash registers work these days? With 5,000 stores worldwide, 40k servers is 8 computers per store, which doesn't seem excessive to me.

by fragmede

6/18/2026 at 8:36:31 AM

5000 stores, let's say 10 checkout lines per store, just to overprovision, so at worst 50000 simultaneous transactions going on, but probably way less. You can do that with a single server, but you'd want some redundancy and spare capacity.

I worked with a Danish retailer with +3000 store in ~50 countries, and even adding their webshop on top and they were closer to 200 (maybe 300) servers (most VMs). Then you need the ActiveDirectory, office IT, all that stuff, with redundancy and it adds up quickly... but not to 40K.

What I will say that people forget is that production might be 8 beefy VMs, you still need to replicate that to a number of test systems, staging environments and so on. So a 8 node production cluster because maybe 24 servers when accounting those other environments.

by mrweasel

6/18/2026 at 3:19:42 PM

See these numbers I buy. 40k smells over engineering to me (or more likely a 3P salesman made a huge bonus after selling the architecture to tesco)

by whatever1

6/18/2026 at 9:26:05 AM

I'd assume most of the big supermarkets have a 4-5 host cluster with the small local stores having a 2-3 host cluster. You've got the software to run the tills sure, but also the loyalty card system (which seems to have a local cache at each site based on how quickly it returns your first name), VoIP, Door Access systems, BMS, Digital Signage, Scan as you shop systems, CCTV, Stock management systems..

I can see how you hit 40k pretty quickly.

by venzaspa

6/18/2026 at 5:26:33 AM

I imagine that cash registers have the cpu power of at least a cellphone and that they can store transactions over internet in the central company database.

by whatever1

6/18/2026 at 6:16:52 AM

[dead]

by tancop

6/18/2026 at 11:36:09 AM

8 servers per store does sound excessive unless of course they are running vm ware on all the computers in the stores, and they count as "servers".

by throwawayffffas

6/18/2026 at 5:51:15 AM

Lots of these machines are dynamically created and provisioned depending on load factors nowadays.

The days of manually setting up servers in hyperscaling-environments are long long gone.

Example: Your GitLab CICD needs Runners. They are dynamically requested "somewhere in our cloud somwhere in the world" and then spun up and configures fully automatically. No human touches this stuff anymore.

by SuperMouse

6/19/2026 at 4:57:30 AM

"No human touches this stuff anymore." And then Clown Strike happens ... amplified by Opus and "agile" BS.

by pbgcp2026

6/18/2026 at 7:36:49 AM

Is it that hard to imagine? They do 100B USD / yr revenue as a supermarket chain with 330k employees and a massive logistics operation. The software supporting the whole shebang is not gonna run on a spare macbook pro in a cupboard.

by remus

6/18/2026 at 3:03:46 PM

You motivated why they need a big database. Still unclear to me why they need 40k VMs and not just 100.

Its ok for Amazon to do it since they paid for the physical machines anyway and they want to dogfood their AWS services, it does not make sense for someone who rents compute and licenses.

by whatever1

6/18/2026 at 10:51:51 PM

They have over 3000 stores. Maybe each one has a handful of VMs.

Maybe each self-service checkout runs a VM, or each staffed checkout.

They wouldn't want to rely entirely on a remote database to be able to sell products.

by Symbiote

6/18/2026 at 9:58:34 AM

And their Dunnhumby division is a huge data consultancy in its own right, and likely the largest user of compute within the wider Tesco org.

by roryirvine

6/18/2026 at 2:36:30 PM

To the business? logistics, facilities (think power, HVAC, refrigeration systems), security, HR, finance, accounting, legal, purchasing, sales, marketing, etc. Probably with multiple environments (dev/qa/prod/DR) for anything important.

by m4ck_

6/18/2026 at 8:43:55 AM

If you can't imagine the scale of a retailer's etnerprise architecture, maybe it's a you problem?

by postexitus

6/18/2026 at 7:12:18 PM

They've got a little over 5,000 stores. Probably a few different offices. Each store probably has several VMs or so so they can continue to run isolated if their connectivity to the mothership disappears briefly. You'll probably want the basics of running some kind of local auth service (maybe AD, maybe something else), your system running the POS platform which might even be an app server and a database server as separate VMs, probably some VM running various building management stuff, a VM to run the security camera platform, I dunno what else.

That's just for the operations of the local stores and we're now at probably >25,000 VMs and we've only touched the retail locations. We still haven't addressed logistics locations, corporate offices, stuff to manage their customer-facing applications and websites, etc.

When I first saw 40,000 VMs I too thought it was a bit excessive, but when you're an org wit several thousand locations that you want to be somewhat self-sufficient things add up quickly!

by vel0city

6/18/2026 at 1:35:44 AM

I don’t know how anyone can afford these migrations especially for production on prem workloads without building literally duplicate sets of hardware clusters then manually migrate workloads.

by firesteelrain

6/18/2026 at 2:09:39 AM

I don't work at this level, but there's lots of things you can do.

a) you migrate in increments, so even if your migration needs to run old and new to compare, you don't need to do it for everything at once.

b) you probably have some slack, and you can make slack by packing tighter during migration.

c) you probably have some amount of regular hardware refresh. Retaining the old hardware a bit longer can get you more headroom for migration.

d) some servers can probably take an extended maintenance outage during conversion.

e) depending on everything, you might be able to get short term capacity from cloud or short term leases.

There's almost certainly some automation around migration. Some of it might even work.

Have a plan, make progress... even if you don't migrate everything by the date, you'll have done a lot and reduce the broadcom bill.

by toast0

6/19/2026 at 3:35:54 PM

It's a very scalable and almost fun task once you get into it.

Alternatives to VMware can run VMware VMs almost immediately, by translating the configuration and with only a few (or sometimes no) changes to the guest. Usually those changes are scriptable. I've done it a few times, moving between VMware and KVM of Windows guests pretty much just worked; the rest was optimisation, i.e. guest driver changes, etc.

Live migration is not realistic between different hypervisors, but a very short downtime per VM is realistic if the new hypervisor can adopt the old disk images directly, which some can. If you want, you can convert formats in the background while the VM is running on the new hypervisor. E.g. KVM and things built on KVM can do all these things.

So to each guest, it looks like a quick reboot with a quick hardware upgrade.

If that's coordinated properly, with a generic HA or Kubernetes setup, there's absolutely zero service downtime (if there are no serious mistakes), as it's just nodes within a cluster taken down one at a time while the others keep the services running, and state migrates among the nodes which are live.

Most of the things you'll change when migrating are the same for large numbers of VMs that are configured the same way except for their disk images, and easily minor things like MAC/IP. So after you've verified a small number, you can go right ahead and script the migrations for another thousand VMs, even doing them in parallel.

You don't need to migrate all VMs at the same time, and you shouldn't do that anyway. So the temporary hardware / cloud cost can be in the low single-digit percentage (for a few weeks to months at 40k VM scale, a few hours to days at 10 VM scale). You probably have some slack in there already, though, so might not need any additional hardware.

by jlokier

6/18/2026 at 2:08:00 AM

We usually reuse the VMware hardware and (most importantly) file storage. Some additional hardware is required temporarily so you can build out initial Openshift nodes. The VMware nodes are decommissioned and converted to OSV nodes as the conversion goes along. With some kinds of file storage (cough NetApp) the conversion is zero copy, the VM literally stays where it is. With others we will copy to new NFS storage areas which will be provisioned on the same physical hardware.

by rwmj

6/18/2026 at 3:46:28 AM

The 40k servers are probably made up of multiple redundant vSphere clusters with failover. You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over. Then the other half. Then duplicate that process. As you build more compute in the new stack, you can decomission more and more of the old stack and convert it. The transition would progress like a cascade, with larger and larger groups of clusters being migrated at once until you're left with the one-off, ad-hoc, weirdo clusters at the end that need to be manually migrated (usually with great effort).

The actual hardware servers are clustered together into pools of resources. The pools are where the VMs live. The bigger the new pool becomes, the faster you can empty the old one. So the migration starts very slowly, ramps up quickly, and then tapers off.

by zelon88

6/18/2026 at 4:33:36 AM

> You simply take one of those redundant clusters and migrate one half of it over.

For that half you are migrating, you are essentially operating without redundancy. If these are serious production workloads, the tradeoff is not as simple as you make it seem.

by warunsl

6/18/2026 at 8:43:49 PM

The way a cluster works is you have a giant pool of resources. Say, 33 - 50% larger than the workload. The workload is a dozen VMs. The cluster is 8 giant compute servers and two giant storage servers acting as one giant compute and storage unit. For redundancy you have extra clusters laying around with no workload, but they are added as failovers.

Normally, if one server on a production cluster goes down, the other members of that cluster seamlessly will take over. This is where the extra capacity comes in. You don't migrate the workload to another cluster. You just lose overhead capacity. If you lose too much then you start migrating parts of the workload to the failover. Not the entire thing.

You usually don't have to use your redundant cluster at all until it's time to rebuild the failed cluster. You might pick one of these spare clusters you keep around for redundancy to migrate all or part of the production workload to while you fix the production cluster.

When doing a big migration you take a percentage of your redundancy and convert it to the new environment. This is your staging environment. Once it is capable of doing work, you slowly grow it out and shrink the old environment at the same time.

by zelon88

6/19/2026 at 11:14:49 AM

This is basically how HA works with VxRail. I buy more VxRail than I will actually host because if a node fails then the VMs can be moved - sometimes not always without downtime but no loss. If I run out of HA nodes or start running low on capacity, then Aria will start sending alerts.

by firesteelrain

6/18/2026 at 11:01:10 PM

If much of this is to support their thousands of supermarkets, almost all of them are closed overnight, or at least overnight on Sundays.

Plenty of time to schedule a migration.

by Symbiote

6/18/2026 at 1:38:47 AM

Hire me, I'll be more than happy to show you! :D I'm an expert at it!

by burnte

6/18/2026 at 1:40:52 AM

Ha I have done migrations recently from vSphere to vSphere using vMotion and it was easy.

But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place (plus physical space, power and cooling)

by firesteelrain

6/18/2026 at 3:13:06 PM

> But it still took duplicate set of HW and I couldn’t imagine doing it without a lot of IaC and automation in place

Like I said, I specialize in that. My career has been doing hard infra stuff other people won't or can't.

by burnte

6/18/2026 at 2:04:46 AM

They also at some point purchased Pivotal Cloud Foundry and increased the licensing costs by incredible (order of magnitude) amounts.

They are completely destroying their customer base for these products.

by bdavisx

6/17/2026 at 11:42:28 PM

As someone who has never dealt with anything close to this scale, why would it take 18 months to migrate? Is this poor config management, a lack of automation, or something else?

by driverdan

6/18/2026 at 1:58:45 AM

I work in automating conversions off VMware and 40,000 VMs is just a lot of data to move. We could probably do 500-1000 / day which would be 3 months, but that would be best case, and there's a lot of prequalification where you examine classes of VMs to check what software they're running and identify the unsupported / difficult cases. That planning would add extra months.

In some cases you can do zero copy conversions, so downtime can be done in a few minutes, but it relies on the customer have very particular storage configurations (NetApp basically). In other cases there can be significant downtime that needs to be scheduled. I worked one case where the customer shut down several production lines over a number of weekends so we could convert the workloads. (Everything was meticulously planned, along with fallbacks that thankfully we did not need to use.)

Some things you don't convert at all. Databases generally get replicated at DB level to new hardware. Single-purpose appliances need to be reprovisioned by going back to the vendor and asking for a KVM equivalent.

Then there's all kinds of craziness, like we had customers who rolled their own backup solutions where we had to add special cases to the software to detect and ignore the backup partitions. Or people running Windows 95 or RHEL 3 (for real!) where there are no virtio drivers and we don't certify the hypervisor so it requires support exceptions. At this point people have been using VMware for nearly 30 years, there's all kinds of crazy legacy.

by rwmj

6/17/2026 at 11:52:06 PM

I can't speak to this particular case, but most of the delay is likely to be organisational rather than technical at this kind of scale.

Don't think about how hard it is to migrate a VM to a new provider. Think about how hard it is to:

* Get procurement to sign off on a new vendor

* Guarantee that your ISO compliance standards can be met under the new regime

* Make sure that GDPR requirements are met during any data transfer process to the satisfaction of your legal team

* Get the old infrastructure team and the new infrastructure team coordinated enough to be able to plan a migration without downtime

* Mollify the consultants that the CEO's friend said he should hire

* Analyse the migration plan to death to derisk it while at the same time be unable to actually evaluate it small scale due to the points above

by mjfisher

6/17/2026 at 11:55:40 PM

Don't forget any relevant training for employees (e.x. for things like 'how to connect to a virtual desktop'). That can add up in some cases.

by to11mtm

6/18/2026 at 2:38:53 AM

VMWare is like Active Directory: been around for ages, wildly flexible, and has a habit of seeping structural debt into every line of business the organization undertakes.

by wpm

6/18/2026 at 6:33:34 AM

AD is on the way out, it seems. Microsoft are pushing Enta or whatever it’s called these days.

by cyberpunk

6/18/2026 at 1:00:28 AM

Interesting -- none of the major VMWare customers had a second/alternative vendor/product? I hope they learnt the lesson.

by senshan

6/18/2026 at 1:24:14 AM

The ecosystem existed - Red Hat OVE, Nutanix were mature in the enterprise market, but VMware had such a grip with low cost (honestly, it was a smart Broadcom play despite infuriating customers), ease of use, feature rich, big software/support/consultant ecosystem. It was almost like the Windows of virtualization, in that it bred complacency.

I know nothing about Tesco, but sometimes ops cultures lack the skills or mandate to successfully switch tech stacks.

by 9x39

6/18/2026 at 5:23:47 AM

There was no second product. vSphere was in a league of its own.

by nunez

6/18/2026 at 12:23:10 AM

At that scale it is almost always easier to run your own infrastructure. Like, I’m not kidding, kubernetes will handle it fairly easy. Get a DevOps engineer or a good consulting agency and run your cluster on Hetzner. This saved us insane amounts of money. No need to buy infrastructure outright but simply moving off the cloud will easily squash your bill by 50% if not more.

by usernametaken29

6/18/2026 at 9:39:22 PM

Go and try to create 40000 VMs on Hetzner. The cloud may look infinitely big, until it suddenly isn't.

by majewsky

6/18/2026 at 12:58:14 AM

My hope from this headline was that some open source solution was functionally equivalent from a business perspective. But then I read that Tesco has had to:

> procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality

meaning VMWare is still basically the only option if you need something that works out of the box. Hopefully this changes in the mid term as other customers migrate away.

by elevation

6/18/2026 at 1:28:12 AM

>VMWare is still basically the only option

The competition is compelling, actually. Red Hat OVE, Nutanix for those who want support, and Proxmox is emerging as a possibility in the ent space.

I read "reduced functionality" as they married themselves to something specific and non-portable, like oh, pick a card from VMware - NSX networking, VSAN storage, maybe something in Tanzu, and that phrase reflected their difficulty escaping the lock-in quickly enough. (This was all speculation)

by 9x39

6/18/2026 at 2:20:15 AM

It's incredible how hard it is for firms to migrate away from platforms. Clearly you could just give something away for nearly free for 20 years and then jack the price up and make bajillions.

Even better if you can charge a mildly high license fee for 20 years first and then jack it up to something outrageous and still have customers who just can't drop you.

by mbac32768

6/18/2026 at 1:30:11 AM

i just had to spend a bunch of time (not for work, for hobby purposes) bc broadcom acquired bitnami or something and then decided to kill off the free docker images for various software. very very annoying. can't believe they did this by just yanking the images from the registry too, leaving nodes to fail if they lose their image cache and have to restart

by kbar13

6/18/2026 at 1:39:35 AM

Imagine paying for virtualization software when open source options are almost industry standard

by puskavi

6/18/2026 at 11:31:37 AM

Good. Broadcom buying them was the death sentence for VMware. If it can't be reversed, the next best thing is to hasten it along. Nobody should be giving money to the likes of Broadcom.

by zombot

6/18/2026 at 8:24:08 AM

[dead]

by jocelyner

6/18/2026 at 1:01:42 AM

[dead]

by eqvinox

6/17/2026 at 11:12:38 PM

effective

by Nikhil37475

6/17/2026 at 11:12:21 PM

extremely effective

by Nikhil37475

6/17/2026 at 10:30:00 PM

this is probably another big risk with enterprises going all in on using spring-boot.

migrating to quarkus won't save you either - since it's IBM on the other hand.

if only other ecosystems could catch up to Java/JVM solutions.

by dzonga

6/17/2026 at 10:59:08 PM

there is no risk since spring boot is open source.

any attempt at milking spring-boot will lead to forking it into OpenBoot or something

by bijowo1676

6/18/2026 at 12:49:47 AM

support contracts ? if your spring-boot version is 2 releases behind etc. You use extensions that are [VMWare Tanzu Spring Enterprise Extensions]

by dzonga

6/18/2026 at 4:38:46 AM

Claude Code is your best support contract

by bijowo1676

6/17/2026 at 10:33:08 PM

What’s so special about Java/JVM solutions? What is for example the Go ecosystem missing in comparison?

by lijok

6/17/2026 at 11:15:39 PM

Mostly 30 years of people writing code.

by ickyforce

6/17/2026 at 9:52:42 PM

Before AI, the cloud was the big thing. It took years for companies to understand the risk of hosting on someone else’s infrastructure, regardless of the initial cost savings. I’m somewhat happy to see reality sink in, though this specific case is quite alarming.

If AI survives, we’ll see inflated costs drive companies back to hiring actual human beings to do the work.

by xvxvx

6/17/2026 at 10:05:46 PM

VMWare was run on local infrastructure long before the cloud existed.

by tjwebbnorfolk

6/17/2026 at 10:42:57 PM

... except this is on-prem with their own infrastructure, not cloud?

by mjr00

6/17/2026 at 11:24:30 PM

If anyone here is looking to move Greenplum workloads off Broadcom (or unsupported open source), email me miles.richardson@enterprisedb.com — I’m the PM for WarehousePG [0], an open source fork of Greenplum. We’ve got a cracked engineering team working hard to modernize it.

At EDB we’ve forked Greenplum from last OSS into WarehousePG, added over a dozen customers with petabytes of data, and hired a few dozen specialists. We have an extension for Lakehouse connectivity based on DataFusion (with optional offload to Spark including GPU acceleration) to read/write Iceberg. And we have a lot planned for the next version, which you might infer from the name: WarehousePG 19.

[0] https://github.com/warehouse-pg/warehouse-pg

by chatmasta