“This has been met with anger and annoyance, but we have only seen a handful decide that they will take the short-term pain, sign up for a multi-year renewal, then start to plan their migration away from VMware technology,” Thompson adds.
In the end, VMware isn’t a good comparison to mainframes because it’s possible to find other options, even if the migration can be expensive, adds Ferris Ellis, CEO at software solutions provider Urban Dynamics. Large VMware customers seeing huge price increases may be able to justify the time and complexity of a migration, he says.
“Mainframes have much stronger lock-in for the software running on them,” he says. “They force a deep-rooted dependency on their proprietary hardware and platform for the workloads they run. The workloads on any VM platform, VMware or otherwise, have little concept of which platform they’re on — that’s part of the value of a VM platform.”
