I don't pretend to know the true actual reality of what's going on here, but an article about the end of non-subscription licensing from December of last year is linked in the original article.
The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.
Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.
Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.
It sounds like they are saying the products are entirely discontinued, including subscriptions, but then they say: "In the future, at the time of renewal, customers will be offered the best subscription products to fit their needs."
It's very unlikely you cancel an existing contracted subscription in this space, but you need to send a really strong message to get your customers to move, so I actually think this is intentional to scare them but not get them mad enough to lawyer up.
It says "not available for purchase" and that users will be recommended what subscription product to use instead.
It's written horribly complicated, and it leaves a lot of open questions, but what it does not say is that you can't give money to broadcom to get the features of those products. And it's hard to imagine that this is the end of vsphere. It's just the end of buying vsphere.
Comments
I don't pretend to know the true actual reality of what's going on here, but an article about the end of non-subscription licensing from December of last year is linked in the original article.
The current article is about the KB article you linked that lists 53 products which it says are, as of today, no longer available under any license and have been entirely discontinued.
Again, not claiming that's what's really going on (maybe it's in error, or the products will be bundled with whatever SKUs they're still going to sell?), but it unambiguously says that these products are discontinued. It mentions the earlier end of non-subscription pricing and implies that this is in addition to that.
Edit: Looking further into this, it looks like going forward they will offer two main SKUs, VMware vCenter Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which contain, or contain features from, many of the discontinued products. But none of the listed products will be available separately anymore. It's difficult to find more information than that, because the VMware website is still advertising all of the discontinued stuff as well as the old perpetual licenses that they discontinued a month ago.
Yeah, this is a really unclear announcement.
It sounds like they are saying the products are entirely discontinued, including subscriptions, but then they say: "In the future, at the time of renewal, customers will be offered the best subscription products to fit their needs."
What does that even mean?
It's very unlikely you cancel an existing contracted subscription in this space, but you need to send a really strong message to get your customers to move, so I actually think this is intentional to scare them but not get them mad enough to lawyer up.
Yep, seems like it's going to be a couple of 'all-in-one' products, only by subscription, with some add-ons available:
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2024/01/embracing-change-wi...
It says "not available for purchase" and that users will be recommended what subscription product to use instead.
It's written horribly complicated, and it leaves a lot of open questions, but what it does not say is that you can't give money to broadcom to get the features of those products. And it's hard to imagine that this is the end of vsphere. It's just the end of buying vsphere.
Good point to highlight that it's really subscription bundles rather than maybe the individual subscriptions some had switched to before.