Comment by lenerdenator

> However, the magic word for both customer segments is "vMotion", i.e. live-migration of VMs across disparate storage. No OSS and/or commercial (including Hyper-V) solution is able to truly match what VMware could (and can, at the right price) do in that space...

Someone's gonna start working on that soon. Necessity is the mother of invention.

To me, this will be the UNIX wars moment for virtualization.

Originally, UNIX was something AT&T/Bell Labs mainly used for their own purposes. Then people wanted to use it for themselves. AT&T cooked up some insane price (like $20k in 1980s money) for the license for System V. That competed with the BSDs for a while. Then, some nerd in a college office in Finland contributed his kernel to the GNU project. The rest is history.

UNIX itself is somewhat of a niche today, with the vast majority of former use cases absorbed by GNU/Linux.

This feels like an effort by Broadcom to suck up all of the money in the VMWare customer base, thinking it's too much of a pain in the ass to migrate off of their wares. In some circumstances, they're not wrong, but there's going to be teams at companies talking about how to show VMWare the door permanently as a result of this.

Whether Broadcom is right that they can turn a profit on the acquisition with the remaining install base remains to be seen.