It’s unsurprising to see legacy providers shifting their business models from perpetual software licensing to subscription-based pricing. Some do it with a measure of grace. But lately, some licensees of virtual desktops and applications have been confronted with abrupt changes and even forced to accept and pay for unwanted features. However, there are ways for alienated customers to protect their best interests.

This past year has been rife with complaints over a substantial licensing change by Citrix after it was acquired by private equity firms and merged with TIBCO Software. Those changes remarkably parallel a playbook that VMware customers experienced in the wake of their vendor being acquired by Broadcom.

For those paying close attention, substantive changes were foreshadowed in 2023 when it was quietly noted that perpetual software maintenance licenses would not be renewed upon expiration. Even those paying attention back then have been hit with what they consider even more egregious changes, and some are citing licensing cost increases of 300% or more.

Specifically, some organizations have griped that while they asked for renewal terms six months or more before their deadlines, those requests went into a dark hole until as little as 30 days remained on their current agreement. That’s too late for an organization with substantial numbers of users—or even just a few—to evaluate and prepare for a switch if they so desire.

When they receive a replacement, er, “renewal” proposal, surprises abound. First, separately licensed products are now “features” within a universal license. For most, that means paying for shelfware they’ll never use while absorbing sometimes astounding price hikes from what they were accustomed to.

Some organizations are coming away from licensing discussions convinced they can only obtain 3-year or 5-year agreements! So much for pay-as-you-go subscription models and winning your customer’s trust every day.

Moreover, many are being shifted to new support models while being gaslighted the changes are in their best interests. Only select customers—by invitation only—are being offered platform licenses and support. Most are being shifted toward channel partners. Not only that, but channel partners handling 2,000 or fewer licenses have themselves been shifted to a third-party provider.

Google has decided to take on the likes of Citrix and VMware by acquiring an outfit called Cameyo whose tech makes it possible to stream apps into browsers – including on Chromebooks.

The search giant’s announcement of the acquisition opines that “Traditionally, businesses have leveraged virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions to access legacy apps without them being installed on the device”. Google also included a quote from analyst firm Forrester Consulting – taken from research it commissioned – to the effect that VDI’s downside include a requirement for “specialized skill sets, user experience latency, and difficulty in security and management.”

That’s not wrong but omits the fact that the biggest VDI vendors – Citrix and the VMware spinout Omnissa – offer clients that allow streaming of apps. Both companies’ clients are available for Chrome OS, and also allow streaming virtual desktops into browsers.

So Google is not exactly breaking new ground.

Google’s head of product management for ChromeOS, Naveen Viswanatha, wrote that his company has already partnered with Cameyo on a virtual application delivery experience fully integrated with ChromeOS.

“By bringing the Cameyo team’s expertise in-house, we are doubling down on our commitment to delivering a streamlined experience for virtualized applications,” he wrote.

Google has certainly picked a fine moment to get into the virtualized applications business. Citrix recently changed its licenses to require acquisition of product bundles on lengthy subscriptions. Omnissa is yet to reveal how it will operate under its new owner, private equity firm KKR.

Plenty of orgs looking to keep their legacy apps alive therefore have solid reasons to consider an alternative, a situation Google’s sales force and channel won’t ignore.

This deal is also interesting for what it says about Google’s Chromebook business, which has done well with education buyers and consumers but hasn’t made enormous inroads into the enterprise, despite offerings like Chrome Enterprise that add manageability and security to its browser-based platform. Google even offers a paid version of its browser – Chrome Enterprise Premium that for $6/month adds further infosec protection measures.

VMware by Broadcom has made some fresh concessions to its cloud service provider community – and the customers who rely on it.

As reported in March, not all members of VMware’s Cloud Services Provider (VCSP) program were invited to continue. Those dropped as VCSP members were instead offered the chance to acquire white label services from remaining participants in the program, with a tight deadline to sort out those new arrangements.

In mid-April, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan promised an extended period of “modified monthly billing arrangements until the white label offers are available.”

Now VMware’s veep for partners and advanced solutions sales, Ahmar Mohammad, has offered more detail on the arrangements.

His post reveals that all existing VCSP premier tier members will retain that status, and that special exemptions may be granted to “partners not yet signed up for the program and that may have unique regulatory constraints or country specific sovereign data requirements (example: European Economic Area and United Kingdom).”

That sounds a lot like a concession to Eurocloud lobby CISPE, which has strongly criticized Broadcom and called for a European Commission probe into the acquisitive giant’s takeover of VMware.

Another big change sees partners that exited the VCSP program allowed to continue operating their cloud services until the end of April 2025. Such partners – some of whom did not choose to exit the program but were shown the door – previously faced the prospect of immediately closing their clouds and/or signing up to resell white label services.

The sudden migrations necessitated by that change were obviously not easily achieved. Now cloud providers that quit VMware – and their customers – have a year to sort things out.

Another change means VCSP partners have an extra month to seek an exemption that will let them continue in the program, or sign up for white label services from another partner. That’s not a huge amount of extra time but, again, will offer some relief to what was previously a very short deadline to make changes. Some new classes of partners are also allowed to become white label providers.

VMware’s end user compute products appear likely to be rebranded as Omnissa after being sold off.

Broadcom decided to sell VMware’s portfolio of desktop and application virtualization products after it acquired the biz, deeming them surplus to requirements. They were picked up by private equity operation KKR for around $4 billion.

The Omnissa name appeared in a VMware Knowledge Base article published on April 11 advising that as of May 6 users of the products will be able to access support services at customerconnect.omnissa.com.

VMware has previously sought to register a trademark for “Omnissa” and defined the term as describing “Computer services for delivering end user computing to personal computers, tablet computers, and mobile devices, namely delivering a remote working experience to individual members of an organization.”

A post establishing an Omnissa Subreddit – dedicated to the former VMware products – is another sign Omnissa is imminent.

KKR is presumably confident it will be able to land the trademark, despite the existence of Omnidirectional Space Situational Awareness – which uses the acronym OmniSSA.

The Knowledge Base article also reveals they’re about to embark on a tight deadline migration project at a very tricky time.

The article is titled “VMware Support Transition to Broadcom” and explains that at around 5:00PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, April 30, online tools allowing user registration, license management, account management, enrolment in learning courses, and “purchase or upgrade products” won’t be available.

The migration – which CRN reports will see VMware move from its own SAP system to Broadcom’s Oracle software – is scheduled to end “at approximately Sunday, May 5, 2024, at 7:30PM.”

VMware has advised that by Monday morning at 08:00, similar features and functionality will be available to VMware customers at support.broadcom.com.

The downtime happens to span the days on which Broadcom’s Q2 2024 concludes. The tech conglomerate will therefore want to be sure it has secured all the support revenue it planned before systems shut down – given the lack of any opportunity to purchase or upgrade products during the migration window.

The migration team is going to be under more than a little pressure to get this done in the tight window VMware has defined – a delay of even a few days could dent revenue.

Broadcom will also be under pressure to ensure its support experience delivers, as its strategy for VMware has been only to do deals that bundle products and support – an arrangement it insists will see customers realize more value, faster.

Broadcom has made sweeping changes to VMware’s business since acquiring the company in November 2023, killing off the perpetually licensed versions of VMware’s software and instituting large-scale layoffs. Broadcom executives have acknowledged the “unease” that all of these changes have created among VMware’s customers and partners but so far haven’t been interested in backtracking.

Among the casualties of the acquisition is the free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi. ESXi is “bare-metal hypervisor” software, meaning that it allows users to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware while still allowing those operating systems direct access to disks, GPUs, and other system resources.

One alternative to ESXi for home users and small organizations is Proxmox Virtual Environment, a Debian-based Linux operating system that provides broadly similar functionality and has the benefit of still being an actively developed product. To help jilted ESXi users, the Proxmox team has just added a new “integrated import wizard” to Proxmox that supports importing of ESXi VMs, easing the pain of migrating between platforms.

The announcement claims that an imported ESXi VM will have “most of its config mapped to Proxmox VE’s config model” to minimize downtime. The documentation indicates that the import wizard is still “in tech preview state” and “under active development,” though it’s also said to be “working stable.” The importer works with VMs made in ESXi versions 6.5 through 8.0, which was the most recent version available before Broadcom discontinued the software.

A wiki article from Proxmox also provides more information about preparing your VMs for the move. The article recommends uninstalling guest tools made to work with ESXi, noting network configuration settings like MAC addresses or any manually assigned IP addresses, and disabling any full-disk encryption that stores its keys in your hypervisor’s virtual TPM. It’s currently not possible to migrate vTPM settings from one hypervisor to another, so booting up a VM with disk encryption enabled will require a recovery key before the machine will boot.

Like the free version of ESXi, the free version of Proxmox VE doesn’t include technical support beyond what is offered in Proxmox’s community forums. For people who use Proxmox VE and want to deploy it more widely in a business, Proxmox does offer a few subscription tiers that provide access to its more stable Enterprise Repositories and actual technical support from the software’s developers.