The story says Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket chain, is trying to move roughly 40,000 workloads off VMware while fighting Broadcom in court over what it calls abusive licensing and sales conduct after the VMware acquisition. Ars notes that Tesco has already picked a replacement platform but is running into compatibility problems with backup and disaster recovery tools including Veeam and Zerto. That detail drove most of the useful discussion. People did not treat the move itself as surprising. They treated it as another large enterprise finally deciding the renewal math is worse than migration pain.
The practical read from the comments is that a 40,000 workload exit is big but not exotic anymore. Several people said the industry now has mature migration paths, especially toward platforms like
OpenShift Virtualization,
Nutanix,
HPE Morpheus, and possibly
Proxmox, though nobody could identify Tesco's target with confidence from the article alone. The important point was not brand guessing. It was that the bottleneck at this scale is rarely raw hypervisor conversion. It is storage alignment, backup integration, compliance review, vendor approval, training, maintenance windows, and all the weird legacy guests that break when a
virtual NIC, CPU expectation, or obscure driver changes.
The tone toward Broadcom was overwhelmingly hostile, but not confused. Most people think the company knows exactly what it is doing. The working theory is a short-term harvest strategy. Raise prices hard, cut support and ecosystem costs, and collect from customers who are too entangled to leave quickly. Some commenters said that logic probably works financially even as it burns the brand, because many enterprises still need years to unwind VMware dependencies. Others pushed back on the idea that VMware's market is simply disappearing into containers or
hyperscalers. They pointed out that old Windows systems, vendor-bound appliances, and "do not touch" enterprise software still run on VMs and will for a long time. That leaves Broadcom with a captive base today, but also gives customers a clear incentive to reduce VMware-specific dependencies anywhere they still can.
arstechnica.com