Euro-Cloud Anexia Moves 12,000 VMs Off VMware to Homebrew KVM Platform

The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Broadcom has lost another sizable customer for its VMware platform: Austrian cloud provider Anexia has moved 12,000 VMs, some of them rented by major European businesses, to an open-source system based on the KVM hypervisor. Anexia was founded in 2006, is based in Austria, and provides cloud services from over 100 locations around the world by placing equipment in third party datacenters. Clients include remote access and control vendor TeamViewer, and airline Lufthansa -- plus plenty more outfits that need reliable hosting and service to match.

CEO Alexander Windbichler told The Register that after Broadcom acquired VMware, increased licensing costs, and made big changes to its partner program, Anexia remained eligible to operate a VMware-powered cloud. But Windbichler felt he couldn't afford to continue, because Broadcom offered new terms that saw the cost of VMware licenses rise sharply. The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent. Whatever the actual figure, Windbichler said the cost increase 'Would have been existential for us.'

'We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears,' he said. 'With Broadcom we had to pay a year in advance with a two-year contract.' That arrangement, the CEO said, would have created extreme stress on company cashflow. 'We would not be able to compete with the market,' he said. 'We had customers on contracts, and they would not pay for a price increase.' Windbichler considered legal action, but felt the fight would have been slow and expensive. Anexia therefore resolved to migrate, a choice made easier by its ownership of another hosting business called Netcup that ran on a KVM-based platform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.