The cost-prohibitive price increases of vCenter and other VMware products leading to a Broadcom exodus has been discussed at length, but I'm hoping for some real world experience before advising on some options.

We have a site with an MSP managed VMware environment. There are three host servers:

There's 17 VM's spread across them, one of which is a vCenter appliance (Photon OS). All other OSE's are Windows Server 2019 with one Server 2016 and a few Win 10 Pro (mostly test or legacy client app use).

The MSP has contacted us to tell us that they are not renewing the vCenter subscription which is due in January 2027. They also state that the HP hardware is out of warranty, requiring replacement. So they have quoted on a IAS migration to Azure as their first option. Other on-prem options are on the way from the MSP, but we suspect they will require significant outlay for new hardware.

The thing is, over the next 12-months, it is near certain that 2 of the production VMs which are core business functions will no longer be needed as the applications running on those will be changed to a completely different product which is SaaS hosted by the provider. Two more VMs have recently been made redundant for other web-app SaaS. Other VMs will become redundant or can be 'archived' as legacy systems that may only be required when accessing old data.

So we kind of only need a stop-gap for 6 to 12 months. Options I see for this stop-gap are:

1. Shuffle VM workloads around so one of the Gen9s can be rebuilt with Windows Server running Hyper-V. V2V some of the production VMs onto this server. Shuffle more, do another Hyper-V host, V2V more until no VMware is left. Requires a fair bit of professional services, and possibly some M$ server licences.
2. Use some capital to purchase refurbished server(s) to install Windows Server and Hyper-V as host(s). V2V the VMs.
3. Remove ESXI servers from vCenter and either licence them with the Free ESXI licencing if possible, or as standalone ESXI hosts with a new perpetual licence (is that a thing?).

For #3, yes, management becomes a tedious task and we lose features like vMotion, DRS, HA, VADP/API-based backup, and BroadCom support... But it seems like a cost-effective stop-gap to get is out of a pickle for the next 6-12 months, right?

Has anyone actually done something like #3?

I'd appreciate any comments or recommendations if there is a good argument or experience to go with it.

Cheers!

\* EDIT *\** Just a small note to let you know that these are not hardware or systems that I currently manage. The business has only recently reached out for help. Without any admin access, I've only been given piecemeal information by the MSP. Reading a few comments so far, it sounds like there is still a bit of discovery to do, and I'm going to need full access to get accurate information before advising on the options.

In Episode 129 of the Unexplored Territory Podcast Anoop Gunturi, vSAN Platform PM, joins me to explore how the vSAN roadmap focuses on lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the VCF platform. We dive into Enhanced Compression, QLC support for various workloads, vSAN over Fibre Channel, and various key architectural updates designed to optimize storage efficiency! This is a must-listen episode if you are a VCF architect / customer.

I understand ELM needs to be broken to get to VCF9.1.1, but still not clear order with NSX. In a multi vCenter 8U3 environment that has Enhanced Linked Mode, half the vCenters don't have NSX integrated and the other half does.

Is ELM supposed to be broken on all the vCenters before building the first management domain? Or can the vCenters alone be upgraded to 9.x, break ELM and then converge to the first management domain?

Hello everyone,

In my ESXi 6.0 environment, when I run /usr/lib/vmware/vmsyslog/bin/vmsyslogd, I get the following error message:

Cannot open kernel log device!

After checking, I discovered that the symlink /dev/klog pointing to /dev/char/mem/klog does not exist. I tried recreating the symlink manually, but was unsuccessful.

Currently, the vmsyslogd service is unable to run.

Any help or suggestions on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!