Change is in the air and it’s licensed. The biggest news this week came from VMware (by Broadcom) as they announced a simplification of their licensing model. The first change is that VMware Cloud Foundation has had the subscription cost cut in half and additional support levels added to help with activation and lifecycle management. VMware vSphere Foundation is also available as a subscription offering with several add-ons available. Notably missing is the option for perpetual licensing, which was removed in this simplification. Also removed were hybrid purchase programs and anything not subscription-based. Customers may still use their perpetual licenses but will not be able to buy support for them until they transition to the new subscription model.
0:57 – AMD Launches MI300
AMD’s Advancing AI event was held last week, and boy was it bit! This was the official launch of the MI300 data center GPU, and AMD wowed the world with a product that beats Nvidia’s H100 thanks to architecture improvements and a generous amount of HBM memory. But it was the promise that AMD would take a big chunk of a $400 billion market for accelerators that made the most news.
Read More: AMD MI300 Performance – Faster Than H100, But How Much?
6:13 – Broadcom Divests EUC and Carbon Black Units from VMware
After every big acquisition there are shakeups. The first of these in the Broadcom/VMware saga has come in the form of a divestiture of the end-user computing group and security arm Carbon Black. According to CEO Hock Tan, Broadcom will be “refocusing VMware on the core business of private and hybrid clouds and divesting non-core assets”. Carbon Black has already been listed as an indpendent business unit inside of Broadcom as of November 27 and will be divested soon. The hope of Broadcom is that interested buyers will be willing to pick up these assets quickly and help recoup some of the costs of the acquisition.
Read More: Broadcom to divest VMware’s end-user computing and Carbon Black units
9:33 – Broadcom Acquires Elastics.cloud
We saw the disclosure that Broadcom has acquired Elastics.cloud, a CXL startup focused on composable infrastructure. The news came from co-founder George Apostol and was apparently done back in September and a team had been working on transitioning the manufacturer to more closely integrate with Broadcom’s vision. Even now the Elastics.cloud website has no mention of the acquisition by Broadcom.
Read More: Broadcom Swallowed Elastics.cloud
12:56 – New Firmware Attacks on Windows and Linux
Just when you thought it was safe to boot your machine again, here comes another set of vulnerabilties! Researchers this week announced LogoFAIL, a cleverly named set of exploits for the UEFI bootrom in most modern systems that replaced BIOS years ago. The summary of the exploits is that by manipulating the splash images of the motherboard manufacturer in specific ways you can take control of a system or execute arbitrary code. Because this exploit exists pre-boot you have complete access to the system and contents of memory at all times.
Read More: New Windows/Linux Firmware Attack
16:40 – VMware Simplifies Offer Lineup through Broadcom
Change is in the air and it’s licensed. The biggest news this week came from VMware (by Broadcom) as they announced a simplification of their licensing model. The first change is that VMware Cloud Foundation has had the subscription cost cut in half and additional support levels added to help with activation and lifecycle management. VMware vSphere Foundation is also available as a subscription offering with several add-ons available. Notably missing is the option for perpetual licensing, which was removed in this simplification. Also removed were hybrid purchase programs and anything not subscription-based. Customers may still use their perpetual licenses but will not be able to buy support for them until they transition to the new subscription model.
Read More: VMware by Broadcom Dramatically Simplifies Offer Lineup and Licensing Model
26:53 – The Weeks Ahead
Cloud Field Day 19 – January 31 – February 1
Cisco Live EMEA – February 6 – February 7
AI Field Day 4 – February 21 – February 22
Networking Field Day 34 – February 28 – February 29
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for even more weekly video content.
