Former dev claims VxRail has run into licensing issues that could run it off the rails

Dell’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, co-engineered with VMware, has run into a Broadcom licensing issue leaving it effectively dead in the water

This is according to a developer on the project who now works for another vendor.

The roots of this derailment, the former developer told us, go back to 2004 when EMC bought VMware for $625 million. EMC, you may recall, made VMware public in an IPO in 2007.

Acadia was set up by Cisco and EMC two years later, in 2009, to build rack-based Vblock Infrastructure Packages in a standardized and repeatable fashion for customer data centers. Intel, as well as EMC subsidiary VMware, later invested in Acadia. The vBlock Infrastructure Packages were converged systems based on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor, Cisco UCS servers and Nexus networking and EMC Symmetrix storage. They became known as Vblocks.

VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) was set up by VMware, Cisco and EMC from Acadia in January 2011.

EMC bought ScaleIO in June 2013 for circa $200 million. ScaleIO provided a virtual SAN capability, combining the direct-attached storage drives in commodity servers into a virtual storage area network (SAN). This was rebranded to VxFlex in 2018 and positioned as an alternative to VMware’s vSAN, which required vSphere to operate. VxFlex supported multiple hypervisors, not just vSphere, and could be used in hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) mode or as a standalone virtual SAN. It was the origin of today’s Dell PowerFlex software.

EMC engineered a 90 percent controlling stake in Acadia/VCE by buying most of Cisco’ stake in October 2014.

The hyperconverged VxRack system, using EMC ScaleIO storage software, was announced in 2015 as a downscaled and more affordable Vblock. A second VxRack system used VMware’s vSAN software, combining the server node’s direct-attached storage drives into a virtual SAN. Both used commodity server hardware and not Cisco servers and networking, nor Symmetrix storage arrays.

VxRail was added as a product in 2016. Its progenitor was VMware’s Starbust project to produce EVO:RAIL; vSphere + vCentre+vSAN, software for a hyper-converged appliance. Later this was given the project name Marvin. It was to be sold by VCE and hardware partners, such as Dell, HPE and Lenovo – eight in total. In other words, it would be software like Google’s Android to be sold by smartphone hardware manufacturers – hence the Marvin (paranoid android) moniker.

VMware Horizon was a desktop virtualization product.

The Marvin software was developed into HP and Dell variants. Then EMC did its own thing called VSPEX Blue. This was a 2015-era hyperconverged infrastructure project in a 2RU 4-node form factor using VMware EVO:RAIL and EMC software, that was superseded by VxRail.

VCE became an internal division of EMC in 2016. Later that year, in September, Dell bought EMC, with its stake in VMware. 

A February 2024 blog by Paul Turner, Broadcom’s VP for Product Management, and Gil Shneorson, Dell’s SVP for Solutions Platforms, said: “With Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware now finalized, Dell Technologies and Broadcom want to reaffirm their dedication to their customers, including those of VxRail. VxRail’s innovation, automation, and operational simplicity bring immense value to our global community of over 20,000 customers, with nearly 300,000 nodes deployed worldwide.”

“It’s crucial to emphasize that Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware does not impact the deployment and support experience of VxRail and VCF on VxRail for which  VMware and Dell have been known and remain committed to delivering for their customers.”

“Our product and engineering teams continue to collaborate on delivery and support for our customer base, which drives the ongoing evolution and dedication to excellence in both VxRail and VCF on VxRail. Together, we’re enhancing our capabilities to meet the modern needs of your HCI architecture across VMware environments, spanning from core to edge to cloud.”

But times change, sometimes quickly.

As our developer tells it: “The original pitch was for a lifecycle manager, and the lifecycle manager is not called the VxRail manager. And when Dell bought this out, they took ownership of that IP. And so VMware created their own” alternative called the vLCM (vSphere Lifecycle Management). This “devalued the VxRail manager, because now it’s native … to the vCentre. And it allowed the competition to leverage that.”

Dell EMC rebranded VxFlex to PowerFlex in June 2020. It spun off its stake in VMware in November 2021, setting VMware independent. And then Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023 for $69 billion, which brings us to the present day.

According to our source: “Where we are today, it turns out that Broadcom wants to keep the VLC and integrate it tightly with their new bundles, forcing Dell VxRail to have to re-engineer their solution. So today, they can’t sell it,” meaning VxRail.

The software engineering effort will be substantial: “Their current engineering is going to be completely different to the new one. The Marvin code was still running the show until 2022. That means 18 months ago, they finally changed the code. … So they were running the same backend beta Marvin code for 10 years. Then they created a new version … released in late 2022. And now they’ve got to redo another iteration.”

What does all this mean for VxRail? “It’s just the brand. It’s just a shell brand. Now it has no substance, it has no maturity, it has no value anymore. VxRail is dead in the water. And Dell knows this, which is why they have PowerFlex.”

Michael Dell positioned PowerFlex as Dell’s premier HCI offering at the recent Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. This is despite VxRail leading the markewt with its 20,000+ customers.

When asked about the situation a Dell spokesperson offered this statement: ”Broadcom is an important and valued partner of Dell Technologies, and we will continue to deliver value to our customers and partners who select Broadcom and VMware solutions.” Broadcom declined to comment to a Register inquiry.

Bootnote

VMware VLC is a PowerShell/PowerCLI utility designed to automate the deployment of VMware Cloud Foundation in a nested environment.