VCD RoundTable

By April 1st, you must be under a new contract and ready for the VCSP Program! In this Episode, we discuss core counts and optimization, licensing, and NSX. Specifically, we unpack the partner level core count requirements, how firewalls play a part in that, the future of NSX Load Balancing, V2T migrations, and contractually defined licensing price increases. To better navigate these changes, watch this Episode and stay tuned for more! #VMware #Broadcom #VCSP #TechInsights2024

Creators & Guests

Host
Sascha Schwunk
IT infrastructure architect and consultant, VMware, NSX, Tanzu
Host
Tobias Paschek
VCIX-NV, VCIX-DCV VCP 3-6, VCP-Cloud, VCP6-CMA, VCP6-DTM, VCP-NV, VCAP4/5/6-DCD, VCAP4/5/6-DCA, VMware Enthusiast, vRO, NSX-V, CCNA Switching Routing
Host
Yves Sandfort
Yves Sandfort - VMware cloud and infrastructure architect and evangelist, CEO comdivision group. VCDX-CMA,VCIX-CMA, VCIX-DCV, vExpert, Nutanix NTC, pilot

What is VCD RoundTable?

VCD Roundtable is a currently monthly Web-/Podcast where a group of VMware Cloud Director experts from VMware, Partners and Service Providers get together to discuss technical challenges, industry trends and how to build a better cloud platform. 

Yves Sandfort:

It's showtime again. Hello, and welcome. We are live for episode 24 covering VMware Cloud Service Provider licenses. Just one more time because we haven't covered it often enough. We will also talk about a few other topics, I guess, today.

Yves Sandfort:

Sasha and I are actually at the CloudFest in Rust, one of European's largest cloud or independent cloud conferences. Let's let's call it that way. 11,500 attendees they have this week, and we are here in no. We are we are not here for year 20. We have not been that long here, but, the conference also got 20 years old this year, so I'm going to be excited for the party tonight.

Yves Sandfort:

And, yeah, we look forward what's going to come up here next. It's also an interesting concept to have the party at basically the last day of the conference, and not actually the day before, like many other conferences do that because tomorrow, there is nothing happening here anymore. And, so, basically, people can be completely hangover tomorrow and don't have an issue with it. Certainly, we can't because we need to get home, but, potentially, this works for some other people. So, with that being said, before we dig into the, license count, or license model and license optimization topics and everything else, beside myself, Lisa Stanford.

Yves Sandfort:

We have, 2 other people in the room, which are

Tobias Paschek:

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Tobias here.

Sascha Schwunk:

And Sasha. Hi. So, before

Yves Sandfort:

we hit, the, the license topics, etcetera, just one topic which came out of this, this week here in the, yeah, at the CloudFest, they ran on Tuesday morning a very, let's say, interesting session because they had, Peter Hoehn and, Marco Fuel from VMware in an ask me anything session for service providers. At least, I must honor these 2, but they actually, did that part of the session and actually were there to, present themselves. On the other side, I must also say I was a bit shocked by the fact is, like, even though we covered it in this podcast and many other and in many other areas, it was covered all over the media that still a lot of service providers were more or less shocked by the fact that the 31st March is going to be the end date of the licenses. 1st April, you need to be under a new contract even though you might not report on April 1st directly. But you need to have all of that in place and that some actually just meet the dead missed deadlines to actually submit forms and things like that.

Yves Sandfort:

So it was kind of interesting to see if you're sort of pending from a business perspective that, people don't take it seriously enough. But it's also, I think, the first lesson learned for a lot of people to understand that if Broadcom sets date timelines, it's not like in the old VMware days where it gets extended always 2 or 3 times. It's a timeline, and it's a finish date, and it's going to happen no matter what. So, therefore, I think that is also why we pulled out the topic for today. The license model is still very imminent, especially now that people seem to no longer be fighting for the fact to get over 3,500.

Yves Sandfort:

Because by now, as everybody should have signed their contracts, people should be already over 3,500. But for everybody else who is below that, it doesn't make it into the premier or pinnacle level. The the game works now the other way around. It's like, how can I reduce my core account to the absolute minimum? So that's why we also thought, we are going to go over this again.

Yves Sandfort:

We need to also reclassify, I think, some of the m six discussions we had before, because we were had a bit of a different understanding in one our one of our last, n six sessions. And we can sit down for that and actually talk about that we interpreted it wrong, but, also, we were told that it doesn't matter who actually. It's just important that you know what's really, at least the current state of the truth, which, again, doesn't mean we still have 11 days or 10 days before it's 31st that this doesn't change. But, Toby, do you wanna start maybe with some of the latest license findings or things which you have uncovered?

Tobias Paschek:

NSX ALB is the future. Just kidding.

Yves Sandfort:

It is if you can afford it.

Tobias Paschek:

Yes. You can afford it. Absolutely. Yeah. Let's let's talk about the NSX stuff.

Tobias Paschek:

So, there was some confusion and and also some interesting parts regarding the the gateway firewall because in the licensing documents, there was always the of the VMware firewall license, on one hand, as an add on for the VCF license. And there was a second, add on or let's yeah, let's call it add on license available, which was named VMware Gateway Firewall. And our assumption, and this was what we also mentioned in one of the episodes was, if you have, your whole VCF virtual domain or the cluster at the end, licensed for, VMware firewall, you don't need to bring in additional firewall, licenses or additional licenses for the gateway firewall if you enable the gateway firewall on the edge nodes. And now we figured out that's not true or that's not the the right way. So if you utilize the gateway firewall, absolutely independent if your edge node is running on top of an, VMware firewall enabled cluster or just a network enabled cluster.

Tobias Paschek:

You always need to license the, gateway firewall as well, which brings us to the point. So one, add on license covers 4, Sascha? Yeah. 4, CPUs. So you should think about how many CPUs do I really need for my, edge nodes, talking about.

Tobias Paschek:

And at the moment, we are also not really 100% sure how is active standby versus active active counting. So this is still some interesting parts.

Sascha Schwunk:

Yeah. But it's so from the from the license perspective currently, it really looks like that you have the full license, and you have to count every license and depending if it is active or if it is passive. So, you have to count all your vCPUs. And if you're running a dedicated edge node cluster with virtual edge nodes, you have also to license VCF on this cluster.

Tobias Paschek:

On this cluster. Yep. Yeah. Which means, maybe in the future, the bare metal edges become a little bit more interesting. Let's see how licensing perspective will will drop in there.

Tobias Paschek:

I hope so.

Sascha Schwunk:

Also, they are unique to licenses. So

Tobias Paschek:

Yeah. The the licenses are

Sascha Schwunk:

there. Expensive. Yeah.

Tobias Paschek:

Yep. Yeah. That's it from from from the NSX portion. The next thing we absolutely said the last time, we don't want to talk about it right now because we are not really 100% aware of what's n a 6 a or b. So also there, we have now the clarification, the s e, service unit license covers one core of a service engine, fully featured enabled.

Tobias Paschek:

So there is no, dedicated firewall of web application firewall license anymore. If you have, one, service unit of NSX advanced load balancing, you can utilize, all features you would look like to utilize. And on the other hand, as far as we are talking today, there is no basic license anymore, and there is no standard, essentials license anymore.

Sascha Schwunk:

And what's interesting is here is so on the, for US and service provider, you are able to run an service engine group for many nodes. So you can run it in a shared mode. That means you can have up to 9 tenants on an edge cluster, on a service engine clusters or or service engine groups. Oops. That's the right name.

Sascha Schwunk:

So that's important. And if you are if you don't using web application firewall with high traffic, you have a lot of throughput in the load balancer. So that you are absolutely fine with running more more, tenants on the same service engines. So that's the good point. You are also able to run up to 1,000 services per service engine crew.

Sascha Schwunk:

So the limitations are really high, though. Take a look there and, think about what is the best way for you to go with this. And another important point I thought or I I I found on the, FAQ was a part. What about service providers using load balancing services for cloud director management or NSX load balancing? There is a hint.

Sascha Schwunk:

So you can use NSX T load balancer for free for your management components. But the information we got a few months or weeks before is that the load balance and NSX t is deprecated. So that will become really interesting in the future what happens there because if you as a service provider running then or starting again with an s x load balancer and yeah. Then it's falls out on the next versions of an s x t maybe. So, you have to go maybe with ALD.

Sascha Schwunk:

But let's see what happens there. What are the next steps?

Tobias Paschek:

I I would say I would say since we had an interesting, or I had an interesting call yesterday and let let me quickly verify that that I don't talk yet. N s 6 ALB will be in VCF in the next 0 to 6 months. So the the question about using n s six t load balancing, I would highly recommend no. So, yes. From a licensing perspective, it it is still there.

Tobias Paschek:

But also here, the license FAQ clearly mentioned, yes. You can use it, but it will be go away in the next version. So it will not be deprecated because deep it is already deprecated. So I assume in n s six version number whatever, the load balancing will not be there anymore.

Yves Sandfort:

Yeah. But I know at least 2 of the Pinnacle partners in the US still utilize this massively in their data centers. Yep. Because against best practice and against best advice 3 years or 4 years ago in the reference implementation for VCF, they did put exactly that feature in based on we know whose advice and yeah. So I'm pretty sure it comes from there because they wanna actually have a confirmation.

Yves Sandfort:

So we have, the first audience question, actually. So for all the other ones attending, please utilize this as well. I'm going to read it out, and then I'm not going to let you 2 guys actually comment on that one. Hi. How does NSXDFV, so the distributed firewall, and GF so the gateway firewall, count into the commitment according to the actual number.

Yves Sandfort:

Of course, should be licensed and housed in maintenance is not counted. I think it's 2 questions. Let's start with the, n s 6 d f v and gateway firewall scenario first.

Sascha Schwunk:

So that is the easy part I would say. So NSX disputed firewall is licensed by course, by physical course. So every physical course of the cluster, you have to license a complete cluster every time. So you have to, yeah, pay 1 distributed firewall per physical core of these clusters. Gateway firewall is licensed by physic, by virtual CPUs, multiply by 4.

Sascha Schwunk:

So, we have per per virtual core 480 US dollar list price per gateway firewall edge node core. The point was the maintenance mode. So maintenance mode or host in maintenance mode will not be counted, so you can stay with your normal commit commit. And if you have an overage, that will be counted by hour. But what's interesting is that, there is no overage for the add ons.

Sascha Schwunk:

That's an important part. So you have to license your full cluster for distributed firewall, but you don't need all the light licenses maybe depending on your settings, distributor, and so on, and can go with an overage. That means if you have a disaster recovery environment, for example, and say, hey. I don't need all the hosts running all the time. So you can lay you go with a commit of 5 and then add another 5 in the disaster scenario, and they will be go as an overage hourly counted.

Sascha Schwunk:

That's possible. But all the add ons need to be licensed full, so in the commit. That's the current state of the FAQs.

Tobias Paschek:

Okay. FAQ. Yeah.

Yves Sandfort:

Mhmm.

Tobias Paschek:

So at at the end, also also to to round up the question a little bit, also there, it more and more becomes interesting to right size your environment, to really say, okay. I have a cluster where I can utilize the configurable. I have a cluster that to be honest, to can utilize this. Also, some interesting parts where I utilize the gateway firewall. But maybe I bring in then additional clusters saying, hey.

Tobias Paschek:

Those are distributed firewall enabled. And starting with data center groups and so on, to really point out point out this to your, to the right direction.

Yves Sandfort:

Good. The question continues. Yes. But this could be dynamic, changing number of tenants how to handle such scenario. As we have all seen in the documentation so far is there is no overage, no over usage for add on products.

Yves Sandfort:

We still question how this is going to work in real life, but, nevertheless, let's let's let's have legal first figure out how things work, and then we see how this actually works in the real life. But, at the moment, it's that's the statement. So you would need to have, commits upfront before you can actually utilize these features. But other than that, what's your, guys, what's your input on dynamic changing number of tenants, how that influences that. Because it would only affect the gateway firewall as long as you're not building up new clusters because your cluster would be DFW anyway.

Yves Sandfort:

That's my understanding. Or what did I get wrong here in that question?

Tobias Paschek:

No. I would I'm I'm I'm absolutely on your side because if I have my cluster, and then I enable for just for this, particular cluster, I will enable the distributed firewall and can, consume it. On the gateway side, the the question is of of of the gateway side if it really will dramatically change, because, now really the part of maximum throughput, maximum concurrent sessions of an of of an edge node comes into the game where I say, where I would assume at the moment that many service providers have maybe a little bit of an overutilized, underutilized but oversized most important, but underutilized but oversized, edge clusters in their data centers, which would provide much more throughput. And then the gateway firewall is, licensed because the gateway firewall will not be enabled per tenant. The gateway firewall will be enabled per edge node or per edge nodes I have.

Tobias Paschek:

This is more more or less the the important part that I really need to, license my Edge nodes to utilize the gateway firewall. And also, this is something Sasha and I was discussing this week sometimes. At the moment, the gateway 5 o is, enabled by default in a VCD. So if you provision a new tenant and create the edge gateway, you automatically have the gateway firewall enabled. The question is, if I disable it, is this then counting or not?

Tobias Paschek:

So this is something which we need to, clarify how how then the gateway firewall is utilized or not because at the moment, we know that everything which comes to when it comes to a change will be counted. But at the end, if the major five o is enabled that we call, and I would like to disable it, it should be the other way around. So let's see what's what's the other outcome.

Sascha Schwunk:

I think there are many open questions currently regarding on the licenses and what may be changed and not. I I think that we will get an a new FAQ or an updated FAQ in the next days because there are so many, questions currently popping up at the VMware, and they I think they are working really hard on that and to find a solution for all of that or find answers, give answers in a q and a so that everyone are aware of how many costs they are commit commit or or not and how to design the new environments. Yeah. Another scenario with NSX v to t migration. So we are still waiting.

Sascha Schwunk:

So there were we are done or there was some rumors or there are some rumors about the v two t migration and how to license NSX v because on NSX v, you have normally distributed firewall enabled. So you have the network network firewall, firewall. You can you can configure on NSX v. On NSX T, you need to activate distributed firewall for, put rules on east west network traffic. So the question is and the rumors was you have to license distributed firewall if you're running an s x v.

Sascha Schwunk:

We are currently waiting for a clarification from VMware what happens with the, service providers who are currently running on v and are in the v to t migration? Because that's a big question because yeah. Let's see. So in the older days, it was more or less another point. Now you have support with your subscription normally, and you will not have support for me.

Sascha Schwunk:

Nobody knows.

Tobias Paschek:

I I think this this is the most important part. You mentioned that it'll at the end, Sasha. Guys, please please please, there is officially no NSX v support more, anymore. So I would highly now be interested in migrating off from n s 6 v into n s 6 t, because I would also and since we now know a little bit more how Broadcom is, working in the background, and how also product releases should could look like in the future. I would not be surprised with the next VCD version if n six v is fully obsolete.

Tobias Paschek:

And then we are stacking, or you are stacking.

Yves Sandfort:

That's not the only point. What we should add to this one is what we have figured out is in reality, if you haven't completed your b to t migration yet, you should definitely talk to, either people from our team or other people who have experience with this. You can utilize the same path to actually get from v directly into vcf. Once you are on n s x t, yes, we are working on a migration tool dedicated for that one in our team, but it's not yet ready. At the moment, if you haven't moved yet, this might be a quick start for you to get into VCF.

Yves Sandfort:

You might not have planned it. But let's be honest, in many cases, we get can get, a VCF design and deploy, relatively quickly stood up. So if I were you and if I were still on n s six v, talk to some experts and actually utilize this and actually mark both of these items off your checklist anyway. Because everybody more or less is expecting that in the long run, however long long run might be, in the long run, Broadcom might request partners to actually utilize VCF. At the moment, you would get actually the advantage of having your having a better level of support.

Yves Sandfort:

That's at least what Broadcom says, which only applies to the premier and pinnacle partners. But it should actually also apply if you actually sign up with a with a white label host like ours. So if you are any of the smaller partners, you can actually, utilize a white label host. We, as problem division, are 1 in North America as well as in EMEA. And, so most likely, as far as I understood, if you have VCF, we can actually apply the faster support as well, which means better response times for you.

Yves Sandfort:

But that also will most likely require that the VCF host by themselves is fully VCF certified, which for us is not a topic because as we said, it's like Toby has done several implementations for service providers. We have multiple instructors who teach VCF on the team. So being VCF certified for us is the smallest, part. But, yeah, keep that in mind when you talk about v to t migration. But I think the most important question is, which is currently to be qualified is how is this going to be dealt with really from a licensing perspective?

Yves Sandfort:

I know that for a short glimpse, someone from our team said they have seen something in the document saying you need to fully license everything if you have been used, but we could never actually find that document back. So maybe it was just, wishful or hateful thinking. But, nevertheless, we are waiting for confirmations here, but you should really get off in the 6 v right now. And there are there are enough people out there who can help you. But just be sure when you find or when you search for someone for a v to t migration, make sure they understand that you are a service provider and that you have easily, that they do not apply the enterprise and commercial approach to it.

Yves Sandfort:

We have seen it often enough that people actually tried that. It's very hurtful. You don't wanna go down that route, especially in combination with VCD. It's going to be very hurtful, and, also, it's going to be very expensive. Because fixing that, VMware will basically say, not our problem.

Yves Sandfort:

And then you are stuck with a completely unstable infrastructure with unknown system states and everything else and have a lot of fun with it. But, by the way, everybody else is, like, utilize the chat window. We are not only here as a podcast, or or a video cast from that perspective is as a robot did, of the chat, utilize the chat window and actually send us in your questions so that we can answer them. Because at least from what I always hear is people have a lot of questions around VMware licensing and service providers and stuff like that still.

Tobias Paschek:

Just just to round up the NSX v two t migration, from an from an licensing perspective for the migration tool itself, those edges are free because we are only utilizing the layer 2 bridging on the edges. So the the the bridge edge nodes will not count into any add on, licenses because we just utilize there the bridging functionality. So those are, covered in the base license model, just as in final ramp up.

Yves Sandfort:

True that. But, again, you also have, the question is more in most cases, the question is not really towards the target platform. In most cases, the question is more towards the towards

Tobias Paschek:

the host 1st platform. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yves Sandfort:

So do I still need to certify all these hosts for gateway firewalls if someone mistakenly turned on distributed firewall? How do we deal with this? So there are a lot of questions going on. I could give you my unofficial answers, which I typically give to 4 providers on how I would do certain things. But, again, it's like, when you look at this is you need to be careful because, yes, it's an unsupported product, but that does not mean that you are, like, you know, that you can play wild wild west and don't have to license it.

Yves Sandfort:

Only because you don't get any support or anything anymore, you still need to have a valid license. And in the service provider world, that valid license means you need to actually rent it from someone so that someone, in this case, VMware Broadcom, is allowed to charge you for it. So, this is going to be interesting. One more thing on the licensing piece. As a final contract came out and, people have seen this, There is a term in there for, price increase per year, with 7% considering current inflation all around the world.

Yves Sandfort:

That is, I would say, fair. I'm not saying that this is actually going to be well aware of. And that is actually where it says, if you need to actually add additional course. So let's say, initially, I'm going to buy 10,000 course, and business is booming. So after 3 year after 2 years or after even 1 year, I wanna buy an additional 4,000 course.

Yves Sandfort:

And now it gets dirty. Because if by then, Broadcom would have changed the list price from 350 to $400, That would, in that specific scenario, also then apply to the new course, not to the old ones, even though the new ones have the same term date and everything else, but the new pricing would apply to them. At the same time, everybody argues. Yes. But, yes, if Broadcom would actually give a cheaper price, that would also apply, nevertheless.

Yves Sandfort:

This is something you need to be aware of. There are 2 potential price bumps included in the contracts. And with that being said, that applies to every service provider in white label. And be very, very careful, and I've said this yesterday on an interview with with Risale and News International and another magazine, in regards to the European, union, story around the service providers is when you pick a white label host, be very, very careful, that they understand all of these things because we hear every day from all the customers talking to us. We hear every day all kinds of weird and shocking stories.

Yves Sandfort:

It's like, you need to, as a service provider, as the master service provider, purchase the licenses for 3 years in either monthly or yearly fashion period. That's what it is. It is 3 years. So take it very serious to really look behind the scenes because you are going to be bound to that provider for 3 years. If they go bottoms up and something doesn't work anymore, it's all going to be, a problem where because you first need to get out of the old contract before I could take you on into a new contract.

Yves Sandfort:

You need to get your, potentially, your your workloads, joint workloads, whatsoever. Also, we saw people actually requesting that to operate the usage meter at the service provider, they need a VPN connection. I don't wanna know how these service providers are, but they basically, with that, just declared themselves as a very high wanted, target from certain hacker groups. Because if you have a VPN connection into every service provider's management network, very good idea. I know a lot of hackers who would pay a fortune to actually get access to one of your boxes.

Yves Sandfort:

So you are better basically protected with whatever the security industry out there has to give. Because, trust me, these guys analyze for informations like this. They are searching for things like this, especially in in times like, this where everybody in the industry, even here at a conference where VMware is not a prime talking topic, is talking about the changes going on, how this influences the market, and everything else. You need to really live on the road to not see this. But yeah.

Yves Sandfort:

So that's that part of the licensing. Anything else?

Sascha Schwunk:

So one important other part is, VCDA. So it's, available. It's, free for migration, but it's not free as though it's not available for for disaster recovery for new service providers who currently not using it. Though that's an important point. So in the, contracts and in the FAQs, we saw, if you're currently using, VCDA for disaster recovery and you count it in your current usage meter, you can use it in the future.

Sascha Schwunk:

But if you want to start with it now, you are not able to use it. And that's an interesting point because it's now included vCDA. It's still a very good product that we can use for for migration. So if you have a new tenant wants to migrate to you, that's a very good I idea. And, yeah.

Sascha Schwunk:

So I think that's a very important part.

Tobias Paschek:

Yeah. To under to to understand it and to know it because, and also there, we have discussed this. SRM is not a proper fitting solution. So let's see how this gets solved, because I would also expect that this is something what will be solved in the future.

Yves Sandfort:

Yeah. But let's make this a bit more clear. It's not a proper valid solution is it's not supported to be used with Cloud Director workloads. Let's be very, very clear here. You can utilize as a now because that has always been a confusion.

Yves Sandfort:

SRM always shows up in some BCD, older BCD documentations and reference architectures and stuff like that. SRM is fine if you wanna actually protect your management cluster. If you want to protect your VCD instances, v centers, and stuff like that, that is what you use SRM for. When it comes down to customer workloads, that is where currently Cloud Director availability. To be honest, if it's just about the r, it's the best solution in most cases you have out there in the market because it actually, by now, can take over a lot of, frequent properties and everything else between 2 cloud director instances and stuff like that.

Yves Sandfort:

A lot of the other backup solutions can back up the individual VMs. In many cases, they cannot bring back any network or a similar situations and and solutions. So, there is a bit of a challenge from that perspective. Anything else on the licensing side?

Tobias Paschek:

Not as today. Let's see what's happening tomorrow.

Sascha Schwunk:

Maybe there there is an open topic with the tunnel mission controls or currently they are discussing the prices, I think, because, in the FAQ, there were no prices, and there are many, many entries in different communities and whether that prices for transmission control changed. But we currently not have the latest answer on the pricing. So we expect that we get latest beginning of the next week, the prices for transmission control. That's the only open topic here.

Yves Sandfort:

Good. Anything else important to cover at the moment? I think the most important part for service providers, no matter which class and level you are in, it's as of day of the recording, which is the 21st March. It's only 10 days left until you have all your contractual situations cleared. Otherwise, you might run into interesting times.

Yves Sandfort:

There is a bit of a transition period for April. What exactly Broadcom is going to allow that transition period is due to be seen. But as, 99% of our audience is in the service provider space, if you are unsure that you have done everything you need to, do it. If you have any questions, as always, we are here to help and guide you with whatever you have as good as we can. But, keep these timelines in mind.

Yves Sandfort:

We and we are set again just 2 days ago here at the conference, there is no planned delay. And, yes, we know. We have also seen the news that there is the request for the European Union to actually look into the case. A, it's only a request, and I discussed it with media yesterday evening, is the challenge is even if someone gets Broadcom legally to reverse the contract, there is a secondary challenge. The secondary challenge is that the aggregator contracts with most service providers have also been canceled.

Yves Sandfort:

So that, in the end, means that even if Broadcom gets a slap on the fingers and actually has to reverse the the the the cancellations, you are still canceled because your aggregator contract is canceled as well. So at that stage, either the European Union or Broadcom or someone else actually has to reinstate all the contractor aggregator agreements. It actually gets you back under that one and actually get all of that sorted. If that's really feasible considering the time, and to be honest, also considering that no one has really shouted out for the last 6 weeks or 8 weeks because pricing and a lot of things have been out there for quite a while. They are not as surprising as some people say.

Yves Sandfort:

And that's where I'm very, very clear and honest. It's this does not did not come as a huge surprise. And also, to be honest, it's like we have hundreds of service providers who we are talking to for our white label program in which we have done the calculations and everything else with. And, yes, there are a few exceptions. But by far, did we not have anyone who has a 12 times, increase.

Yves Sandfort:

And we are talking about 100 where we have the numbers and actually play through. The average, if they go through some core optimization and everything else with us, is in a range between plus minus 5, maybe 10%. However, there is also a huge amount of our service providers who have 30, 40% decreases in pricing. Yes. There are a few which have increases.

Yves Sandfort:

Yes. There are a few which have decreases, but there's nothing like a generic 12 times increase. And so I will be I will be, and, again, I'm taking up the bat for that. I will be surprised if there is really something big happening from the EU. Yes.

Yves Sandfort:

There are also bigger claims from some bigger organizations, but that looks for me more like the OVH, Microsoft, stuff that is most likely going to be settled outside of court anyway, and, this will not help any smaller provider. So if you are a smaller provider and if you think that this is going to rescue you, it's like, don't bet too much on it. I would at least try to prepare myself so that I have a contract in hand which I can, worst case, execute on the 30th or 31st if then a white label host is going to accept it. Because remember, that's going to be on a weekend because by April 1st, you need to have a new contract. That being said, that's it for today's episode.

Yves Sandfort:

As long as nothing else comes up, we are because we are coming to the Easter break time and some of us are traveling, we are going to do another recording tomorrow. We are still trying to figure out the topic because, originally, we had something planned around area operations, but we are not 100% sure if that can happen tomorrow. If not, we, have something else on the plan on the schedule. So, nevertheless, we will record another episode tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Yves Sandfort:

We will post the topic and everything else as soon as we have it, and we would love to have you all again live on the show. With that being said, bye bye.

Tobias Paschek:

Bye.