Tesco, which is embroiled in a bitter legal battle with VMware, is gearing up to migrate its virtual machine-centered workloads onto the open-source Proxmox.
As first spotted by The Register, the company has advertised for a head of software engineering (“edge platform”) to overhaul the infrastructure serving its stores.
This new employee will have “two major, interconnected engineering priorities,” a job description (applications close on October 31) said: “Modernising Tescos edge virtualisation estate through the migration from VMware to Proxmox, and building a robust, scalable software-driven Edge Management Platform to provision, manage, monitor and maintain the retail edge estate…”
Their success will be measured, in part, by delivering:
“Safe and predictable migration from VMware to Proxmox, successful validation of required store configurations, reduced legacy dependencies and effective operational handover.”
That’s a big shift and one that will ultimately be handed to a new group CTO: Tesco’s Guus Dekkers is retiring in December after eight years at the company. (Tesco’s new CTO will be Chris Blatchford, who will join in March 2027 from Kingfisher plc, where he runs tech for its B&Q, Brico Dépôt, Castorama, and Screwfix businesses.)
The new Tesco head of software engineering, meanwhile, will “define the technology strategy and architecture, lead complex engineering and migration programmes, and build a high-performing engineering organisation,” for this significant shift.
Tesco puts Proxmox at the edge
Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is open-source software released under the AGPLv3 licence. Austria-based Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH is the primary maintainer and provides a range of different enterprise services and bolt-ons.
Much ink has been spilled since Broadcom bought VMware and started ratcheting up prices and streamlining licence options about whether Proxmox is “enterprise-ready.” (Concerns in many quarters have been about the lack of out-of-the-box compatibility with well known disaster-recovery software.)
Tesco has clearly decided it is – or will be investing to make it so.
(Proxmox documentation on managing separate backup server implementations is here, for those interested...)
See also: A $300 million cloud bill triggered a rethink - and a shopping spree on modular hardware
Among the new software lead’s responsibilities:
- "Define the target architecture, migration patterns and repeatable build configurations for different store environments, accounting for hardware compatibility, workloads, networking, storage and operational constraints.
- "Lead the assessment, design, engineering, testing and production validation of platform variants before progressive rollout across the retail estate.
- "Establish automated approaches for hypervisor provisioning, configuration, workload migration, upgrade management, validation, rollback and recovery.
- "Manage migration dependencies, technical risks, compatibility challenges and cross-functional delivery, ensuring changes are introduced safely without compromising critical store operations.
- "Establish clear engineering ownership, documentation, knowledge transfer and operational handover so the platform can be sustainably supported and evolved by Tesco teams."
Tesco wants someone with “strong technical foundations and credibility across Java, Micronaut or comparable Java frameworks, microservices, REST APIs, Python automation and Terraform” and “solid experience with Linux operating systems, edge computing, server hardware, virtualisation and storage technologies, including the design, integration, deployment or lifecycle management of infrastructure platforms.
Tesco is currently suing VMware over support for its perpetual license-based VMware suite, saying it is obliged to continue support and upgrade software.
According to earlier reporting by The Register, Tesco said it turned down at least four offers from Broadcom to continue using VMware and Broadcom’s mainframe tech.
One offer from VMware to Tesco proposed a fee of $23.5 million for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and mainframe software and support services for a single year. Tesco said that was “around 175%” more expensive than what it believes it should have had to pay for VMware and represents a 350% price hike for the mainframe offerings.
At half that, Tesco can buy itself a whole lot of Proxmox and engineering expertise.
