Gartner published a report this week arguing that for some enterprise workloads, migrating to a mainframe is now cheaper than continuing to license VMware. Simon Sharwood covered it at The Register. The math is real — Broadcom's post-acquisition pricing has pushed VMware total cost of ownership past IBM Z for a non-trivial set of workloads, and Gartner is on the record telling clients to do the comparison.

The Legacy Sysadmin opens with a thirty-year arc: helped a bank get off MVS in 1999, helped them standardize on VMware in 2011, and is bracing for the call asking about a Z migration in 2027. The Burnt-Out SRE sketches the eighteen-month post-mortem in advance — half-migrated workloads paying for both platforms, the CFO who approved the project moved to a different company, the new CFO commissioning a study that will recommend migrating b ...