In a Setback to VMWare, Tesco is Looking to Migrate to Proxmox

Tesco, the supermarket group with stores in the UK and certain regions of Europe, is hiring a Head of Software Engineering for its Edge Platform. The new hire would be responsible for carrying out the move away from VMware, the Broadcom-owned virtualization software, to Proxmox for the systems that run inside its stores.

The Register were the ones who spotted the listing first, and so far it’s the only public sign of the Proxmox plan. Tesco has not said how many stores the move covers or how fast the rollout will occur.

What edge means for a supermarket

Edge computing puts servers and software near the place where the business operates instead of in a faraway central datacenter, and for a supermarket chain, that place is the brick-and-mortar store.

Tesco’s listing describes its Edge Platform as the computing environment and software that lets applications run across its stores. Checkout, payments, stock management, and staff-facing apps all depend on it.

The platform covers Linux, server hardware, virtualization, and storage. Stores also need to keep working through connectivity disruptions or when local resources run short, as a badly handled change can interfere with store operations, staff, and customers.

The ask

The hire would handle two jobs. The first is the migration, and it involves defining repeatable setups for different kinds of stores, testing each version before a gradual rollout, and automating installs, upgrades, rollbacks,…