Netflix is suing Broadcom's VMware over virtual machine patents

What just happened? Netflix is suing Broadcom, alleging infringement of multiple patents related to virtual machine operations. The video streaming giant alleges that VMware products like vSphere and their cloud solutions violate up to five Netflix patents related to managing and optimizing virtual machines.

The patents in question cover some critical behind-the-scenes tech that helps keep virtual machines running smoothly, according to the lawsuit filed in a California federal court. Three of the patents deal with tracking and allocating CPU resources to virtual machines efficiently. The other two describe methods for a load balancer to seamlessly start up virtual machines on physical servers as needed.

Netflix says VMware's virtualization tech flat-out uses these patented innovations without permission. They claim "VMware has infringed and continues to infringe" on these patents through products like vSphere Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation, and their cloud offerings for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more.

Netflix ...