Broadcom Keeps Changing the VMware Rules. Treat Your Next Renewal as a Five-Year Platform Decision.

If your company still runs on VMware, three things happened in the last few weeks that should be on your leadership team's agenda, not just your infrastructure team's.

• •On October 31, Microsoft's pay-as-you-go Azure VMware Solution nodes with the VMware license bundled in reach end of life. Starting November 1, customers have to bring their own VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) subscription purchased from Broadcom.
• •On October 26, The Register reported that a Tesco job posting describes moving its store and edge virtualization from VMware to Proxmox. Tesco is also suing VMware and says it was quoted a 175% price increase.
• •On October 27, Network World reported that Broadcom stopped offering its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) as a download in August and now limits licensed use to backup and recovery. Many migration tools relied on it.

Put together: the price changed, the cloud workarounds are closing, and leaving now takes more planning than it used to. Most mid-sized companies are still treating this as a line item on the renewal quote.

What Changed in 2026

• •Bundles, not products. Broadcom has pushed customers into VCF subscriptions. You pay for a full stack whether you use all of it or not.
• •Cores count. Licensing is counted per core with a 16-core-per-processor minimum, so the way you size hosts changes what you pay.
• •The cloud is no longer an escape hatch. Running VMware on a hyperscaler now means buying VMware licenses separately in most cases. Moving to a hosted VMware service changes where it runs. It doesn't change your licensing exposure.
• •Customers are looking. In a Rimini Street-commissioned survey reported by The Register, 9 in 10 VMware users said licensing costs had them considering alternatives, and 60% were weighing a multi-hypervisor approach. (Rimini Street sells VMware support, so keep that in mind.)

Why This Is a Leadership Decision

When a VMware renewal is handled as a procurement ticket, you usually get one of two results. Either you pay whatever the quote says because you ran out of time, or your team starts an exit under pressure with no business case behind it.

The renewal decides your infrastructure cost, your disaster recovery approach and your team's workload for the next three to five years. That makes it a CEO and CFO conversation, and it needs:

• •A five-year total cost comparison, not a renewal-versus-renewal comparison
• •A clear view of which workloads actually need what VMware provides
• •An owner who is accountable for the decision and the timeline

The Three Options

• •1. Stay and negotiate. This is often the right answer, especially if you have heavy dependencies on NSX, vSAN or VMware-based disaster recovery, or you have cloud reservations that still have time left. Right-size your core count, only license what you use, and negotiate from a documented position.
• •2. Move to a hosted or cloud VMware service. This can simplify operations and get you out of the data center. It doesn't solve the licensing cost, so price it accordingly.
• •3. Exit to another platform. Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Local, Nutanix, Proxmox or cloud-native services are all viable for the right workloads. Plan this as a program: application dependencies, backup and DR redesign, skills, security tooling and a realistic migration window. The VDDK change means confirming early that your migration tooling still works.

Many companies end up with a mix. They keep a smaller VMware footprint for the workloads that need it and move everything else.

Where Mid-Sized Companies Get It Wrong

• •Starting the analysis 60 days before the renewal date
• •Comparing platforms on license price alone and ignoring migration, retraining and DR costs
• •Letting the reseller or MSP frame the options when they have a stake in the answer
• •Choosing a hypervisor before mapping which applications run where and who owns them
• •Underestimating how long it takes to rebuild backup, monitoring and security around a new platform

In my years as a CTO and running large infrastructure programs, the platform choice was rarely the hard part. Getting a clear inventory, an honest cost model and one accountable owner was.

What to Do Next

• ☐Find your VMware renewal date, contract terms and any cloud reservation end dates.
• ☐Count licensed cores the way Broadcom counts them, and compare that to what you actually use.
• ☐List the VMware features you depend on (NSX, vSAN, site recovery) and the ones you're paying for but don't use.
• ☐Group workloads into stay, move or retire.
• ☐Build a five-year cost comparison for at least two options, including migration and staffing.
• ☐Confirm your backup and migration tools still work under Broadcom's current terms.
• ☐Name one executive owner and set a decision date at least six months before renewal.

If you're also working through 2027 budgets, my earlier pieces on IT budgets built on prices that no longer exist and the AI buildout bill on your cloud invoice cover the wider cost picture.

Frequently Asked Questions

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