If you’ve been anywhere near a VMware renewal in the last couple of years, you already know where this post is going. But in case you’ve had your head down in a migration project and missed the full scale of it — buckle up.
What Actually Changed
When Broadcom closed the VMware acquisition, they didn’t just tweak the price list. They rebuilt the whole model:
- Perpetual licenses are gone. If you were one of the many orgs that bought once and just paid for support each year, that option no longer exists. Everything is subscription-only now, forever.
- Standalone products got folded into bundles. You can’t just buy vSphere anymore in a lot of cases — you’re pushed toward VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), whether you need everything in the bundle or not.
- Minimum core counts jumped. The old 16-core minimum purchase is now 72 cores in many programs, which is brutal if you’re running smaller clusters.
- The actual price increases are eye-watering. Reports across the industry put the average increase somewhere around 150%+, with plenty of orgs — especially SMBs and hosting providers — seeing figures north of 1,000% once bundling and minimum commitments are factored in.
- Late renewals now carry a real penalty — a 20% surcharge on the first year’s subscription, applied retroactively.
On top of all that, there’s been friction on the partner side too — European cloud providers have been pushing back hard (CISPE filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission in March 2026 over Broadcom ending most VMware Cloud Service Provider partnerships in the region), which tells you this isn’t just an SMB pricing story — it’s a broader shake-up of the whole ecosystem.
Before You Panic-Migrate: Check What You Actually Need
Here’s something worth doing before you start evaluating alternatives: go back and actually map your requirements against what’s in the bundles.
I did this myself recently comparing VCF against VVF. My core requirements were pretty standard — vMotion, Storage vMotion, vSphere Distributed Switch — and it turns out all three are covered under vSphere Enterprise Plus, which is included in both bundles. If your needs look similar, VCF might be more than you actually need, and VVF (or even negotiating down to just what Enterprise Plus covers) could save you a chunk without touching a single VM. Worth an afternoon of digging before you commit to a full platform migration.
That said — for a lot of people, the pricing has crossed a line where “just negotiate harder” isn’t enough, and it’s time to actually look elsewhere.
The Alternatives Worth Actually Considering
Proxmox VE — This is where most of the migration momentum is right now, especially for SMB and mid-size shops. It’s free, open-source, KVM-based, and the community has exploded over the last couple of years specifically because of the VMware exodus. If you want the closest thing to “ESXi without the invoice,” this is probably your answer.
Microsoft Hyper-V — If you’re already deep in a Windows Server estate, this is the path of least resistance. It’s included in your Windows Server licensing (which you’re probably already paying for), and tools like Azure Migrate make VM conversion fairly painless. Where it gets messy is with heavier Linux workloads or storage setups that push past what Storage Spaces Direct comfortably handles.
Nutanix AHV — The enterprise-grade option. It’s a full hyperconverged stack (compute, storage, virtualization, and the Prism management layer) rather than a drop-in hypervisor swap. It’s proven at scale and genuinely competitive with what vCenter + vSAN used to offer — but you’re trading one licensing relationship for another, so do the math carefully.
XCP-ng — The other major open-source option, built on Xen instead of KVM. Smaller community than Proxmox but solid if you want something battle-tested and vendor-independent.
OpenStack — The heavyweight option for building a full private cloud. Powerful, flexible, and completely open — but it needs a dedicated team who actually knows OpenStack. Not a weekend project.
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization — Worth a look only if you’re already committed (or heading toward) a Kubernetes-native operating model. It lets you run VMs and containers side by side, but the learning curve is real if your team is coming from a traditional vSphere background.
Going full public cloud (AWS/Azure) — For some orgs, this whole saga is the final push to get out of the data center business entirely rather than replace the hypervisor underneath it.
A Realistic Migration Approach
Nobody sane rips out their entire virtualization layer in a weekend. The pattern that keeps showing up in every migration writeup I’ve read:
- Start with dev, test, and genuinely non-critical workloads first
- Move Linux-heavy services before the complicated Windows/storage/networking-dependent stuff
- Leave anything tied deeply into NSX or vSAN until last — those integrations take the most work to untangle
- Budget more time than you think — most full transitions run somewhere in the 18–24 month range for anything non-trivial
And even if you’re not planning to leave immediately: having a real, evaluated alternative on paper gives you actual leverage at your next VMware renewal — even orgs that end up staying put report better negotiating outcomes just from having done the homework.
Bottom Line
Broadcom didn’t just raise prices — they changed the entire economics of running VMware long-term. Whether the right move for you is renegotiating down to what you actually need, or genuinely moving to Proxmox, Hyper-V, or something heavier like Nutanix, depends entirely on your environment. But “do nothing and hope the next renewal is better” isn’t really on the table anymore.
If you’re in the middle of evaluating this for your own environment, I’d genuinely like to hear what you’re finding — drop a comment or hit me up.