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The Courts Virtualization

T-Mobile Appears To Be Quitting VMware Amid Support Rights Lawsuit With Broadcom (theregister.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the on-the-way-out dept.
T-Mobile appears to be migrating its 303,000-core VMware environment to another platform while fighting Broadcom in court for the extended support it says its perpetual-license agreement guarantees. "The matter is somewhat urgent," The Register reports, because a court-ordered support arrangement expires August 3, "so T-Mobile may soon be unable to get support for its very substantial VMware estate." The Register reports: The dispute relates to a deal T-Mobile struck with VMware in August 2023, which saw the telco acquire perpetual licenses and two years of support for some software, plus the option for a further year of support. When Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023, it stopped selling perpetual licenses and standalone support deals for customers with those licenses. Broadcom also reduced the virtualization giant's product range from over 150 products to two subscription-only bundles. Broadcom now mostly sells its Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. Customers including AT&T and Tesco tried to exercise their right to extended support, but Broadcom declined to do so. AT&T settled on confidential terms. Tesco is pursuing the matter in the courts.

When customers exercise their option for extended support, Broadcom argues it can't deliver because the products covered by the contract don't exist anymore, its contracts allow it to deny support for dead products, and subscriptions are now the industry standard. T-Mobile started using VMware's products in 2008. In one hearing, the carrier's counsel described T-Mobile's VMware implementation as "the base of the entire internal network" and "the place where 1,000 applications reside." Another filing, from Broadcom, says the telco runs VMware software on over 303,000 CPU cores.

Court documents allege that in 2024 Broadcom notified T-Mobile it would not renew support after the initial two-year deal expired in 2025. The two parties kept talking about possible new arrangements. T-Mobile also sought an injunction that would compel Broadcom to provide extended support. Broadcom opposed the injunction, arguing that T-Mobile deliberately waited too long to seek it. At one point T-Mobile suggested a $20 million deal for another two years of support. An affirmation filed last week by T-Mobile vice president of technology Kevin Luu says the carrier sought that arrangement "to be able to complete T-Mobile's transition away from VMware at a more deliberate pace."

The court eventually granted the injunction forcing Broadcom to offer support beyond August 2025, but required T-Mobile to pay $5.28 million and post a $500,000 undertaking. Broadcom continued to provide support but also sought damages on grounds that the injunction meant it missed out on a new deal with T-Mobile. The telco has rubbished that argument in part because the two parties were still talking about a new deal. Broadcom later proposed to charge $24 million for extended support covering six products, a sum it said would cover over 20 staff needed to support T-Mobile. The carrier fired back by pointing out that it has made just two support calls in 2026, which hardly justifies such a massive staff and expense.

T-Mobile Appears To Be Quitting VMware Amid Support Rights Lawsuit With Broadcom More | Reply

T-Mobile Appears To Be Quitting VMware Amid Support Rights Lawsuit With Broadcom

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  • Everyone Saw This Coming (Score:5, Informative)

    by machineghost ( 622031 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @07:19PM (#66219164)

    Broardcom's entire business model with these acquisitions (they did the same thing with others before VMWare) is to acquire something everyone depends on AND can't easily switch off ... and then jack up the prices by an insane amount.

    It doesn't matter if most customers eventually leave: they will stick with what they have, no matter the cost, long enough for Broadcom to cover the entire cost of acquisition. At the end of the day they have more money than they started with, a small fraction of customers still paying, and some significant IP.

    They win all around, and everyone else (including the acquired company and its now-fired employees) loses.

    • Re:Everyone Saw This Coming (Score:4, Informative)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @11:13PM (#66219322)

      Indeed. The only surprise is that some large customers (like T Mobile) apparently did not see that coming.

      • Re:Everyone Saw This Coming (Score:5, Insightful)

        by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Thursday July 02, 2026 @01:17AM (#66219378)

        I guarantee there's someone, or a few someones, at t-mobile who saw this coming. They're mid level support or engineers. I'm sure they were screaming to all that they could find about what was coming, but upper management and the powers that be ignored them. None could confront the mass migration that was necessary if this group of someones were right, so they must be wrong.

        Until they weren't.

        And so this group will be rewarded with all the shit-work needed to get the migration done, while the very same people that ignored the timebomb ticking in their closet will be rewarded for their "vision" and "decisiveness".

        God I don't miss corporate.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I have no doubt that is accurate. Too many enterprises are shit-shows with no accountability and no negative consequences for really bad decision making once somebody has managed to climb high enough.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fuzzyf ( 1129635 )
          This is spot on
          Would upvote if I had mod points
        • Oh, I'm sure the people who pay the bills are paying attention as well. It's probably cheaper to sue Broadcom to force them to provide support than it is to rush into a massive migration.

          • "Rush"? They've had going on 3 years.

            Looks to me that they blindly trusted Broadcom, despite all evidence to the contrary.

            • Or, they said, "We already f-ing paid for this, and they're going to f-ing provide it. Send the lawyers!"

    • Like a tick, flea or parasite infection, worse off (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Canberra1 ( 3475749 ) on Thursday July 02, 2026 @02:43AM (#66219434)
      Our business has not changed, we have not expanded, same usage ,but you want 50% more in license fees anyways. We are not at fault, and paid a premium for perpetual licenses in good faith. You at merger time, failed due diligence for existing obligations. Tricky legal manipulation still amounts to daylight robbery. This stuff happened under Computer Associates and Oracle decades ago. Every few years, someone tries to roll you into a package deal, with worthless extras you don't need, or wont use least they lock you in harder. Solution Options: The 'No worse off test' , Lawyer up and fight, Move, jump ship while in litigation. The Hotel California situation MUST be budgeted for, even today. One advises AI token billing is already broken, and there will be front end AI brokers throwing easy ones to China or lowest bidder, so it is a no brainer NOT to commit to any model. I observe no-one is asking 'which business rules are costing us call center money?' I can answer that one - needless redundant two factor, or security questions, and too smart promos, obscurity with auto renew billing prices.

    • Broardcom's entire business model with these acquisitions (they did the same thing with others before VMWare) is to acquire something everyone depends on AND can't easily switch off ... and then jack up the prices by an insane amount.

      The Martin Shkreli [wikipedia.org] business model.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SpzToid ( 869795 )

        Broardcom's entire business model with these acquisitions (they did the same thing with others before VMWare) is to acquire something everyone depends on AND can't easily switch off ... and then jack up the prices by an insane amount.

        The Martin Shkreli [wikipedia.org] business model.

        What are the odds Martin Shkreli will be 1 of the 250 pardoned this week [theatlantic.com], the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence from a monarchy? After all Martin Shkreli is just another white collar criminal.

      • It's far, far, far older than that.

        There was a day that, indeed, 640k was enough for anybody and a 40Meg hard drive was as much as a good second hand smallish car.

        I can remember the 80s. It was rife. Everywhere was somebody making a bid for some other company, even just for the realestate and other assets. Bang, a dvision sold off, moving from prime real estate to "sticks" and the waterfront being developed for a soulless luxury hotel or apartments.

        Of course, it was all with other people's money. Sometime,

    • Much like "everyone" can see the ongoing lock-in to AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure? If by "everyone" you mean "everyone except the people with the power to approve procurements", I agree.

      Seriously though... what happens if Amazon, Google, and Microsoft start massively jacking up the prices for AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure to cover their massive AI capex or whatever? Is moving things out of AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure any easier than moving things out of VMWare?

      With the exception that it's not only eggh

      • There's a fundamental difference you're missing: all the businesses you listed want to keep you as a customer. Broadcom *does not*.

        For their model to work, customers just have to pay their (wildly) increased rates long enough for Broadcom to make back the $$$ they spent to acquire VMWare (they'd like to make a tidy profit too, but with all the VMWare assets they acquire that's guaranteed ... as long as they cover the acquisition cost).

        Google, Amazon and Microsoft may all be shitty companies with shitty pla

  • The bill just keeps getting larger and larger each time you push off dealing with the main core issues.

  • Get off of VMWARE ASAP, but be warned (Score:5, Informative)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @07:57PM (#66219192)

    VMWare is more than virtualization.

    OpenStack technical trainer here:

    If you think of VMWare in 2026 as virtualization only solution, like we still are in 2006, then sure, KVM, or QUEMU, Xen, BSD's VMM, or Hyper-V are cromulent options.

    But nowadays, VMWare, XenServer/Xencloud, on Premises Azure et al are used to make Private Clouds, or the fleets running on them use a few advanced functions beyond virtualization, with all that implies. Very few workloads are "virtualization only", not touching any of the advanced or the cloud-dy functions .

    The linux equivalent would be OpenStack, with all the load that implies.

    And yes, many of the FOSS solutions run KVM under the hood, with a few exceptions like Xen based ones, or BSD's vmm and vmmd, but again, what really counts in 2026 is not the Hypervisor, but all the other advanced stuff built atop of it.

    There is another aspect in this too, and it is Application support. Many ISVs certify their platforms/apps on specific OSs/Distros running on Specific Hypervisors.

    So, for instance, your ISV may say: Only Windows Server 2022 or 2025 only, RHEL 10, or Suse 16, on top of VMWare, Openstack or Azure.

    And there you are, for those workloads, you can forget about all the other solutions (obscure or not) that homelabbers love to peddle. Big corpos can pressure smaller ISVs to support their preferred solution, but the big ISVs will most likely put a few options on offer, and that's it.

    In those cases, large intitutions (like T-Mobile, the focus of the article) have 100s or even 1000s of ISVs some more crititcal than others, and they need to reach commonality of solutions, or personel requirements ballon (the legacy VMWare group, the Openstack group, the XenCloud group, the ProxMox group, the Azure group, the Nutanix group, the....) along with all the other support functions (negotiations and keeping track of support contracts for each technology). A veritable nightmare. So, unlike homelabbers, Big corpos will probably go to a one or two vendor solution for their internal clouds.

    Since VMWare was the leader, and for many lustres a model citizen, pretty muche every single ISV offered them as a supported option, therfore, it was the easier default.

    So, get out of VMWare ASAP, but be warned it will be hard, as you need to provide alternatives to the advanced functions, and align certification requirements for support.

    Also, use this as a clean-up opportunity . Retire redundant APPs, retire inhouse stuff with big technical debt, move it to either functions inside SW you already own (even if they are not completely taylor made) or to SaaS. That way your VM stable will be smaller, migration will be faster and easier, and the bill from whatever replaces VMWare will be "even moar" cheaper.

    • if you are in the position of "get out of VMWare ASAP" you did not get caught. You made a series of bad choices over and extended time frame!
      When ASAP comes up you have failed!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        The company I work for has decided to stay on VMware because they stated that "the applications we are running aren't supported under another VM".

        The point of virtualization is for the applications to not know that they are on a virtual machine.

        This was presented at a major corporate "hallelujah" meeting recently where they at the same time had created positions for upper mid level managers that they now are looking for people to fill.

        I did experience a similar thing right before the Dot Com bubble burst an

    • well yeah (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The deal was announced MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AGO. Yes I understand that budgets are already set for the year, however the next fiscal cycle should have been commenced the efforts of getting off VMware with all alacrity.

      Is it possible T-Mobile had a multi-year agreement with prices locked in and so didn't want to spend money that didn't need to be spent to double-pay for their IT infrastructure? Yeah I'd bet a doughnut that's what happened. However it just leads to a bigger and more urgent problem when the co

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Gleenie ( 412916 )

        I don't work for T-Mobile but I do work in the Core Network design team of another mobile carrier in another country. Amongst those applications were undoubtedly a bunch of systems that are literally the mobile network itself, Virtual Network Functions (VNF) - things like HSS, MME, PGW etc. You can't just pick those up and flick them somewhere else on a whim. With the complexity of a modern mobile network 4 years would be on the short side for a program of work to move them. Especially since the move would

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tailhook ( 98486 )

          Amongst those applications were undoubtedly a bunch of systems that are literally the mobile network itself...

          Yes, yes, yes. Thing is, there was a clear lack of urgency here. The timelines you cite are for your case, and whatever requirements, budgets and deadlines you suffer. T-Mobile made a bad bet in 2008, and the writing has been on the wall for years now, and viable alternatives have been available at least as long. Were T-Mobile competently managed, they certainly had the means to meet the necessary deadlines. Instead, they made yet another bad bet trying to litigate against pirates.

          The correct bet tod

    • We moved off on-prem VmWare to Azure cloud. VmWare had a workload management function called VmMotion - to automatically pauses and move VMs between hardware blades, supposedly without skipping a beat. But VMotion used to break cluster management software we ran. So our admins turned it off for susceptible VMs - those stayed 'sticky' on the blade they spun up on.

      As we moved to Azure, I asked how we could avoid a similar situation. Turns out Azure has a similar 'feature' called 'Live Migration'. The

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        AWS doesn't even do that. We have to manually shut down and restart VMs to have them move to newer hardware. We regularly get emails about "end-of-life" hardware that we need to manually shut down and restart on AWS.

        I like Microsoft's thinking.

    • Is there a specific reason why you left XPC-NG off your list of viable candidates?

      What is the typical company profile that you routinely see adopting OpenStack?

      • Is there a specific reason why you left XPC-NG off your list of viable candidates?

        Small-ish and not well known entities giving the support contracts for XPC-NG, that medium and large customers desire. Large companies that desire an internal cloud based on Xen will graviatate towards Citrix, now that they are back. Even Amazon Cloud started life based on Xen (with a corporate-friendlier BSD license) and then moved to KVM (less friendly GPL), that tells you something.

        What is the typical company profile that you routinely see adopting OpenStack?

        - Telcos worldwide, as, as some other porsters said, On-Prem NFVs are supported pretty much only on VMWare Cloud Foundation and OpenStack.
        - Large companies (banks and others) becuase their favourite providers support that solution (Huawei*, RedHat, Ubuntu, Oracle, etc)
        - Ultra-large companies that are capable to roll OpenStack from upstream and self-support, or even better, monetize it by selling to thrid parties (AliBaba, Tencent et al)
        - Companies of all sizes that want to do a full hybrid cloud with full interopreability between their private and public cloud, as virtually the only two options to do that are Azure, or OpenStack** (if you are veeeeeery carefull on your choice of private and public cloud OpenStack clouds).

        Extra Info:
        Another trend I see in Medium and large companies, including telcos, is a two provider solution. Say Azure on-prem Cloud + OpenStack On-prem. That way, you have options regarding ISV compatibility, and in the case of workloads that can run on both, you deploy on the cheapest one. And if ever one of your providers pulls a Broadcom, you can easily migrate to the other, while you ditch the bad actor, and bring in a third solution.

        * Huawei not only sells to telcos, they sell to large, very large, and strategic, non-telco customers as well.

        ** Amzon has outpost, and google has GDCE, yes, but those are on premises only because they ship the machine to your DC. You have very little liberty to choose HW provider or config, nor to decide sw config and patch application, or management interfaces, or... you get the idea. Outpost and GDCE are located in you DC, but not fully controlled by you the way local Azure or Local OpenStack are.

  • Broadcom told us all it was going to scam us... (Score:5, Informative)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @07:57PM (#66219194) Homepage Journal

    They didn't even try to hide it. They were very public about this acquisition being about milking their customer base who would not be able to migrate away in time to avoid paying them.

    My company ditched VMware within 3 months of the announcement. We moved with all deliberate speed to Proxmox and to be honest, we're happier there. Wish they had forced us sooner.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      I did the same. I wouldn't say I'm happier - as a tech running the show, there are certain niceties I miss. From an overall business decision we are paying far less money and I believe the redundancy / resiliency is much the same and the end users don't see any difference so from that perspective, the business prefers the new solution. At the end of the day it's all about maximising profits, and Proxmox does that vs VMware for sure.
  • We went to Spectrum 2 days ago to replace my sons oldish phone with a new phone and plan from Spectrum. His old plan was on T-Mobile. We are still waiting for the eSim and phone number to transfer to his new phone. Spectrum says it might take 72 hours. But it appears the problem is likely on T-Mobiles end. I wonder how many others are being held hostage to this situation?

    • Transfers have always been messy, no one has fixed that problem, period.

      I don't see how T-Mobile running their cell towers on VMware or not is going to have a direct impact on your transfer. Onboarding is just another app, slightly more critical than most, and it does touch a lot of systems. But it's hardly a big problem even if things go offline for 72 hours.

      They care bout money, so billing is probably top of mind. Then cell towers.

  • Always Part of the Plan (Score:4, Interesting)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @08:48PM (#66219238)
    It was obvious that Broadcom's plan was to shed their smallest customers and squeeze their biggest customers and I'm sure that they had models projecting how many customers would migrate away from VMware in the process. What I'd love to know is how accurate those projections have been but that information is harder to obtain.
    • Considering this has been Broadcom's recent mid-term business model I bet their projections were pretty accurate, as they were informed with data from less public/controversial acquisitions where they've done the same thing. Just to companies you've never heard of that make parts for companies that you have.

  • Hello? Anybody? (Score:4, Funny)

    by guygo ( 894298 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @09:08PM (#66219260)

    So even T-Mobile can't get through to customer support?

  • Oh the irony! Hurt Corpos hurt Corpos (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jumperalex ( 185007 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @09:11PM (#66219262)

    Broadcom: We are altering the deal. Pray we do not alter it further
    T-Mobile: Fuck you we're leaving
    Also T-Mobile: We're cancelling all legacy phone contracts despite promising we wouldn't.

  • 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli modus operandi (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gavino ( 560149 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @09:30PM (#66219270)
    Broadcom are the tech equivalent of 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli, who became infamous and earned the nickname after he hiked the price of a potentially lifesaving antiparasitic medication in 2015.

    Pharma bro logic: The people who pay the massive price hikes will be more than enough to offset the people who die because they cannot afford the medication, and this short-term revenue boost will cover the purchase price, and from that point on it's all free money.
    Broadcom bro logic: The companies who pay the massive price hikes will be more than enough to offset the companies who leave because they cannot afford the subscription, and this short-term revenue boost will cover the purchase price, and from that point on it's all free money.

    It's the exact same playbook.
    • They are like Oracle, take something very good like Sun Microsystems (Solaris, Java), as far as locking into worse contracts after acquisition: "Java SE Universal Subscription (2023): Oracle changed its pricing metric. Instead of charging per user or per processor, organizations now pay based on their total employee count. This means you must pay for every employee in the company, even if only a few use Oracle Java"

  • What's the problem? (Score:3)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @10:30PM (#66219308)
    >"The matter is somewhat urgent," The Register reports, because a court-ordered support arrangement expires August 3, "so T-Mobile may soon be unable to get support for its very substantial VMware estate." ... The carrier fired back by pointing out that it has made just two support calls in 2026, which hardly justifies such a massive staff and expense.

    They have a perpetual license, so can keep running VMWare without support. If they only had 2 support calls in the last year, it seems they should be able to move on to another solution without any urgent need for support. If they make a breaking change to a system, move that to the new platform. For the other existing stuff, keep calm and carry on.

    • Without support, T-Mobile probably won't be entitled to patch any of the inevitable future critical security vulnerabilities found in VMware's software.

    • Good point. T-Mobiles auditors and cybersecurity insurance will absolutely love that their systems are no longer patched against critical vulnerabilities

  • Contracts denying support for dead product (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @11:14PM (#66219324)
    Exercising a cynical loophole for Broadcom. They can pretty much ditch any contract they want just by playing musical chairs with the product.

  • I've been running Linux for over 25 years on various desktops and servers, along with some Windows and NetWare servers and whatnot for even longer than that, going back to the 80s. One of my clients opted for RHEL back when CentOS was a thing, just because they wanted "support". So they got a whole bunch of licenses for RHEL and switched (I eventually switched, too, because of the bullshit RedHat pulled with CentOS, but I went to Debian). You know how many times we've had to call RedHat or post on their

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No support, no patches including security fixes. Broadcom has paywalled all patches. Not only does that create a cyber risk, it will not go over well with their cyber insurance underwriters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )

        Gotcha. No security fixes would be a definite issue. TMobile would have to work doubly hard to minimize security risks while they switch to something else.

  • What are they migrating to? (Score:3)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Thursday July 02, 2026 @01:21AM (#66219384)

    I didn't see it mentioned anywhere; what is t-mobile migrating to?

  • This going to trial (and the UKs Teco also going to trial), might end badly for the software industry. There might actually get to be some formal ruling on what "perpetual" means. Ditto "Lifetime" and "Support".

    At the moment, these terms are whatever the vendor says they are. They might become what a judge says they are. And that could be good or bad for consumers depending upon the ruling.

    However, it could be even worse for vendors as now there is a line in the sand. No doubt, once the dust is settled (ie,

  • If it costs $24 million to pay 20 people, I want to be one of those 20 making $1.2 million a year. Where do I apply?

  • What is T-Mobile moving to?

  • VMware manglement incompetent, film at 11

    / also, the popcorn you are eating has been pissed in

  • Hum... perhaps filing a police report for Fraud and a chat with the DA?

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