Licensing Costs Driving 90% of VMware Users To Explore Options, Survey Finds (arstechnica.com) 46
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there's an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini's survey said they're exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware's higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.
Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said.
[...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.
Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said.
[...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.
There are still VMWare customers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would have though that by now they are all gone. Probably those left are the ones that stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about exist strategies.
Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. Funny thing: There is a regulatory requirement here for any financial service provider here to have a cloud replacement strategy. That includes cloud providers. Would be a good thing for everybody to have that, but people are stupid, full of themselves and greedy.
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WSL? I didn't realize WSL was a production layer. I thought it was more of a development platform, and for production, one either used Linux virtual machines, or containers in the VMs.
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Never underestimate the insanity and abject incompetence of windows sysadmins when given power over infrastructure.
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I would have though that by now they are all gone. Probably those left are the ones that stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about exist strategies.
For some customers, they looked at the resources needed to migrate, and decided it was cheaper to stay put and/or invest the resources that would be needed elsewhere in their business.
I doubt Broadcom is going to get many new customers, but Broadcom seems to be OK with that.
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Well, initial stupidity can come at a very high price.
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Broadcom bought VMWare for the patents. They dont care about the software. Broadcom has had a history of this, so this isnt a new or surprising thing.
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For some customers, they looked at the resources needed to migrate, and decided it was cheaper to stay put and/or invest the resources that would be needed elsewhere in their business.
Yes, and the reason is that they stupidly painted themselves into a corner and never thought about an exit strategy. Had they been thinking about the possibility that they might one day need to migrate from the beginning, it would be much cheaper to do so now.
That's the thing about painting yourself into a corner, a little better planning at the start can always avoid it with little to no additional effort.
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Enterprise customers with slow IT policies take years to make migrations like this. My department has dozens of applications running on hundreds of VMs, and we'll be lucky to get our pivot to Proxmox done in two years. I'm sure there are much bigger, much slower behemoths out there who will take even longer, or just pay because it's easier than moving.
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Re: There are still VMWare customers? (Score:2)
Wake me when they actually shift (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not a admin so I don't actually run my own VMs but from talking to other admins there is nobody who has tools for doing the kind of deployments you need to do in a large Enterprise except for VMware. I mean the tools exist but you're going to spend so much money paying people to monkey around with them you might as well just p
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The bigger you are, the harder it is to turn the ship in an emergency. See Titanic.
At some point the inertia of change isn't worth it, as you suggested. It is possible, but is it worth it?
The last way to look at this is a way to start the process of diversifying our Tech holdings. Windows, Office, Adobe, VMWare etc. But here is my take, STEAM is showing the way out. We're not there yet, but the tide appears to be turning (to keep the nautical terms going).
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The way out is through
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nowhere else to go, for now.
the vast majority of those customers have the kind of money & resources to fund or develop comparable alternatives. i'd be shocked if they haven't been exactly that as soon as VMware decided to fleece them.
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It was a net benefit for us to move off VMWare and not pay them a cent of extortion money to do so.
So Im not sure where you get these broad ideas or statements, but they are BS.
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The difference is that if you pay people to monkey around with things, you get a non-revocable perpetual license to the result. With license rental, you get a perpetual bill. It's the same rent trap as individuals get stuck in but with less excuses.
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This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me be clear: Broadcom did not buy VMWare to go into the virtualization business!
They bought them with the following plan:
1. Jack up the prices (by an insane amount) while reducing costs in extreme ways ... but it will take the time, and in the meantime they will pay ... but Broadcom (or rather the people behind it) have already pocketed enough from step #2 to pay for acquiring VMWare in the first place, plus a profit
2. Most customers are large enterprise users: they will change eventually
3. Eventually everyone leaves VMWare
4. VMWare, even with few/no customers, still has tons of assets like real estate: you liquidate all that and now you've made a massive profit over what it cost to buy VMWare
This was not some secret: it's a playbook Broadcom has used on acquisitions before. Maintaining a virtualization company was never their goal: it was to make money fleecing the company's corpse.
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This was not some secret: it's a playbook Broadcom has used on acquisitions before. Maintaining a virtualization company was never their goal: it was to make money fleecing the company's corpse.
And Computer Associates (now owned by Broadcom), demonstrated the way decades before Broadcom even existed.
Re:This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: This Was Broadcom's Entire Plan (Score:2)
Isn't Broadcom a public company, not a private equity fund?
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You are correct, but they are following a model pioneered by private equity firms. From Gemini:
Broadcom operates a public business model heavily inspired by private equity strategies ...
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Yes, it pisses off the vmware customers and its infuriating to watch those insufferable wall street bros light their cuban cigars with flaming hundred dollar bills. But, in the big picture, it
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Not even sure how evil I would rate this (Score:2)
One suggestion is to have a set of boiler plate contracts and have companies use these and then certify that the contract complies to the standard. Sellers are completely free to choose the contract they w
are you serious? (Score:2)
There are people still using VMWare?!?!? And their main issue is COST, rather than the fact that VMWare is like a thousand years old?
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Hating on vmware because it's "a thousand years old" is certainly a hot take.
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This Is News? (Score:2)
This seems like news from 2025.
Seeking new equilibria (Score:1)
It's a step function price shock that'll adjust at a stable price. If enough leave there is no point in owning the IP, doubt they'd open source VMware. All it takes, which AI makes easier than ever, is a workable alternative with an easy button. Have done a little proxmox - just attach to an ESXi machine and suck 'em over.
So they're moving to VirtualBox? (Score:3)
Disclaimer: I used to work for Oracle, and my boss, Ken Ross, pulled down his $40K quarterly bonus by simply billing customers for work that was never done.
Migrating is not so easy. (Score:5, Interesting)
1.) VMware had (and still has) a lot of goodies on vSphere that were (and some still) are not on competing products. If your Virtualization strategy depended on any of these, migrating is hard.
2.) Take point #1 and multiply by 20x if you have (private/public/hybrid) cloud foundation.
3.) If you were a single-virtualization or single-(private)cloud vendor based shop, you probably want to migrate to a multivendor stack as part of THIS migration, so that, if one of your new vendors goes rogue (just like VMware/broadcom did) you are not trapped again. This complicates even more the migrations, as, you will need to handle a multivendor environmet, and more so, for a while you will have to juggle 3 vendors (WMware + the other 2)
4.) For ages VMware was a model citizen, which means everyone certified agaist them. Before the migration you need to make sure all your workloads are certified. This is 4x valid for purposes of regulation, certification, compliance, and (cyber) insurance
Is a very complex issue, for many an organization is not as simple as "I migrated the VMs in my homelab in an afternon so how hard can it be?". And the timelines are heavily compressed.
Already migrated (Score:2)
Usual wank comments (Score:3)
There are lots of clowns here who think because they run a few VMs at home they are experts.
Companies know they are getting bent over. VMWare know it
To migrate off though costs you $X in Labour and Y in people hours. And that is before you factor in any business disruption. Now multiply those numbers when you have hundreds of thousands of VMs. And all that assumes every transition goes quickly with 100% success and nothing breaks.
Even at less than a hundred VMs it took a minimum of 6 months to do with full time consultants doing the work and trying to weave it into normal business operations - we were lucky in that a lot could be done at weekends.