Should You Leave VMware After Broadcom? An Honest Decision Framework
Since Broadcom changed the VMware commercial model, leaving has gone from unthinkable to a serious board level question. But the honest answer is not a slogan in either direction. For some estates staying is plainly right, for others leaving is overdue, and the difference comes down to a handful of factors you can actually assess. Here is the framework we use, from people who do not resell VMware licences and who model staying and leaving on the same basis.
This is the question we are asked more than any other right now, and it usually arrives in a slightly panicked form. A renewal quote has landed that is two or three times the previous one, someone has read that everyone is leaving VMware, and the instinct is to treat exit as the obvious answer. It is not obvious. Leaving VMware can be the right move and it can be an expensive mistake, and which one it is for you depends on your estate, not on the headlines. So before you commit to anything, it is worth slowing down and deciding on evidence.
C4C is an independent UK technology consultancy, and we do not resell VMware licences. We take no margin on your renewal, so we have no reason to keep you on VMware or to push you off it, and we model staying and leaving on the same basis. We are paid a fixed fee, a share of the saving we achieve, or for professional services such as a licence audit or a migration. Where a destination we supply comes up, such as Nutanix, we say so. Often our advice is to stay and renegotiate. Tell us your situation and we will give you a straight answer.
Usually not straight away, and often not at all. For many estates the right answer is to stay and renegotiate, because the cost and disruption of moving outweigh the increase. Leaving wins when you use little beyond core virtualisation, face a steep uplift on capability you do not touch, or a hardware refresh already points away. You do not have to switch everything on day one: split the estate into hold, migrate later and evaluate for exit. Whatever you decide, start early, before the renewal clock removes your leverage.
What are you actually trying to achieve?
Almost nobody actually wants to leave VMware. What people want is to stop overpaying, to regain leverage, and to feel they are not trapped. Exit is one way to get those things, but it is not the only way, and it is rarely the cheapest or the fastest. So the first move is to separate the real goal from the assumed solution. If the goal is a defensible renewal cost, that may be achievable while staying. If the goal is genuine independence from a single vendor's pricing power over the next decade, that points more firmly toward exit. Naming the goal honestly changes the answer.
It also matters that this is no longer a neutral default. Before Broadcom, staying on VMware needed no justification. Now the commercial terms have moved enough that staying is a decision you should be able to defend, the same as any other. That does not mean leave. It means stop assuming, and decide.
There is no universal answer. Staying on VMware is the right call for a meaningful share of estates, and leaving is the right call for another meaningful share. Anyone who tells you confidently that everyone should leave, or that nobody should, is selling something. The work is in deciding which group you are in.
What changed under Broadcom?
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, perpetual licences have been withdrawn, with sales ending in December 2023, and subscription is the default. Licensing is now per physical core, with a minimum of 16 cores per processor, and you license every core in the server. The product has been consolidated into two bundles, VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and the fuller VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), though VVF has now been withdrawn in some regions and may not be available to license where you are. Version 9 adds a compliance reporting obligation, where failure to submit regular verified reports can degrade management functions and suspend support. The net effect for many is a renewal that costs far more for the same workload, which is what has put exit on the table at all. If you want the detail on the numbers, our renewal cost guide and the renewal calculator are the place to start.
What decides whether to stay on VMware or leave?
Strip away the noise and the stay versus go decision turns on five things. None of them on its own gives you the answer, but together they point clearly in most cases.
1. Estate size and the shape of your renewal
Large estates that already use the broad VMware stack tend to find staying more rational, because they are getting real value from the components they pay for and they have the scale to negotiate. Smaller estates, and estates with a lot of low core count or edge hardware, often see the sharpest percentage uplift and the least to show for it, which makes exit more attractive. The raw size matters less than the ratio of what you pay to what you genuinely use.
2. Feature use, honestly assessed
This is the factor people get wrong most often. The question is not what VMware can do, it is what you actually use. If you run core virtualisation and vSAN and little else, you are paying for a great deal of capability that never touches your workloads, and the case to either right size the bundle or leave is strong. If you genuinely use the networking, automation, Tanzu and hybrid management in VCF, the stack is earning its keep and leaving means rebuilding all of it elsewhere. Be ruthlessly honest here, because this single assessment moves the decision more than any other. Our VCF or VVF guide walks through mapping real feature use to the right bundle.
3. Renewal uplift, as a real number
Reported increases range widely, from roughly double to well over ten times in extreme cases, and European cloud providers told the European Commission of rises of 800 to 1,500 percent. Source: The Register, May 2025. But the figure that matters is yours, validated against your actual cores and entitlement rather than a vendor quote taken at face value. A 30 percent uplift on a fairly priced stack you fully use is a very different decision from a 300 percent uplift on capability you barely touch. Get the genuine number before you weigh it, because the quoted number is rarely the floor, and Broadcom’s standard rules on terms and minimums can be softened in negotiation. Our guide to reducing your VMware renewal covers the levers.
4. Risk appetite and operational maturity
Migration is real work and it carries real risk, most of it in the places people underestimate, data gravity, disaster recovery coupling, networking and firewall dependencies, backup interlock and operational tooling rather than the hypervisor swap itself. An organisation with strong platform engineering and a healthy tolerance for a managed project can absorb that. One that is already stretched, or that cannot afford disruption to critical services, should weight staying more heavily, at least for now. Honesty about your own capacity to execute is part of the decision.
5. Regulatory and contractual position
Regulated workloads change the maths. Running unsupported infrastructure is rarely acceptable for long, so if any of your estate is on an unsupported version, for example vSphere or vSAN 7.0, where general support ended on 2 October 2025, with vSphere 8 following on 11 October 2027, stabilising that is urgent regardless of the bigger stay versus go call. Equally, some licences acquired through OEM or bundled constructs carry portability constraints that affect how cleanly you can leave. Know your contractual ground before you assume either path is open.
Who should stay on VMware, and who should leave?
No profile is destiny, but these patterns hold often enough to be a useful starting point. Find the one closest to you, then pressure test it against the five factors above.
Lean toward staying, done well
Large, stack heavy, feature rich estates
You run a broad VMware footprint, genuinely use the networking, automation and hybrid capabilities, and have the scale to negotiate. For you the work is not exit, it is right sizing VVF against VCF, negotiating the renewal hard, and handling the version 9 compliance obligation cleanly. Leaving would mean rebuilding capability you actually rely on. See staying on VMware, done well.
Lean toward leaving over time
Smaller, edge heavy or lightly featured estates facing a sharp uplift
You mostly use core virtualisation and storage, the renewal uplift is steep, and you are paying for a stack you do not touch. For you a planned exit to a destination such as Nutanix, Azure Local or HPE can be the stronger long term position. We supply Nutanix, so we always set it against the alternatives on the same numbers. It is rarely a this year project, but starting the assessment now restores leverage. See migrating off VMware.
The architecture question underneath
VxRail and hyperconverged estates
If you run VxRail or another hyperconverged platform, there is a second decision beneath the VMware one: whether the fused compute and storage model still fits, or whether disaggregating to separate hosts and an external array would decouple your refresh cycles and step outside the vSAN tied portions of the licensing. See the VxRail guide and disaggregating from HCI.
Genuinely undecided
Mixed estates where the factors pull in different directions
Most organisations are here, and that is fine. The answer is not to guess, it is to run a short, evidence based assessment that establishes the real number and the real blockers, then split your workloads into hold, migrate later and evaluate for faster exit. You do not have to decide the whole estate at once.
Do you have to switch everything on day one?
No, and you usually should not. Replacing VMware is not a single cutover. The organisations that do it well move in phases: pilot a destination on a contained set of workloads, move the straightforward ones first, and leave the most complex or most integrated systems until the new platform has proved itself. Some workloads may never move.
- Split the estate into three groups. Hold and optimise the workloads where VMware still fits, migrate later the ones that can wait for a refresh, and evaluate for a faster exit the ones where the case is already clear.
- Shrink what stays. VMware is licensed per core on every host that runs it, so consolidating the remaining estate onto fewer hosts as workloads leave reduces the bill, not just the footprint.
- Buy time with the renewal. A shorter term, or terms that let you reduce or terminate, can fund a phased move instead of forcing a rushed one. In one engagement we secured a multi year renewal with a right to terminate every year.
What should a mid size company move to from VMware?
There is no single answer, which is why a destination should follow the decision to leave, not drive it. For estates that mostly run virtual machines, the common shortlist is Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper V or Azure Local for Microsoft centred organisations, and Proxmox where cost matters most and in house skills are strong. Where the direction is containers, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs virtual machines and containers on one platform. Some workloads belong in public cloud instead. Our VMware alternatives comparison sets out where each fits. We supply Nutanix and say so, and we will tell you when another platform, or staying, is the better answer for your numbers.
C4C assesses both sides before you commit: the full cost of staying against the full cost of moving to Nutanix, Microsoft Azure or Azure Local, Hyper-V, Proxmox or OpenShift, including migration services, running both platforms during the move, hardware, tooling and retraining, and the technical limits that could stop a workload moving, from application vendor support to the networking, storage and disaster recovery features you rely on. You get a clear recommendation: renegotiate and stay, move part of the estate, or move. We do not resell VMware licences. We do supply Nutanix and Veeam, and say so where they are in the running. Talk to us about a stay or migrate assessment.
How do you decide, rather than guess?
The mistake we see most is deciding the strategy before establishing the facts. The better sequence is to understand the reality first, then choose on evidence. This is the Decide stage of our IDEAL framework in practice, and it does not need to take long.
- Run an entitlement audit by cluster and by node, confirming core counts, version rights and who owns the support contract, so you know your true baseline rather than the quoted one.
- Assess feature use honestly, mapping what you actually consume against what each bundle includes, so you can tell right sizing from exit.
- Model the real renewal exposure under more than one scenario, then compare it against the genuine cost and risk of migrating, not a hand wave on either side.
- Stabilise anything unsupported as a priority, since that is urgent whichever way the larger decision goes.
- Start a parallel alternatives assessment even if you expect to stay, purely to restore negotiating leverage and surface the real blockers before a renewal corners you.
That sequence keeps control with you rather than the renewal clock, and it means that whatever you choose, you chose it on evidence. We have done exactly this for clients facing the decision, and the outcome is often better than either extreme suggested. In one engagement, independent audit and negotiation took a Fortune 500 company's Broadcom renewal to 56 percent below the quote, saving more than £1 million, on a multi year term with a right to terminate every year, which kept every option open. You can read that VMware licensing case study for how it played out in practice, or talk to us before your renewal.
Doing nothing is a decision too, and not always a safe one. Letting a renewal auto process, or running on an unsupported version because change feels risky, quietly removes the leverage and the options you would want later. If you take one thing from this guide, let it be that the choice deserves to be made deliberately rather than by default.
Where should you go next?
This guide is the map. Each path below is the detail, written to the same independent standard. Start with the one closest to your situation.
- Staying on VMware, done well, if the broad stack earns its place and the task is to optimise and negotiate.
- Migrating off VMware, for the honest how of moving without breaking production.
- VMware to Nutanix and Azure Local as a VMware alternative, for two named destinations and where each fits.
- VCF or VVF, to map your feature use to the right bundle and stop paying for capability you never use.
- Disaggregating from HCI and the VxRail guide, if your real question is about the storage architecture, not just the hypervisor.
- Our guide to reducing your VMware renewal and the renewal calculator, for the numbers, as a no signup first step.
Stay or leave? Get an evidence based answer before your renewal
Tell us your situation and we will give you a straight view: where your entitlement actually stands, what the real renewal number is, and whether staying, leaving or a mix makes more sense for your estate. We do not resell VMware licences, so we gain nothing from either answer on VMware. We have sat on the other side of the table.
How we are paid. A fixed fee, a share of the saving we achieve, or professional services such as a licence audit or a migration. Never a margin on VMware licences.
Prefer email? Reach us directly at hello@c4cgroup.co.uk.
Frequently asked questions
Should we leave VMware?
Often not straight away, and for many estates not at all. Staying and renegotiating is frequently the right answer, because the cost and disruption of moving outweigh the increase. Leaving makes sense when you use little beyond core virtualisation, face a steep uplift on capability you do not touch, or a refresh already points away. It comes down to five things: estate size, real feature use, the true uplift, your capacity for a migration and your regulatory position. Decide on evidence, early, before the renewal removes your leverage.
Is everyone really leaving VMware?
No. Analyst reporting shows meaningful workload movement and wide renewal increases, but that is not the same as everyone leaving. A large share of estates are staying and optimising, because for them the stack still delivers value and a negotiated renewal is cheaper than rebuilding everything elsewhere. The headline movement is real, but it does not tell you what is right for your specific estate.
Do I need to switch everything on day one when replacing VMware?
No. Replacing VMware works best in phases: pilot a destination, move the straightforward workloads first, and leave the most complex until the new platform has proved itself. Split the estate into hold, migrate later and evaluate for exit, consolidate what stays onto fewer hosts to cut per core licensing, and use the renewal terms to buy time rather than forcing a rushed move.
What should a mid size company migrate to from VMware?
It depends on the workloads. For mostly virtual machine estates the common shortlist is Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper V or Azure Local, and Proxmox where cost matters most and skills are strong. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization suits a container led direction, and some workloads belong in public cloud. Choose the destination after deciding to leave, on your own numbers, not before.
How do I know if staying is the right call?
Staying tends to be right when you have a large estate that genuinely uses the broader VMware capabilities such as networking, automation and hybrid management, when you have the scale to negotiate, and when the cost of rebuilding that capability elsewhere would exceed the renewal. If you mostly use core virtualisation and storage and are facing a steep uplift, that points the other way. Mapping your actual feature use is the single most useful test.
What does leaving VMware actually involve?
Far more than swapping the hypervisor. The hard parts are data gravity, disaster recovery coupling, networking and firewall dependencies, backup interlock, storage replatforming and operational tooling. A realistic exit is a phased project of assessment, pilot, execution and closure, not a single cutover. Our migration guide covers the honest detail of doing it without breaking production.
Can I just stay on an old VMware version and avoid the new model?
Not safely for long. vSphere and vSAN 7.0 reached end of general support on 2 October 2025, and vSphere 8 follows on 11 October 2027. Running an unsupported version means no security fixes and no support, which is rarely acceptable for regulated or critical workloads. Doing nothing also quietly erodes your leverage and options.
Does C4C resell VMware or the alternatives?
We do not resell VMware licences, so we take no margin on your renewal and gain nothing on VMware whichever way you decide. We do supply some alternatives, including Nutanix, and backup such as Veeam, and we say so whenever they come up. We are paid a fixed fee, a share of the saving we achieve, or for professional services such as an audit or a migration.