Your VMware problem isn't a licensing problem -- It's a decision problem.
Every conversation about Broadcom's VMware pricing starts in the same place: the invoice. Gartner's Paul Delory puts typical renewals at 300–400% higher than before. Perpetual licences are gone. Four bundles replaced the à la carte catalogue. A 16-core-per-CPU minimum means small hosts pay for capacity they will never run.
All true. All widely reported. And all of it describes the symptom.
The organisations getting hurt worst aren't the ones with the biggest estates or the worst contracts. They're the ones who spent eighteen months gathering information instead of making four decisions.
The number that should actually worry you
Around 74% of IT leaders say they're exploring VMware alternatives, and Gartner expects 35% of VMware workloads to move to other platforms by 2028.
Notice what those two figures describe together: a very large group looking, and a much smaller group moving. The gap between them is where the money goes. Exploring is free. Deciding is what changes your price.
The Leverage Window
Here is the mechanism, and it's worth keeping:
Your renewal price is set by your alternative, not your architecture.
A credible alternative — Hyper-V, Proxmox, OpenShift/KVM, Nutanix, a hosted VMware service, or a deliberate decision to consolidate workloads off virtualization entirely — takes 12–18 months to plan and execute responsibly.
So your negotiating leverage exists only while:
runway to renewal > time to alternative
Cross that line and something quiet happens: you stop negotiating and start accepting. Nothing in your architecture changed. Your options did.
Do the arithmetic on your own calendar. Renewal date, minus twelve to eighteen months, is your decision date. For a meaningful number of organisations reading this, that date has already passed — which is itself useful to know, because it changes which options are still real.
Four decisions, in order
Most modernization programs aren't behind on execution. They're behind on these, and every week they stay open, the window narrows.
- Which workloads genuinely require this hypervisor? Usually far fewer than the estate suggests. Segmentation shrinks the problem before you price it.
- What is your credible alternative? Not a shortlist — a costed, sequenced plan you'd actually sign. Credibility is what gets priced at the table.
- By when do you decide? A date, on a calendar, owned by a person.
- Who signs? Programmes stall in the gap between the architect who knows and the executive who can commit.
None of these require you to leave VMware. Several of our recommendations end with clients staying — on materially better terms, because for the first time they had somewhere else to go.
Where we come in
ITs BizNet doesn't sell you a migration. We compress the decision.
In a short, fixed-scope assessment, our senior architects segment your estate, price two or three credible alternatives against your actual core counts and renewal dates, and hand you a roadmap with owners and deadlines. It's yours to keep — usable with any provider, including your incumbent, and including us. No obligation attached.
Because the expensive part of this isn't the licence. It's the twelve months spent not choosing.
What's next
Find your renewal date. Subtract eighteen months. If that date is behind you or inside the next quarter, you're in the window where preparation still changes the price — and it closes quietly.
Book a free consultation for a decision assessment and costed roadmap. We'll tell you honestly whether you still have leverage, and what to do with it if you do.
Sources:
- Gartner (Paul Delory) — renewals typically 300–400% higher
- Gartner Peer Community — ~74% of IT leaders exploring alternatives
- Gartner forecast — 35% of VMware workloads on other platforms by 2028
- 72-core minimum proposed early 2025, reversed by 10 Apr 2025; 16-core per-CPU minimum remains
- 12–18 month migration planning horizon — widely reported; attribute to a named source or present as our own delivery experience