Published October 20, 2026
What changed
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware on November 22, 2023. On December 11, 2023, it ended sales of perpetual licenses and of support renewals for them. VMware products are now sold as subscriptions. Many products are no longer sold on their own, only inside two bundles: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF).
VCF and VVF are licensed per physical core, with a minimum of 16 cores for each processor.
Perpetual license holders move to a subscription when their support ends. Customers who used a few products may now buy a bundle with products they do not use. In a 2024 lawsuit, AT&T submitted an email to a New York court describing a proposed 1,050% annual increase in its VMware bill.
Availability also varies by region. In December 2025, Broadcom said VVF was no longer available in some EMEA countries.
vSphere 7 reached end of general support on October 2, 2025. Hosts on 7.x now get no product support, security patches or updates from Broadcom unless it offers them Extended Support. The alternatives are to renew and upgrade, or to move.
Full exit or smaller estate
The goal does not have to be zero VMware. It can be a VMware estate small enough that the next renewal costs what the remaining workloads are worth.
Some workloads should stay longer. Applications whose vendors support them only on VMware. Clusters built on NSX networking or vSAN storage that would need redesign. Systems near retirement that are not worth moving twice. Moving those first adds risk and saves little.
Other workloads move more easily: general-purpose Windows and Linux servers, test and development environments, and anything already deployed by automation. Start there.
Decide per workload, not per estate. A useful first output is a list of every virtual machine with one of four labels: stay, move to another hypervisor, move to a public cloud, or retire.
The options
| Option | What it involves | Migration tooling |
|---|---|---|
| Renew and reduce | Stay on VMware, retire or move enough workloads first that fewer cores are licensed at renewal. | None for the hypervisor |
| Microsoft Hyper-V or Azure Local | Hyper-V on Windows Server, or Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI), which uses Azure Arc as its control plane and is priced per physical core. | System Center Virtual Machine Manager (powered-off conversion), Azure Migrate |
| Nutanix AHV | Nutanix's hypervisor, with Nutanix's own storage or supported external arrays such as Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray. | Nutanix Move |
| Proxmox VE | An open-source platform built on KVM, with paid support subscriptions. | Built-in ESXi import wizard (from version 8.2) |
| Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | Virtual machines run alongside containers on OpenShift. | Migration Toolkit for Virtualization |
| Public cloud | Move virtual machines to Azure, AWS or Google Cloud as they are, or rebuild them. | Azure Migrate, AWS Transform MGN (formerly AWS Application Migration Service) |
| Retire | Switch off workloads that no longer earn their cost. | None |
Running VMware inside a public cloud provider's data center keeps the Broadcom license. In November 2025, Broadcom began requiring customers on hyperscaler platforms to bring their own VCF subscription bought from Broadcom.
The order of the work
- Inventory the estate. List hosts, processors, cores, virtual machines and their operating systems. Record which VMware features each cluster uses: vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, distributed switches, templates, PowerCLI scripts. The core count sets the subscription size; the feature list sets the migration effort.
- Establish the contract position. Find the renewal date, the cores under subscription, the notice period and any reduction rights. Work every other step back from the renewal date.
- Label every workload. Stay, move, move to cloud, or retire, with an owner for each decision. Check each application vendor's support statement for the target platform.
- Choose the target and replace the surrounding tools. Backup, monitoring, disaster recovery, patching and automation all have VMware-specific parts. Confirm your backup product supports the target platform, at what version, before the first workload moves.
- Run a pilot. Move a set of non-critical virtual machines of each operating system type. Measure conversion time per virtual machine and per terabyte, and the downtime each needs. Those figures turn the plan into a schedule.
- Migrate in waves. Group workloads by application, not by host, so an application moves together. Plan a rollback for each wave and keep the source virtual machines until the wave is accepted.
- Decommission and reduce. Retire emptied hosts, and reduce the VMware subscription at renewal to the cores still needed.
What moves easily and what does not
Copying a virtual machine's disks is the simpler part. Plan most of the time for the features built around them.
- vSAN. Storage moves to the target's own storage layer or to external storage. Treat that as a storage design project, with its own capacity and performance testing.
- NSX. Micro-segmentation rules, load balancers and overlay networks have to be rebuilt on the target or on separate network and security products. Plan to move clusters that use NSX heavily last.
- Site Recovery Manager. Disaster recovery runbooks and replication need a replacement and a new test. Do not retire the old recovery setup until the new one has passed a test.
- Live migration, high availability and load balancing. Each alternative has its own versions of these, with its own defaults. Operations teams should learn them before production moves.
- Automation. PowerCLI scripts, templates and provisioning workflows have to be rewritten for the target's tools and interfaces.
- Monitoring and capacity tools. Anything that reads VMware's management interfaces has to be replaced or reconfigured.
Work inside each virtual machine
Each converted virtual machine needs checks inside the guest operating system. They are small one by one and large across thousands of machines.
- Remove VMware Tools, following your migration tool's steps, and install the target's guest drivers. Proxmox VE, Nutanix AHV and OpenShift Virtualization use VirtIO drivers for Windows guests.
- Check network settings. The virtual network adapter changes. Its name can change, a Windows guest can warn that its IP address is still assigned to the old adapter, and DHCP reservations need the new MAC address.
- Check Windows activation and edition after conversion.
- Check applications licensed against hardware identifiers, which can change when the virtual hardware changes.
The contract and the renewal
If the exit will outlast the current term, the contract has to buy that time without locking in the full estate for years.
- Can the renewal be shorter than the term proposed, so the subscription ends when the migration does?
- Can cores be reduced at each anniversary, or only at the end of the term?
- Which products in the bundle do you use, and does the quote assume you use them all?
- What support do the remaining hosts get during a partial exit?
- When must notice be given, and to whom: Broadcom directly or a partner?
- Is the bundle you are quoted still sold in your country?
Start the conversation well before the renewal date. Bring a migration plan with dates, whether you intend to leave or stay.
Skills and operations
If your team's experience is mostly VMware, budget for training, a support subscription and a partner for the first waves.
Plan for running two platforms at once. During the migration, the team operates VMware and the target side by side, with two sets of tools, patches and on-call procedures. Put that double running in the first budget.
Settle these first
- When is the renewal, and how many cores will you need on that date?
- Which workloads depend on vSAN, NSX or Site Recovery Manager?
- Which application vendors support your target platform, in writing?
- Does your backup product support the target, at your version?
- Who will run the new platform, and when will they be trained?
Questions
- Do we have to leave VMware completely?
- No. You can keep VMware for the workloads that depend on its features or on vendor certification, and move the rest. The aim is a smaller VMware estate at the next renewal, not necessarily none.
- What happens if we stay on vSphere 7?
- Since October 2, 2025, hosts on vSphere 7 get no product support, security patches or updates from Broadcom unless you have Extended Support. Ask Broadcom or your partner whether it is available. Staying is a security decision as well as a licensing one.
- Does running VMware in a public cloud avoid the licensing change?
- No. Since November 2025, Broadcom requires customers on hyperscaler platforms to bring their own VCF subscription bought from Broadcom. On Azure VMware Solution, Microsoft set October 31, 2026 as the retirement date for license-included pay-as-you-go SKUs and August 30, 2027 for license-included reserved instances.
- Do our Windows Server licenses change when we change hypervisor?
- Microsoft licenses Windows Server by the server's physical cores, or by virtual machine with subscription licenses or active Software Assurance. Its guidance does not tie this to a hypervisor. With all cores licensed, Datacenter edition covers unlimited virtual machines on that host. Check activation and edition on each virtual machine after conversion.