Nine in 10 VMware customers eye the exit as licensing bills bite

Nine out of ten respondents to a survey of VMware customers say higher licensing costs were prompting them to consider alternatives. Unisphere Research surveyed 269 executives, managers, and professionals at VMware user organizations between December 2025 and February 2026. The study, commissioned by third-party support provider Rimini Street, also found that 54 percent cited the end of perpetual license support as a reason to evaluate other options. The study showed cost remains the leading driver of virtualization roadmap decisions. Seventy-three percent said savings were a top priority. Respondents also identified barriers to change: operational complexity (40 percent), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). Users were looking for choice, flexibility, and control over their virtualization strategies, said Keith Costello, chief operating officer with Rimini Street, which sells third-party support for VMware. "These survey findings reinforce the need for practical, vendor-independent strategies that put business priorities back on the client's terms." Sixty percent of respondents were considering a multi-hypervisor strategy. Forty-eight percent said they did not currently plan to move any assets to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), Broadcom's subscription platform and preferred migration path. Broadcom agreed to buy VMware in 2022. By November 2024, Gartner was arguing that customers were worse off because of the acquisition. In May 2025, cloud customer group the European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO) and cloud trade association CISPE claimed that Broadcom had upped VMware licensing costs to between eight and 15 times their previous levels since it acquired VMware. At the time, Broadcom said it was working to advance the European Union's sovereign cloud objectives and enable enterprises to "accelerate innovation, provide more choice, and address their most complex technology challenges." In June, UK retail giant Tesco said it was replacing VMware with an alternative product and pressing ahead with its licensing lawsuit against the virtualization pioneer's parent company, Broadcom, with a High Court trial scheduled no earlier than November 2027. Last month, Gartner predicted that more than half of enterprises would begin proofs of concept for alternatives to their VMware deployments by 2029, while still rating the Broadcom business unit a leader in two major markets. "By 2029, 55 percent of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery, up from 25 percent in 2026," it said. ®