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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Some enterprises are reducing their VMware footprint, but the evidence points to a gradual, selective unwind—not a synchronized mass exit. A January 2026 CloudBolt survey of 302 North American enterprises with at least 1,000 employees found that 86% were actively reducing VMware use, while secondary reporting on the survey put completed full migrations at about 4%. Those figures measure different stages: a company can move some workloads or stop adding new ones while keeping VMware for the rest. The survey is from a vendor in cloud management and cost optimization, not a census of VMware customers worldwide. CloudBolt’s survey findings and TechRadar’s reporting capture that difference.
The VMware exit is a controlled unwind, not a mass migration
“Dropping VMware” can describe several very different decisions. An enterprise might stop placing new applications on VMware, migrate one business unit, replace a specific VMware product, or remove every production VMware dependency—including disaster recovery and management systems. Only the last is a full exit.
- Full exit: no production workloads or essential operational dependencies remain on VMware.
- Footprint reduction: some workloads or clusters move, while VMware remains for selected systems.
- New-workload avoidance: existing VMware workloads stay put, but new projects use another platform.
- Component substitution: a company replaces a product such as VDI or disaster recovery without replacing all of vSphere.
The distinction matters because reducing VMware use can weaken its position in a company’s next renewal even if no full migration is completed. The practical decision point is often a contract renewal, hardware refresh, application project, or datacenter change—not the date of Broadcom’s acquisition.
What changed after Broadcom acquired VMware
Broadcom changed VMware’s commercial model and product packaging. In December 2023 it announced the end of sales of perpetual licenses and perpetual-license support renewals, and shifted the portfolio toward subscription and term offerings. Existing perpetual licenses did not simply stop functioning; customers’ rights and support depend on their contracts. Broadcom’s licensing announcement describes the transition, while its perpetual-license availability clarification provides further detail.
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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) became central purchasing vehicles. The shift has affected more than the headline price: buyers have had to reassess bundles, subscription commitments, procurement routes, support relationships, and the predictability of future renewals. Broadcom presents portfolio consolidation as simplification, but a simpler catalog is not automatically a lower bill. Bundling may suit a buyer that wants an integrated stack and cost more for one that previously bought only a subset of the components.
VCF 9.1 uses subscription-based licensing and includes components such as vCenter, ESX, vSAN, NSX, VCF Operations, VCF Automation, VMware Kubernetes Service, and VCF Private AI Services; some advanced services remain separately licensed, according to VMware’s VCF 9.1 FAQ. VMware’s VCF 9.0 FAQ says perpetual-license customers cannot upgrade directly to VCF 9 without first moving to subscription licensing.
Why companies are not leaving all at once
A VMware environment is more than a hypervisor
Replacing ESXi can affect vCenter, storage, networking, security policy, backup, disaster recovery, automation, monitoring, and staff procedures. Some environments depend on vSAN or external SAN/NAS, NSX, HCX, Site Recovery Manager or VMware Live Recovery, VMware-specific backup integrations, VDI, or hardware validated for VMware. Replacing the compute layer without redesigning or validating the surrounding systems can break processes that applications rely on.
Migration work also extends beyond converting virtual machines. Teams need to map application dependencies, check guest operating systems and virtual hardware, validate network and storage behavior, update recovery runbooks, and prove that monitoring and security controls still work. Workloads with strict compliance or availability requirements often need more testing and formal approval.
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Contracts, hardware, and applications move on different clocks
Large organizations rarely have a single renewal date or a uniform estate. Business units may have separate contracts, hardware refresh cycles, and application roadmaps. One cluster may be ready to move while a regulated legacy system is not. A common response is to renew a limited VMware scope, use another platform for new projects, and migrate or retire workloads as their hardware or application lifecycle creates an opening.
Leaving has a price too
A migration business case should account for discovery, target-platform subscriptions or licenses, new hardware or cloud capacity, professional services, testing, temporary parallel environments, training, application remediation, and backup and disaster-recovery redesign. Those expenses compete with renewal cost. CloudBolt’s survey reported migration complexity, technical barriers, and higher-than-expected alternative costs among reasons departures were slowed; its findings are survey evidence, not an audited measure of every customer’s experience.
Where workloads are going
There is no single destination. CloudBolt’s survey reporting indicates that public-cloud IaaS was the leading destination among organizations moving workloads, but that result should be read in the context of its North American enterprise sample—not as a global market census. Companies may combine cloud, alternative private-cloud platforms, application modernization, and retirement.
| Destination | Where it can fit | What to weigh |
|---|---|---|
| Public-cloud IaaS | Cloud-ready workloads, existing cloud commitments, rapid capacity needs, or applications that benefit from managed services. | Model compute, storage, network egress, backup, support, and utilization. A lift-and-shift can preserve inefficient design and cost more than owned infrastructure for always-on workloads. |
| Nutanix AHV / Nutanix Cloud Platform | Organizations seeking a supported private-cloud or hyperconverged platform with VM operations and hybrid-cloud options. | Compare hardware, node count, subscription tier, support, storage, networking, and migration services. Nutanix is not automatically cheaper; validate feature and integration needs. Nutanix’s migration information describes its VMware-alternative offering. |
| Microsoft Hyper-V / Azure Local | Microsoft-centric environments with Windows Server, Azure, Active Directory, licensing, and staff investments. | Assess management and architecture changes, hardware requirements, Azure services, and VMware-specific dependencies. Microsoft’s Azure Local overview is an entry point. |
| Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | Organizations already using or adopting OpenShift that want to manage VMs alongside containers. | This is a broader application-platform strategy, not a drop-in vSphere replacement. Consider skills, architecture, operational complexity, and subscription economics. See Red Hat’s OpenShift Virtualization overview. |
| HPE Morpheus VM Essentials | HPE-aligned buyers seeking a commercial virtualization option or migration bridge. | Validate maturity and feature parity against the actual estate. A reported licensing-assistance promotion was time-sensitive; eligibility and terms may vary. See HPE’s product page. |
| Proxmox VE, XCP-ng, or other alternatives | Cost-sensitive teams with Linux and virtualization expertise, particularly for less complex workloads. | Lower license expense does not remove the costs of engineering, support, integration, governance, and operations. See Proxmox VE’s product page. |
| Replatform or retire | Applications due for modernization, replacement, or shutdown. | A hypervisor move may be unnecessary if a workload can move to a managed service, be rebuilt, or be retired; account for application change and risk. |
Public cloud changes the operating model, not just the location
Cloud can make sense when an organization already has cloud skills or commitments, needs to add capacity quickly, or wants managed databases, analytics, security, and geographic reach. But a continuously running VM can become expensive once storage, backups, snapshots, monitoring, and egress are included. Use measured utilization and the full service bill, not allocated vCPU and RAM alone, to estimate cost. Data residency, compliance, and application architecture can also constrain placement.
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Managed VMware in Azure is not a VMware exit
Azure VMware Solution moves VMware infrastructure into an Azure-managed environment; it can reduce datacenter ownership without eliminating VMware software or Broadcom licensing dependence. Microsoft’s licensing transition documentation says new relevant Azure VMware Solution node purchases after October 15, 2025 require portable VCF licensing. Existing pay-as-you-go nodes that included VCF can continue under the stated transition terms through October 31, 2026. The rules also allow phased licensing in eligible scenarios, including mixed licensing within a private cloud. See Microsoft’s licensing guidance.
Customer examples illustrate possibilities, not market share
Nutanix says MSIG Asia migrated approximately 2,000 VMs to AHV after VMware licensing costs increased. That is a vendor-reported customer case, not an independent price comparison or a representative migration rate. Nutanix also reports Dartmouth College completed its technical migration in summer 2022, before Broadcom acquired VMware; that example shows migrations predated the current licensing-triggered wave. See the MSIG account and Dartmouth account.
Why staying with VMware can still be rational
A renewal is not necessarily inertia. Staying may be the lower-risk choice when critical applications rely on VMware-specific functions, the environment has demanding availability or compliance requirements, the team lacks capacity for a major platform transition, or the migration would require costly redesign. A negotiated renewal can also cost less than a fully loaded migration, especially when the organization already uses VCF capabilities or has acceptable contract terms.
Forcing a rushed exit can introduce outages, performance regressions, backup failures, security gaps, unsupported configurations, higher cloud bills, and staff strain. A deliberate period of modernization before moving a workload may be safer than treating a hypervisor conversion as a like-for-like swap.
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Build a five-year comparison before choosing a path
Compare the VMware renewal with realistic alternatives over the same period and scope. Quotes are often specific to cores, hosts, support, hardware, geography, and contract term; no single license-price comparison establishes total cost.
| Decision factor | Questions to answer |
|---|---|
| License and subscription cost | What is the complete renewal proposal, including bundled components and support? What will the target platform charge for subscriptions, support, and required services? |
| Migration and coexistence | What are the costs of discovery, services, training, testing, parallel capacity, and temporary dual licensing? How long must both environments run? |
| Infrastructure and cloud | What hardware refresh is due? For cloud, what are actual compute, storage, egress, backup, and support costs at measured utilization? |
| Feature and integration fit | Which workloads require NSX behavior, vSAN, replication, backup APIs, automation, GPU passthrough, or other specific integrations? What must be redesigned? |
| Operational capacity | Can staff support the target platform 24/7? Will multiple platforms create a new silo, and can existing runbooks and controls be adapted? |
| Business and governance | How do regulation, data residency, procurement timing, vendor concentration, exit rights, application roadmaps, and disaster-recovery geography affect the choice? |
| Risk and reversibility | Can the organization pilot and roll back? What is the cost and consequence of downtime, a failed migration, or a new vendor dependency? |
For the technical inventory, include VM count and density, operating systems, clusters, datastores, storage protocols, networks, snapshots, replication, affinity rules, GPU and passthrough use, backup products, automation, monitoring, and hardware support. Map the surrounding dependencies before selecting a destination.
How to phase a VMware reduction
- Freeze the current state. Export VM, host, cluster, datastore, network, snapshot, backup, and dependency data.
- Classify workloads. Decide which to retain, rehost, replatform, refactor, retire, or replace; do not assume every VM needs a new hypervisor.
- Choose a representative pilot. Select low-risk workloads that still exercise real backup, monitoring, network, and recovery needs.
- Validate the target. Test performance, patching, high availability, security controls, backup, and recovery—not just whether the VM boots.
- Prove rollback. Define who can reverse the change, how data stays consistent, and what conditions trigger a rollback before production moves.
- Budget for coexistence. Plan for parallel capacity, overlapping support, and temporary licensing rather than assuming the old environment can be switched off immediately.
- Migrate in dependency order. Coordinate infrastructure services, application tiers, databases, identity, and external integrations.
- Rebuild operating controls. Update access, alerting, patching, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and audit evidence for the new platform.
- Decommission only after validation. Remove old backup jobs, networks, snapshots, licenses, and support commitments after recovery obligations and retention needs are satisfied.
Common migration mistakes to catch early
- Assuming VM conversion is enough: unsupported guest operating systems, VMware Tools, virtual hardware, UEFI/Secure Boot/TPM settings, changed network interfaces or MAC addresses, storage-controller differences, or application licensing tied to hardware identifiers can complicate a move.
- Missing network and security behavior: basic connectivity may not preserve microsegmentation, distributed firewall rules, load balancing, east-west traffic controls, or network automation.
- Leaving disaster recovery until last: document and test replication, recovery-point and recovery-time objectives, cross-site failover, immutability, application-consistent recovery, DNS, and identity dependencies.
- Underestimating the people cost: an alternative with lower license fees may require more engineering, patching, integration, documentation, on-call work, or vendor coordination.
- Allowing partial migration to become sprawl: VMware, Hyper-V, cloud, and Kubernetes can coexist, but each needs an explicit role so the organization does not accumulate platforms without a support model.
VMware 7 is another specific decision point: Broadcom lists October 2, 2025 as the end of general support for vSphere ESXi/vCenter 7.0 and vSAN 7.0. End of general support does not mean installations stopped working on that date; customers still on vSphere 7 should assess upgrade, support, and alternative plans against their requirements. See Broadcom’s lifecycle notice.
What the evidence says—and does not say
The CloudBolt survey supports the conclusion that many surveyed large North American enterprises were actively reducing VMware use by January 2026. It does not establish that 86% had left, that they were moving every workload, or that the same pattern applies globally. The reported gap between active reductions and completed full migrations is consistent with a long transition shaped by technical complexity, contract timing, cost, and risk.
Vendor surveys and customer stories are useful signals, but their incentives matter: migration vendors benefit from emphasizing dissatisfaction and complexity, while platform vendors highlight their own customer successes and product advantages. Treat individual migration examples as evidence that a path is possible, not proof that it will be cheaper or better for a different estate.
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