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On June 27, 2025, the District Court of The Hague ordered Broadcom Inc. and VMware LLC to keep supporting Rijkswaterstaat’s specified VMware products while the Dutch infrastructure agency migrates away from them. The order is temporary, applies only to this agency, and requires annual payment of €1,765,191.36, subject to indexation. It is not a general right for VMware customers to receive migration support.
What the court ordered
The preliminary-relief judgment requires Broadcom Inc. and VMware LLC to ensure continued support for products covered by Rijkswaterstaat’s perpetual licenses after its existing support expired on July 22, 2025. Support runs until the agency completes its migration or for a maximum of two years from July 23, 2025—effectively no later than July 22, 2027.
The court-defined support includes maintenance updates and upgrades, bug and security fixes, and technical assistance. Rijkswaterstaat must pay €1,765,191.36 per year, with annual indexation. If the defendants fail to comply, the order provides for a penalty of €250,000 per day or part of a day, capped at €25 million. The judgment and operative order identify the products and conditions covered.
Why Rijkswaterstaat challenged the change
Rijkswaterstaat is an executive agency of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. Its responsibilities include critical infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels, locks, and related water and transport operations. The dispute concerned continuity of support for systems on which vital services depend, not simply a procurement disagreement over price.
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The agency held perpetual licenses for VMware products including vSphere, NSX, vSAN, vCenter Server, Aria Automation/Operations (formerly vRealize), and Site Recovery Manager. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023 and shifted away from the previous perpetual-license-and-support structure toward subscriptions combining usage rights and support.
These terms are distinct:
- Perpetual license: the right to continue using an acquired software version; it does not itself guarantee ongoing maintenance or assistance.
- Support agreement: services such as technical assistance, fixes, patches, and access to updates or newer versions, as specified by the contract.
- Subscription: a recurring commercial arrangement that may combine software rights and support.
The court recognized Broadcom’s general right to replace perpetual-license offers with subscription products. It focused instead on whether this customer had a reasonable transition or exit path given its operational dependence and the time available.
What the 85% figure represents
Rijkswaterstaat’s commissioned cost analysis, as recorded in the judgment, estimated annual costs for the relevant VMware products would rise from €2,146,446.03 to €3,966,220—about 85%. That is the agency’s analysis, not a court calculation of a universal VMware price increase.
The judgment also records subscription offers made on August 1, 2024, of approximately €16.5 million to €16.9 million for three years, payable annually. Those multi-year offer totals are separate from the annual cost comparison above; they should not be treated as interchangeable figures. Actual commercial changes for other organizations depend on their products, core counts, bundle requirements, discounts, geography, contract terms, and renewal timing. Network World’s coverage also describes the case-specific increase and the licensing dispute.
How the dispute unfolded
- Late 2023: Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware.
- 2024: Rijkswaterstaat sought continued support as its existing agreement approached expiration.
- August 1, 2024: The agency received indicative subscription offers totaling approximately €16.5 million to €16.9 million over three years, payable annually.
- October 31, 2024: Broadcom provided a limited temporary extension, ending July 23, 2025.
- March 5, 2025: Rijkswaterstaat said it planned to phase out VMware over about two to three years and requested support during the transition.
- March 10, 2025: Broadcom rejected a further extension.
- June 27, 2025: The Hague court issued its preliminary-relief judgment.
- July 23, 2025: The ordered exit-support period began.
- July 22, 2027: The maximum end date if the agency has not completed migration earlier.
Why the court intervened
The court found that Broadcom’s conduct breached the duty of care owed to Rijkswaterstaat in the circumstances of this case. The agency had invested in perpetual licenses, its systems supported vital infrastructure, and it had relied on VMware’s published lifecycle policy. The court concluded that it learned the relevant commercial consequences too late to complete a two- to three-year migration before support expired, and that adequate exit support was not offered.
The combination left Rijkswaterstaat commercially constrained as the deadline approached. The ruling does not say vendors can never change product portfolios or commercial terms; it addresses the transition imposed on this customer in light of its dependency, timing, and lack of a workable exit-support arrangement. SDxCentral’s report covers the support cutoff and penalty in the case.
What the ruling does not mean
- It does not require Broadcom to keep selling perpetual licenses or preserve the former commercial model indefinitely.
- It does not provide free support: Rijkswaterstaat must pay the ordered annual amount.
- It does not grant VMware source-code access. Source code was requested as an alternative, but continued support was the remedy granted.
- It does not establish an automatic two-year exit-support right for all VMware customers.
- It does not make VMware Netherlands responsible for the ordered support. The court dismissed the claim against that entity, finding it did not itself license or support customer products.
- It is a preliminary-relief judgment, not a final determination of every contractual or competition-law issue.
Other customers may regard the decision as persuasive, but their position depends on their own contracts and circumstances. Relevant factors include perpetual-license rights, renewal and support language, lifecycle commitments, operational criticality, notice, migration feasibility, vendor transition offers, steps taken to reduce dependency, governing law, and the identity of the contracting and support entities. Legal observers have described the decision as potentially significant for other European customers, but that commentary is not a holding that those customers qualify for the same remedy. Network World discusses that broader reaction.
What affected organizations should do
Establish the contractual position
Collect the original perpetual-license agreements, product schedules, order forms, support renewals, end-of-support notices, lifecycle-policy records, reseller correspondence, vendor quotes, and notes documenting migration discussions. Keep dated records: the applicable entity, product, version, and support commitment can matter as much as the headline price.
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Map operational dependency
Inventory production workloads and dependencies across vCenter, NSX, vSAN, Site Recovery Manager, automation, backup, monitoring, identity, certificates, and disaster recovery. Record hardware and storage constraints, regulatory or availability requirements, recovery time and recovery point objectives, and which applications cannot tolerate a rushed cutover.
Ask for written, specific transition terms
Request a written offer that defines duration, covered versions, updates and security fixes, technical assistance and severity-one response, access to downloads and portals, compatibility information, escalation routes, pricing and indexation, termination rights, and cooperation with the incoming platform. Informal assurances do not define a reliable support runway.
Build a migration runway and preserve options
Plan discovery, representative pilots, network and storage redesign, identity and security integration, backup and disaster-recovery validation, performance and failover testing, application-owner signoff, parallel operation, staged cutovers, and decommissioning. Obtain comparable proposals from at least two alternatives, and compare total transition cost—not just license or subscription charges—including hardware, engineering, consulting, training, application remediation, backup changes, security tooling, dual running, downtime exposure, and data-transfer costs.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Migration is more than moving virtual machines
A conversion tool or export/import process may move a VM without preserving production behavior. Test representative workloads and explicitly validate:
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- VM hardware versions, guest operating-system support, and application certification.
- Virtual networking, overlays, firewall rules, NSX microsegmentation, and east-west traffic.
- Storage formats, datastores, snapshots, replication, and backup integration.
- High availability, live migration, disaster-recovery orchestration, and actual RPO/RTO results.
- CPU scheduling, NUMA behavior, latency-sensitive workloads, and hardware-bound systems.
- Windows Server and application licensing on the target platform.
- Monitoring, automation, infrastructure-as-code, identity, certificates, and security-policy translation.
- Appliances whose vendors certify only VMware, plus support responsibility during parallel operation.
- Rollback procedures, data consistency, and evidence retention after cutover.
How to assess replacement platforms
No alternative is a drop-in answer for every VMware estate. Match the target to workload compatibility, networking, storage, availability, disaster recovery, automation, security, administrator skills, commercial model, and the risk of replacing one concentrated dependency with another.
| Option | Potential fit | Trade-off to test |
|---|---|---|
| Nutanix AHV | Organizations seeking an integrated hyperconverged platform with enterprise support. | May require platform redesign, new infrastructure, retraining, and a substantial migration rather than a simple substitution. |
| Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Local | Organizations already invested in Windows Server, Active Directory, System Center, or Azure operations. | Model Windows Server rights, Azure Local charges, management, hardware, services, and support together; savings are not automatic. |
| Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | Organizations aiming to run VMs alongside containers or modernize applications over time. | A broader Kubernetes/OpenShift operating model may be unnecessary complexity for teams seeking only a conventional hypervisor. |
| Proxmox VE | Smaller deployments, labs, service providers, and technically capable teams seeking an open-source stack. | Check enterprise support expectations, certified integrations, procurement requirements, and the available vendor ecosystem. |
| Public cloud or managed private cloud | Workloads that benefit from managed infrastructure or cloud services and can justify architectural change. | Cloud does not eliminate lock-in; include compute, storage, networking, backup, egress, security, managed services, and application refactoring. |
Vendor pricing depends on the customer and configuration. Obtain current quotes and compare them with the cost of transitional VMware support, hardware, services, training, dual operation, and ongoing renewals rather than relying on a license-only comparison.
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