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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsYes, some European VMware customers and cloud providers have reported increases of up to 1,500% since Broadcom acquired VMware. That is an upper-end reported case, not a standard increase applied to every customer. A 1,500% increase means a bill is about 16 times the previous price: a €100 cost becomes €1,600.
The largest shocks usually result from several changes arriving together: perpetual licences moving to subscriptions, per-core billing, larger bundles, minimum terms and different reseller economics. The only reliable way to assess exposure is to compare equivalent functionality and calculate three-year total cost, including migration.
Where the 1,500% figure comes from
The European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO), a project associated with the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), reported that some VMware customers and service providers experienced exponential increases after Broadcom’s acquisition. Its reporting describes the end of perpetual-license sales, the removal of monthly pay-as-you-go arrangements, three-year annual subscriptions and bundles that may include products a customer did not previously buy. ECCO’s report appendix is the underlying source for those claims.
Secondary coverage described the upper-end result as “up to 1,500%”; one reported AT&T example cited a projected 1,050% increase before settlement discussions. These are reported customer cases, not an audited market-wide average. The available material does not establish that a particular percentage applies across all countries, editions, contract sizes or customer types.
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What changed after Broadcom bought VMware
Broadcom completed the acquisition in November 2023. It then reorganised VMware’s commercial model around subscriptions and a smaller portfolio. Broadcom’s own explanation is set out in its VMware business-transformation announcement.
- New perpetual licences stopped being sold, and Broadcom ended Support and Subscription renewals for perpetual offerings.
- The main offers became VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), with selected products and add-ons available around them.
- Licensing moved toward physical-core counts rather than historical CPU-based entitlements.
- Products such as management, operations, storage, networking, security and disaster recovery can be presented in larger bundles.
- ECCO reports three-year subscriptions with predetermined annual prices and the end of monthly usage-based purchasing in some arrangements.
Existing perpetual licences were not automatically invalidated. Broadcom says customers can continue using them, while support, updates, patches and access to new versions are governed separately. That distinction matters: continued use of an old entitlement is not the same as retaining a supported, renewable product.
How a 1,500% increase can occur
Subscription replacing support-only renewal
A customer may previously have owned perpetual software and paid an annual support fee. A new quote may require a subscription that includes both entitlement and support. Comparing the old support invoice with the new subscription total can therefore produce a much larger percentage than comparing equivalent software alone.
Per-core licensing
Under a per-core model, all in-scope physical cores can affect the bill. A few high-core servers, standby hosts and disaster-recovery clusters may create a much larger licensed estate than a historical per-CPU arrangement. Broadcom’s licensing changes and their practical implications are discussed in this CCS Insight analysis.
Bundles replacing individually selected products
A small vSphere deployment can be quoted a bundle containing management, automation, storage or security functions. Those capabilities may be useful, but a customer using only a fraction of them can still face a higher total bill.
Minimum terms and payment timing
A three-year commitment, annual prepayment or predetermined pricing can increase cash-flow pressure even when the annualised price is lower than the headline comparison suggests.
Capacity that was previously treated as spare
Licensing may cover every physical core in production, test, development, failover and lightly used hosts. Cloud-service providers can also be affected when they must license capacity that is not fully utilised or cannot immediately be passed through to customers.
Reseller and partner economics
Changes to partner and cloud-service-provider programmes can alter discounts, support routes and service-provider margins. A customer’s final quote therefore reflects both VMware’s model and the commercial terms offered by its reseller or provider.
Why the number does not apply to every customer
The result depends on the baseline used for the comparison. A renewal quote is affected by:
- Country, currency, taxes and regional price book.
- Product edition and whether the old entitlement was perpetual, subscription or hosted.
- Physical-core count, disaster-recovery hosts and standby capacity.
- Whether the quote includes additional products or services.
- One-year versus three-year terms, annual versus upfront payment and negotiated discounts.
- Whether the comparison uses list price, discounted price, support-only cost or total contract value.
| Comparison point | Earlier arrangement | Possible new arrangement |
|---|---|---|
| Entitlement | Perpetual licence | Subscription |
| Metric | Often CPU-based or legacy entitlement | Physical-core based |
| Products | Selected individually | Fewer, larger bundles |
| Support | Annual support renewal | Included within subscription or quoted separately |
| Term | Potentially annual renewal | Often a multi-year commitment |
| Capacity | Existing licensed estate | Potentially all cores across production and DR hosts |
Broadcom’s response
Broadcom says VMware’s former portfolio was too complex and that subscription licensing is an industry-standard model. It presents VCF as a full-stack private-cloud platform and VVF as a smaller option. Broadcom also says VCF’s list price was reduced by half compared with the prior VCF subscription list price, and that licences can be portable between on-premises environments and supported cloud endpoints. Those are statements about Broadcom’s product and list-price structure, not proof that every customer’s renewal invoice fell. A customer moving from a small, discounted vSphere estate into a larger bundle can still pay more.
Who is most exposed
European cloud-service providers
Providers may have many customers on older monthly or usage-based arrangements, thin margins and contracts that prevent immediate pass-through of higher costs. ECCO frames this as a cloud-competition issue as well as a procurement issue. The ECCO report provides that broader context.
Small and midsize businesses
Smaller estates can be hit by bundle minimums, limited negotiating leverage and a lack of internal specialists. A three-year prepayment can be particularly difficult for a small organisation that needs only basic virtualisation.
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Large buyers may face bigger absolute increases but can often negotiate volume discounts, test alternatives and use strategic-account leverage.
Public-sector and regulated organisations
Data sovereignty, procurement cycles, long application lifetimes, change control, disaster recovery and certification requirements can make rapid migration impractical even when the renewal is expensive.
How to calculate your own exposure
1. Inventory the estate
- List vCenter instances, hosts, clusters and physical sockets.
- Record physical cores per socket, licensed cores and VM density.
- Include vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager, Aria/operations, Horizon and cloud-hosted VMware where applicable.
- Identify perpetual licences, support-renewal dates, DR and standby hosts, and reseller terms.
2. Separate the cost categories
Show historical perpetual-licence purchases, annual support, the proposed subscription, newly included or required add-ons, implementation, financing, taxes, currency effects and reseller margin as separate lines.
3. Verify the licensing metric
Start with:
Required licensed cores = sum of physical cores on all in-scope hosts
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Then confirm minimum-core rules, treatment of DR and disconnected hosts, cloud entitlements, and whether the quote uses physical cores, virtual cores or another metric. Do not assume a universal minimum without checking the exact product and contract.
4. Compare three scenarios
- Like-for-like VMware renewal.
- The quoted VMware bundle with all included features.
- A migration to an alternative platform.
For each scenario calculate:
Three-year TCO = licences or subscriptions + support + hardware changes + migration labour + training + backup and DR replacement + monitoring and management replacement + downtime risk + consulting or managed-service fees
5. Model terms and timing
Request no-discount and negotiated cases, one-year and three-year terms, annual and upfront payment, reduced-core and full-estate assumptions, and migration over 12, 24 and 36 months. This reveals whether the problem is price, commitment, capacity or a combination.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Stay, negotiate or migrate?
Staying can be rational when
- The estate is stable and highly optimised.
- Applications depend on VMware-specific APIs or integrations.
- Migration staff, testing time or regulatory approvals are unavailable.
- A negotiated renewal is materially cheaper than a rushed move.
- A short renewal creates time for a tested transition.
Migration can be rational when
- The renewal destroys operating margins or includes unused bundle components.
- The estate is small enough to move with limited disruption.
- The organisation already standardises on another platform.
- Long-term price predictability and reduced vendor concentration matter more than short-term convenience.
A practical approach is dual-track: negotiate and stabilise the next VMware term, run a controlled proof of concept on an alternative, migrate low-risk workloads first, and retain VMware temporarily for high-risk applications. Recalculate the economics using measured migration effort rather than a vendor’s headline saving.
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Nutanix AHV
Nutanix suits organisations seeking an integrated hyperconverged platform, but it is a commercial platform requiring migration planning, compatible hardware economics and replacement of VMware-specific tooling. Its market research is vendor-sponsored, so treat it as directional. See AHV and Nutanix sales.
Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI
These can fit Microsoft-centred organisations with Windows Server, Active Directory and Azure expertise. Model Windows Server, Azure services, hardware, management and support carefully; Linux-heavy or VMware-integrated estates may require substantial redesign. Microsoft documentation is available for Hyper-V and Azure Local.
Proxmox VE
Proxmox can suit cost-sensitive businesses, laboratories, education and technically capable teams. Optional subscriptions do not remove the need to budget for backup, monitoring, enterprise support, migration and staff skills. It is not a zero-migration replacement. See Proxmox VE and its subscription pricing.
OpenStack
OpenStack is aimed at cloud providers and engineering organisations with strong Linux, networking and automation capability. For a small business seeking a simple hypervisor, its operational complexity is usually disproportionate.
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Hosted VMware, including Azure VMware Solution
Hosted VMware can defer application refactoring and support a datacentre exit, but it does not necessarily remove VMware licensing, cloud infrastructure, storage or egress costs. Microsoft’s documentation says that for relevant new Azure VMware Solution node purchases from 1 November 2025, customers must provide a Broadcom-purchased VCF subscription rather than receiving a VCF licence bundled with the nodes. Check the current rules at Microsoft Learn.
Questions to put to the reseller
- Which hosts, cores, DR systems and cloud environments are included?
- What is the old-versus-new baseline: list price, discounted price, support only or total contract value?
- Which bundle components are mandatory, and can unused products be removed?
- What are the minimum term, payment schedule, renewal cap and exit provisions?
- How are perpetual entitlements, patches and support handled during a transition?
- Which discounts are temporary, and what is the renewal price after the initial term?
The Bottom Line
The 1,500% figure is credible as a reported upper bound for some European customers, not a universal VMware tariff. Treat it as a prompt to normalise the quote: count every licensed core, separate support from software, identify bundle value and cash-flow commitments, and compare a three-year VMware cost with a fully loaded migration plan. Many organisations should negotiate time while testing alternatives rather than making an immediate, uncosted exit.
Quick Recap
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