Ninety percent of organizations using VMware are exploring alternative virtualization strategies, primarily driven by higher licensing costs following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. Some customers report price increases as high as 1,000 percent, while others face hikes between 100 and 300 percent.
Broadcom's elimination of perpetual license support is a key factor, cited by 54 percent of survey participants in Rimini Street's "2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What's Next for VMware Users." Seventy-three percent of organizations now prioritize cost savings in their virtualization roadmap decisions.
Rimini Street, which sells third-party support for enterprise software including VMware, Oracle and SAP, published the survey today. While the company has a financial incentive to highlight customer pain, the study was conducted by Unisphere Research and aligns with other recent industry reports.
The survey of 300 organizations worldwide reveals the economics now favor diversification. Forty percent cited operational complexity as a barrier to switching, with 38 percent pointing to multi-vendor management challenges and 37 percent naming both expanded attack surface and team skill gaps.
Gartner's Tony Harvey previously called Broadcom's takeover a "wake-up call" for customers overly dependent on a single vendor. The survey data supports that assessment: 60 percent of organizations are now considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, while 47 percent favor a hybrid IT environment combining hypervisors and containers.
The shift has immediate business model implications. Forty-eight percent of respondents said they do not plan to move assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation—a direct rejection of Broadcom's ecosystem consolidation strategy. The pattern suggests enterprises are treating VMware not as a long-term platform anchor but as a legacy workload manager to be displaced over time.
