Ninety percent of VMware customers are exploring alternative virtualization platforms, according to a survey by Rimini Street, a third-party software support provider. The exodus follows Broadcom's aggressive licensing restructuring since its 2023 acquisition of VMware.
Survey respondents reported cost increases ranging from 100 to 300 percent, with some facing spikes as high as 1,000 percent. Fifty-four percent cited Broadcom's decision to terminate support for perpetual licenses as a primary reason for seeking alternatives. The survey, conducted by independent research firm Unisphere Research, covered 300 organizations globally.
Cost reduction now dominates virtualization planning: 73 percent of respondents listed financial efficiency as a top priority in their infrastructure roadmap. That shift reveals Broadcom's pricing strategy has altered customer purchasing behavior.
The migration challenge, however, is steep. Forty percent of organizations cited operational complexity as a barrier to switching, while 38 percent flagged multi-vendor management overhead. Team skill gaps and security concerns each affected 37 percent of respondents—costs that must be weighed against licensing savings.
Sixty percent of respondents are pursuing multi-hypervisor strategies to reduce single-vendor dependency. Forty-seven percent favor hybrid environments combining traditional hypervisors with containers, a shift that hedges technical and financial risk.
VMware's own hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation, will absorb only a fraction of workloads: 48 percent of customers have no plans to migrate to it. The broader pattern suggests enterprises are fragmenting their infrastructure, moving away from VMware standardization toward diversified, cost-optimized stacks.
