Ninety percent of organizations using VMware are exploring alternative virtualization solutions, citing higher licensing costs, according to a survey of 300 VMware-using organizations published by Rimini Street today.
Fifty-four percent of survey participants specifically cited Broadcom's decision to end support for perpetual license holders. Since Broadcom acquired VMware, some customers have reported cost increases of up to 1,000 percent, with others experiencing hikes ranging from 100 to 300 percent.
Cost savings emerged as the top priority for 73 percent of participants in their virtualization roadmap decisions.
Organizations exploring new virtualization options face real friction. Forty percent of respondents cited operational complexity as a key challenge. Multi-vendor management challenges were named by 38 percent, while securing increased attack surface and team skills requirements each accounted for 37 percent of responses.
Tony Harvey, a Gartner senior director analyst, said clients view the Broadcom acquisition as "a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor and are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments."
In response to these pressures, 60 percent of surveyed organizations are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy. Additionally, 47 percent of respondents favor a hybrid IT virtualization environment, combining hypervisors and containers for optimal workload placement. Forty-eight percent of surveyed organizations are not planning to migrate any assets to VMware's Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform.
