Prioritizing The Customer In The Virtualization Arena
Virtualization has long been the backbone of modern IT infrastructure, setting the stage for efficient resource management and innovation. VMware created and defined the x86 virtualization market starting in 1999. Since then, it's become a billion-dollar market, and hundreds of thousands of enterprises have come to rely on VMware's foundational technology. Along the way, the company has garnered a dedicated community and amassed considerable influence within the data center industry.
However, with Broadcom's acquisition of VMware in late 2023, the dynamics of the virtualization industry shifted dramatically. Sweeping changes in licensing and strategy have left many businesses searching for alternatives.
The Shift To Subscriptions And Its Challenges For VMware Customers
Broadcom announced that it would discontinue the sale of perpetual VMware licenses and the renewal of support and subscription (SnS) contracts. Perpetual licenses allow businesses to use the software indefinitely, while SnS licenses provide ongoing support and maintenance for those products. It also introduced subscription-based licensing for the product suite.
The announcement noted that customers could continue to use their existing perpetual licenses and retain their older vSphere versions, but they were left without critical support once their SnS contracts expired.
Fast-forward to 2025, and some customers have reported that VMware is looking to shut down perpetual licenses completely. For organizations that have relied on these solutions for years, this represents an acute challenge to mitigate a shifting licensing landscape, as it introduces new business costs and raises the question of whether other alternatives may be better business opportunities.
What Enterprises Need In A Post-VMware World
As I talk to companies seeking alternative solutions, a few key attributes have become common table stakes, starting with foundational virtualization capabilities on par with their current environment. They want to ensure their teams have a familiar private cloud experience so that their skilled VMware administrators have minimal friction adopting the new platform. Enterprise virtualization features that businesses rely on today must be rock-solid, including VM high availability, dynamic resource rebalancing, VM live migration, distributed virtual switches and software-defined networking.
Core virtualization alone, however, will not inspire a migration, as many organizations are using this opportunity to modernize their cloud stack while selecting a new provider solution. The shift toward open standards is reshaping the virtualization landscape, creating new opportunities and challenges for the industry.
Solutions that embrace open principles are becoming more attractive to businesses seeking flexibility and control. Modern capabilities, including workload automation and cloud-native workload support such as containerization, are required to ensure the selected platform will deliver what is demanded today as well as into the future.
Having the right feature base across traditional virtualization and cloud native capabilities goes a long way in earning customer trust, but there are still IT concerns about the actual cost of the migration. Many customers want to know that they can still use their selection of infrastructure to avoid costly upgrades to their data centers. They are also concerned with the human cost of migration and want to know that tools to deliver an efficient and trusted migration path are available as part of any platform selection, placing migration targets in weeks and months and not years of time investment.
We are at a pivotal moment in the virtualization landscape. Customers are driving demand for greater flexibility, accelerated innovation and vendor relationships built on transparency and trust. Virtualization Review cited a Gartner Inc. report that predicted that 'by 2026, 50% of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI) products to replace their VMware-based deployments.'
The time is now to begin discussing alternative paths forward. The question is, will organizations stay loyal to familiar solutions, or will they explore new approaches tailored to evolving needs? The decisions made today will shape virtualization's future, unlocking new opportunities for growth, agility and collaboration.
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