VMware to cloud migration: your options after the Broadcom acquisition

For fifteen years, VMware was the default choice for virtualising a data centre. Few IT leaders questioned the hypervisor: vSphere worked, teams knew it, and licences were bought once and for all. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, completed in November 2023, changed that equation. Licensing, portfolio, partners, cloud offerings: almost everything has moved in less than three years.

As a result, the question comes up in most of the architecture reviews we take part in: should you stay on VMware, switch hypervisor, or use the deadline as an opportunity to move to the cloud? This article sets out what has actually changed, compares the options available at the end of October 2026 and suggests a method for deciding. For the broader framework of a migration, see our migration to AWS and Azure services.

What has changed since Broadcom acquired VMware

The end of perpetual licences and the move to subscriptions

On 11 December 2023, a few weeks after the acquisition closed, VMware by Broadcom announced the end of perpetual licence sales. Offerings are now sold only as subscriptions (or term licences), and support renewals (SnS) for perpetual licences were stopped. Customers who own perpetual licences can keep using their versions, but without support or updates once their support contract expires. Broadcom offered a trade-in programme towards subscriptions.

In practice, a company that bought its vSphere licences five years ago and only paid for support now faces a recurring cost, renegotiated at every renewal.

A portfolio consolidated around VCF and VVF

The same move grouped the portfolio around two main offerings:

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the full private cloud stack (compute, storage, networking, management), aimed at large enterprises;
• VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), a lighter offering for mid-sized organisations.

Add-ons sit on top of these offerings. For many customers, the effect is twofold: products once bought separately are now part of a bundle, and you sometimes pay for components you do not use.

Partner programmes: a smaller network

Broadcom has also overhauled its partner network. In July 2025, VMware cloud providers (the VCSP programme) not selected for the new invitation-only programme received a non-renewal notice, with a transition period until 31 October 2025. The white label model, which let smaller hosting providers resell VMware through a primary partner, ended on the same date. In Europe, Broadcom gave notice on 31 October 2025 that these models were ending for the European Economic Area, followed by non-renewal notices for many contracts in January 2026.

For an end customer, this means the hosting or managed service provider that ran your VMware platform may no longer be authorised to resell it to you. Check this before any renegotiation.

On the hyperscalers: bring your own licence

The most recent change concerns VMware offerings hosted on the public cloud. Broadcom moved to an exclusively bring-your-own model for VCF on hyperscalers from 1 November 2025:

• Azure VMware Solution: since 1 November 2025, Microsoft no longer includes a VCF licence with new nodes. Pay-as-you-go deployments that still had an included licence must move to portable VCF by 31 October 2026, and licence-included reserved instances must be exchanged by 30 August 2027.
• Google Cloud VMware Engine: Google has not sold nodes with an included VCF licence since 15 October 2025; new commitments require a VCF subscription bought directly from Broadcom.

In other words, keeping VMware in the cloud no longer spares you a negotiation with Broadcom: you will have two contracts, one with the cloud provider for the infrastructure and one with Broadcom for the licence.

What about prices?

It is the question everyone asks, and the honest answer is: it depends on your contract. Broadcom does not publish a public price list, and the impact varies with the number of physical cores, the products used and your previous terms. Reports of significant increases circulate in the trade press, but no average figure is reliable. The only number that counts is your renewal quote, compared with the full cost of the alternatives.

The options available

Option 1: stay on VMware and renegotiate

Staying is a legitimate option, especially if your estate is deeply integrated with the VMware ecosystem (NSX, vSAN, operations tooling), if your teams are experts, or if the deadline is too close to migrate calmly. In that case, a few reflexes:

• start from an accurate count of the physical cores you actually need, since subscriptions are priced per core;
• consolidate under-used hosts before renegotiating;
• check that your partner is still authorised to sell VMware;
• negotiate a term that leaves time to prepare an exit if you are considering one.

Staying does not stop you preparing what comes next. Many organisations renew for a limited term and use that time to migrate part of their applications.

Option 2: switch hypervisor on premises

If you want to keep your servers but leave VMware, several hypervisors are serious alternatives:

• Proxmox VE: an open source platform based on KVM, with optional commercial support. It includes an import wizard that connects directly to an ESXi host (tested with versions 6.5 to 8.0) to bring VMs across. The documentation is clear about its limits: no direct import from vSAN or from disks encrypted by storage policy, and much slower performance through vCenter than directly through the ESXi host.
• Microsoft Hyper-V: a natural fit in a heavily Microsoft environment. Windows Admin Center offers a VM Conversion extension, still in preview, which replicates VMs from vCenter to Hyper-V with reduced downtime.
• Nutanix AHV: the hypervisor of the Nutanix hyperconverged platform, with the Nutanix Move tool to migrate VMs from ESXi, including to Nutanix deployments on the public cloud.
• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: runs VMs alongside containers on OpenShift (Kubernetes). The Migration Toolkit for Virtualization supports vSphere as a source, with cold or warm migration. It makes sense if you already have a Kubernetes strategy; see our Kubernetes page.

Switching hypervisor is not just a matter of a conversion tool. Backup, monitoring, operating procedures and high availability all need reviewing, and teams need training. And the hardware keeps ageing: this option postpones the hosting question rather than solving it.

Option 3: keep VMware, but in the cloud

This is the Relocate strategy from the 7 Rs: moving VMs to the cloud version of the same platform without converting them, often with VMware HCX. It lets you vacate a data centre quickly without touching the applications.

• Azure VMware Solution (AVS): vSphere private clouds on dedicated bare-metal servers in Azure, starting at three hosts per cluster. Microsoft manages the infrastructure and the lifecycle of the VMware stack (ESXi, vCenter, NSX, vSAN). Since 1 November 2025, the VCF licence must be bought from Broadcom.
• Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE): Google’s equivalent service, which has also moved to customer-provided VCF licences.
• VMware Cloud on AWS: the service has not been resold by AWS or its partners since 30 April 2024. AWS states that it remains available through Broadcom, so renewals go directly through Broadcom or a Broadcom reseller.
• Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS): generally available since 5 August 2025, it runs VCF directly in your VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances. You must bring your own VCF licence, and the stack is self-managed: you (or a partner) install, upgrade and patch VCF, while AWS handles the hosts, networking and firmware. At the end of October 2026, the AWS FAQ lists Europe (Paris) among the available Regions, and support for VCF 9.0 and 9.1 was announced in July 2026.

The appeal is speed and operational continuity. The limitation is obvious: you remain dependent on VMware and its licensing policy, with a commitment to dedicated hardware on top. It is often a stage, not a destination.

Option 4: migrate to native VMs on AWS or Azure

This is the Rehost strategy (and sometimes Replatform): converting VMware VMs into EC2 instances or Azure virtual machines. You leave the VMware ecosystem entirely and pay for infrastructure as you use it.

• On AWS, the server migration service is now called AWS Transform MGN (formerly AWS Application Migration Service). It continuously replicates disks at block level and converts servers to launch on AWS, with short cutover windows. Beware of older guides: agentless replication from vCenter is no longer available for new deployments, and AWS recommends installing the agent on each server. Upstream, AWS Transform for VMware, generally available since May 2025, automates discovery, dependency mapping, wave planning and the translation of VMware network configuration into VPCs.
• On Azure, Azure Migrate deploys an appliance in your VMware environment to discover VMs, assess them and replicate them agentlessly to Azure VMs. You can run a test migration on an isolated network before the final cutover, and the wizard lets you apply Azure Hybrid Benefit to your eligible Windows Server and SQL Server licences.

This option needs more preparation than Relocate: VM right-sizing, IP addressing, integration with the cloud foundation. But it opens up the most possibilities afterwards (managed services, elasticity, FinOps). See our AWS consulting and Azure consulting pages.

Comparing the options

Option	Typical timeline	VMware dependency	Changes for operations	Watch point
Stay and renegotiate	Short	Total	None	Recurring cost, authorised partner
Switch hypervisor	Medium	None	Significant (tools, skills)	Hardware still to be renewed
VMware in the cloud (AVS, GCVE, EVS)	Short	Total	Low	Two contracts, dedicated hosts
Native VMs (EC2, Azure VMs)	Medium	None	Significant (cloud foundation)	Microsoft licensing, networking, right-sizing

Linking your choice to the 7 Rs

The trap is choosing one option for the whole estate. A VMware platform hosts very different applications: a critical ERP, file servers, in-house business applications, forgotten servers nobody uses any more. Each one deserves its own decision.

That is exactly what the 7 Rs method is for, as explained in our article Cloud migration strategy: the 7 Rs explained. Applied to a VMware estate, it often produces a split like this:

• Retire: VMs that have been powered off or unused for months. Removing them immediately reduces the number of cores to license.
• Retain: applications tied to specific hardware or with a planned end of life, which stay on premises as long as needed.
• Relocate: critical, poorly documented applications, moved as they are to AVS or EVS to meet a deadline.
• Rehost: most standard Windows and Linux servers, converted into native VMs.
• Replatform: databases that benefit from moving to a managed service (Amazon RDS, Azure SQL).
• Repurchase: tools that can be replaced by SaaS (email, CRM, collaboration tools).

A common strategy works in two stages: Relocate to get out of the data centre or the VMware deadline quickly, then gradually Rehost or Replatform from the hosted VMware platform to native services. Provided you set the length of the intermediate stage from the start; otherwise it becomes permanent.

Method: preparing a VMware migration

Inventory: RVTools, Azure Migrate, AWS Transform

Everything starts with a reliable inventory: VMs, hosts, clusters, physical cores, datastores, snapshots, networks, operating systems, actual CPU and memory usage.

RVTools is the most widely used tool to export this inventory from vCenter as an Excel file. Azure Migrate can import an RVTools export (a preview feature, up to 20,000 servers per file) without deploying an appliance, and AWS Transform for VMware can also use RVTools. A security note: Microsoft reports that the RVTools installer was hit by a supply chain attack on 12 May 2025. Download it only from the official website and check the file hash.

For finer performance data, the Azure Migrate appliance collects usage over time and produces sizing recommendations. These measurements matter: a VM sized “just in case” on premises becomes expensive if it is reproduced as is in the cloud.

Dependencies and migration waves

A VM inventory does not tell you which applications talk to each other. You need to map the flows (dependency discovery tools, firewall analysis, interviews with application teams) to build groups that migrate together. Then you organise the waves: a pilot wave, low-criticality but representative, to bed in the tools and procedures, followed by waves of increasing size.

Windows Server and SQL Server licensing

This is the most frequently underestimated item when leaving VMware. The rules differ by target:

• On Azure, Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you use Windows Server and SQL Server licences covered by active Software Assurance or an eligible subscription. Microsoft grants 180 days during which licences can be used both on premises and in Azure while you migrate.
• On AWS, licence-included instances are the simplest option. Windows Server BYOL is only possible on Dedicated Hosts, for licences bought before 1 October 2019. SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance are eligible for License Mobility.
• On AVS or EVS, you remain on dedicated hosts: Microsoft licensing rules apply differently and need checking with your reseller.

Have these points validated by your licensing contact before comparing scenarios: they can reverse a decision.

Networking and addressing

Do you need to keep IP addresses? Temporarily stretch networks between your site and the cloud (HCX allows this for the hosted VMware options)? Which dedicated connectivity (Direct Connect, ExpressRoute) or VPN? How will NSX rules be translated into security groups? These questions drive the schedule and must be settled in the design of the cloud foundation, before the first wave. Our recommendations are part of our approach to cloud security and governance.

Backups, disaster recovery and rollback plan

Before each cutover, check three things:

• Backup on the target is in place and tested (an actual restore, not just a green job). Your current solution may not be compatible with the new hypervisor or the cloud.
• The disaster recovery plan is redefined: cross-region replication, standby sites, recovery objectives (RTO, RPO).
• The rollback plan is written down: how long the source VM remains available, who decides to roll back, and how quickly. Only delete source VMs after a stabilisation period signed off by the business.

Costs: what to include

Comparing “the Broadcom quote” with “the cloud bill” is not enough. A serious comparison includes:

• Running two environments in parallel: throughout the migration, you pay for VMware and the target. How long this lasts depends directly on the pace of the waves, which is why they should be planned around the end date of your VMware contract.
• Licensing: any VCF subscription (including in the cloud), Microsoft licences, backup and monitoring tools.
• Target infrastructure: dedicated hosts for AVS, GCVE or EVS, instances and storage for native VMs, network connectivity.
• Migration work: preparation, testing, cutovers, fixes, support.
• Upskilling operations teams on the new platform.
• Expected gains: hardware not renewed, data centre space freed, VMs removed or right-sized.

For native VMs, the bill is then managed with the FinOps practices described in our article FinOps: definition and levers on AWS. Cloud providers also offer migration funding programmes whose terms change over time: check them when your project starts.

Checklist before deciding

• End date of your VMware contract and status of your partner
• Complete inventory: VMs, physical cores, actual usage, unused VMs
• Map of application dependencies
• A 7 Rs decision per application, not for the whole estate
• Windows Server and SQL Server licensing analysis for each target
• Target network architecture and cloud foundation described as code
• Backup, disaster recovery and rollback plan for each wave
• Cost comparison over three to five years, parallel running included

Next step

If your VMware renewal is approaching, or you simply want to know which options hold up for your estate, we can carry out the inventory, compare the scenarios and build a realistic migration plan. We work from Villeneuve-d’Ascq, with on-site workshops in the Lille metropolitan area (northern France) or remotely. Find out more about our migration to AWS and Azure services.

[ YOUR QUESTIONS ]

Frequently asked questions

Why are companies leaving VMware?

Since the Broadcom acquisition, VMware is sold on subscription only, the portfolio has been grouped into bundles and many partners have lost access to VMware programmes. Many organisations are seeing their renewal terms change and are using the opportunity to reassess their virtualisation platform.

Has Broadcom increased VMware prices?

Broadcom does not publish a public price list, and the impact varies widely depending on core counts, the products actually used and the previous contract. Several customers have publicly reported significant increases, but there is no reliable average figure. The only number that matters is the renewal quote for your own estate.

What is the best VMware alternative?

On premises, the most common alternatives are Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. In the cloud, you can keep VMware (Azure VMware Solution, Google Cloud VMware Engine, Amazon EVS) or migrate to native virtual machines on AWS or Azure. The choice depends on your skills, your applications and your timeline.

How do I migrate from VMware to Azure?

There are two main routes: Azure VMware Solution, which keeps vSphere and lets you move VMs without converting them, or Azure Migrate, which discovers VMware VMs, assesses their sizing and replicates them agentlessly to native Azure virtual machines, with a test migration before cutover.

Can I still use VMware Cloud on AWS?

Since 30 April 2024, AWS and its partners no longer resell VMware Cloud on AWS. AWS states that the service remains available through Broadcom. Separately, since August 2025 AWS has offered Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS), which runs VCF in your own VPC with a VCF licence you bring.

How long does a VMware migration take?

It depends on the number of VMs, their dependencies and the strategy chosen. Rehosting to native VMs or relocating to hosted VMware takes weeks for a small, well-documented estate and months for several hundred VMs. The schedule is built from the inventory and the end date of your VMware contract.

Sources

• Broadcom: Broadcom Completes Acquisition of VMware (press release, November 2023)
• The Register: VMware by Broadcom ends perpetual licences (12 December 2023)
• The Register: VMware reboots its partner program again (16 July 2025)
• The Register: Broadcom and VMware cloud partners in Europe (31 January 2026)
• Microsoft Learn: Portable VCF licensing reference for Azure VMware Solution
• Microsoft Learn: Introduction to Azure VMware Solution
• Google Cloud Blog: Broadcom’s VMware license changes as they relate to Google Cloud VMware Engine (9 October 2025)
• AWS: VMware Cloud on AWS FAQ (AWS resale ended 30 April 2024)
• AWS: General availability of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (5 August 2025)
• AWS: Amazon EVS FAQ
• AWS: AWS Transform for VMware is now generally available (15 May 2025)
• AWS: AWS Transform MGN, agentless replication for vCenter
• AWS: Microsoft licensing on AWS (Windows FAQ)
• Microsoft Learn: Migrate VMware VMs agentless with Azure Migrate
• Microsoft Learn: Import VMware servers using RVTools XLSX (preview)
• Microsoft Azure: Azure Hybrid Benefit
• Microsoft Learn: VM Conversion extension for Windows Admin Center
• Proxmox VE Wiki: Migrate to Proxmox VE
• Nutanix: Supercharge your VM migrations to Nutanix AHV with Nutanix Move
• Red Hat: Installing and using the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization