Broadcom is Forcing Their Captive VMware Customers To Leave For Competitors
VMware is officially dead now that they have been taken over by Broadcom. They refuse to let anyone use their software for less than thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year for a license subscription. There are no more VMware perpetual licenses, everything has been forced to an annual expiring subscription. VMware's new annual license fees are seven times what the cost was in 2023.
Now I'm hearing VMware customers who renewed and paid the outrageous increases in license prices, when renewing and trying to reduce costs by cutting the number of CPU's/cores they use with their VMware software, Broadcom is outright refusing to let them. People are starting to analyze their license contracts to find out if they do or do not have the right to reduce their costs when renewing their annual licenses by cutting the number of cores they renew. So, basically, companies are facing the prospect of either completely losing access to the software or paying the outrageous prices to renew software that they only use 50% or less. Even if they move a server host to a VMware competitor product, they are being forced to renew all the software licenses to keep using any of it.
Broadcom is making themselves the enemy of IT communities everywhere.
So, we're moving on to ProxMox, which can directly import and convert VMware VM's to its fully open source platform. ProxMox is basically like VMware used to be, with a reasonable low-priced entry point that is appealing to small business: free. Support subscriptions are only required if you need more than an open source community level of support.
We're beginning testing for corporate environments now, and we'll be deploying solutions for customers before the end of 2025. What I've seen so far has been very promising, but there is a learning curve.
Rest In Peace, VMware. We had a good run, but all good things do come to an end.
Long live cloud solutions that don't bleed us dry!