VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware.
Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware.
Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’s an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers.
For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini’s survey said they’re exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware’s higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.
Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini’s survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions.
“Significant barriers”
In today’s announcement, Rimini pointed to “significant barriers to progress” for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent).
“These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption,” Rimini’s announcement said.
Broadcom’s takeover has spotlighted the challenges of being overly reliant on a single vendor.
“Many clients are looking … at this [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,” Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst at Gartner, previously told Ars, referring to Broadcom’s acquisition.
Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of “growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.”
“In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for ‘best of both worlds’ workload placement,” the announcement said.
Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren’t planning to move any of their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.
“The trend shows increasing diversification in enterprise virtualization strategies with a longer-term transition toward bespoke, multi-platform IT virtualization environments. As organizations reevaluate their paths to modernization, they are increasingly adopting approaches that combine on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and alternative hypervisors to support workload flexibility, operational efficiency and better cost control,” the announcement says.
In its “Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure” released last month, Gartner predicted that 55 percent of enterprises will make “proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery” by 2029, which is an increase from 25 percent in 2026.
In a statement today, Joe McKendrick, lead analyst at Unisphere Research, pointed to interest among VMware users to do more than just replace their virtualization vendor.
“[The survey] reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependency on a single provider, maintain continuity for mission-critical systems and modernize at a pace that fits their own business requirements,” he said. “For many organizations, that means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resilience, security and scalability over time.”
vmware’s mere existance is dumb to me when better foss alternatives have already existed for years.
At our company, when the price increase hit, we moved to AVD. It was cheaper and the reliability has been significantly better.
Obligatory, fuck Broadcom.
Broadcom bought VMWare and tried the enshitification strategy that works so well with normal consumers; put the product on life support, increase licensing costs by hundreds of percent, Profit. But unlike Disney IPs and shit-eating consumers, the only thing keeping larger orgs on VMWare was no catalyst to switch. It was just the cost of doing business. But when you jack up prices so much and assume companies are just going to suck it up, all you end up doing is killing your golden goose. My company is changing to Openstack (a good decision even in a vacuum), all they needed was a little motivation to actually do it. I’m sure any company with a few competent engineers and a few managers that can look beyond the next quarter will do the same.
In summary: If you have any $AVGO sell it, or at least write calls.
I was just at our local VMUG meetup. Attendance was abysmal.
i wasn’t *UG groups were still a thing – is the local LUG not as popular too?
They’ve moved away from local groups to the Connect paid events. Pretty lame.
Our VMware renewal costs were so eye watering the move to Proxmox was approved the same day.
If a move from VMware to Proxmox was so obviously viable I wonder what you were doing buying VMware in the first place.
That’s the ‘best’ part about Broadcom, they’re so unimaginably greedy that even the capex on a new infrastructure project is less than their yearly license costs!
Our VMware costs have doubled for our last 3 renewals. We had a project this year to move to another hypervisor. Most of our hardware was old, and we were able to replace all of our hardware AND buy the license for the new hypervisor and it’s still cheaper than renewing one year of VMware.
What did you switch to?
We are a big Microsoft/Azure shop, so we went with Azure Local. Proxmox was the other option we were looking at, but we determined it wasn’t a good fit at this time. That may change in 5 years when we go to upgrade hardware again, and we already have plans to continue to evaluate it.
Is Azure Local different than Hyper-V in any way? Most of our ESXi servers we’ve just been installing windows server on, setting up Hyper-V and migrating VMs over.
There is not much of an option, compeditor are kvm management software, hard to train enterprise engineers to use anything kernel level
We switched to Nutanix before shit went sideways and we were able to actually drop an engineer. Even though it’s KVM it’s pretty good at what it does. And for reference we had over 2,000 VMs. Migration was pretty seamless (minus a few dumbass devs who hardcoded IPs)
Hard, yes. Impossible? Certainly it’s not.
