VMware price increase - what's next?

What happened?

Last year, in November 2023, after a series of announcements and negotiations, the deal based on which Broadcom Inc. acquired VMware was completed. At that time, only a few predicted that the phrase “VMware price increase” would trend so well on Google search. All of this happened because of a new subscription pricing model which significantly impacted work of many CIOs, CTOs, and IT managers. Some Reddit posts are confirming the trend:

Ours went up just over 500% for just over 1000 cores just prior to the merger [1]

Broadcom changed our license model from perpetual to subscription and changed the license from per CPU socket to CPU core. Received our quote that is double what we were paying. Previous Year - $124k /yr Renewal - $257k /yr [2]

And now, a significant part of those who rely on virtualization are looking for inspiration: What to do?! Knowing the vSphere "leaving complexity" reputation (about this challenge also on the next chapters), I've prepared a couple of scenarios for you:

Scenario Zero: Stay'n'Pay

It's quite logical that Broadcom/VMware bundled their offerings to motivate you to use more services or at least consider adaptation. However, my assumption is that if you're reading this article, you're not quite happy with the changes. So, let's focus on other alternatives.

Scenario One: “Love me VMware, love me sweet. Never let me go.”

Not only love can make us attached to VMware. Our data centers, applications, and operations are still in need of using the solution. Instead of nervously opening the financial plan Excel, it is possible to reach out to one of VMware's partners to get a deal through them. Just one note: part of the recent changes also included the shrinking of VMware's partner ecosystem. Even in the new landscape, IBM is playing a great role, so you can count on our well-negotiated rates.

We did our homework and prepared couple of scenarios which are protecting customer who decided to stay with VMware: from financial (no price increase due to Broadcom acquisition) as well as operational point of view.

To sum up: you don’t like your new bill, but you still need to work on VMware? Click below and check what rates we can offer you or reach out to see your options:

Scenario Two: “Freedom! Freedom! Freeeeedoooom!” (George Michael – Freedom! '90)

Not sure if you've already typed on Google “best alternatives for VMware,” but if you do, you can find Red Hat Virtualization featured. Red Hat, in general, is famous because of its open-source historical core. The Virtualization model is part of the famous Red Hat OpenShift solutions which not only answer your virtualization needs but also enable you to prepare your environment for containerization. In this scenario, the best news is that your IT department doesn’t really need the OpenShift skills because it's possible to use the fully managed Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service (and it ROKS ??).

The good news is that our architects are here to help you with this project. You can book some time on my calendar: here .

Scenario Three: "Let's come together, right now, in sweet harmony"

Have you already heard about the term “distributed cloud”? It refers to the distribution of public cloud services to different physical locations (on-premise!) while the operation, governance, and evolution of the services remain the responsibility of the public cloud provider. IBM Cloud Satellite is our distributed cloud offering and it runs on the infrastructure that clients already have today (in his Data Center). But how does it help with your virtual machines? That concept might help you if:

• you have your own, on-premise infrastructure but you don't want to outsource managing it or,
• you have workloads which needs to be processed on-prem but some can be on cloud.

Here the harmony between "scenario two" (Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Service) and your on-prem infrastructure happens. Leveraging Cloud Satellite you're using managed service of ROKS running on your on-prem infrastructure. And that is solving your problem with Virtual Machines, Data Center management and allowing you to scale-up if needed.

Epilogue: "Help! I need somebody!"

Even if it's not really the matter of this article, I can also imagine the situation that Broadcom catalyzed discussions about moving to cloud in your organization. In that case you can find in our catalog the service of migrating your VMs to Cloud. We call it Migration As A Service solution (message me so I can tell you more).

What now?

So now you know a couple of solutions, and I've already spoken with our architect ecosystem. If you need consultation, please send me a DM, mail, comment, or just book time on my calendar.

Also, if you have any questions, please write them in the comment section – I'll be happy to answer!

Have you liked the article. Let me tell you a few words:

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#VMware #Broadcom #SaaS #ITmanagement #Virtualization #RedHat #OpenShift #CloudComputing #DistributedCloud #IBMCloud #Infrastructure #TechSolutions #DigitalTransformation #ITConsulting #FutureOfIT

Reddit quote source: [1] and [2]