With the Changes to VMware Licensing, How Can Your Business Avoid Another Fiasco?

Skittish about the alterations to VMware licensing? Here’s how to steer clear of it happening again.

In his Empower 2024 session “Empower Your VMware Transition,” Origina Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder Rowan O’Donoghue shares a conversation he’s had with several customers following controversial changes to VMware® licensing, pricing, and support availability. 

“We’ve had a lot of customers saying, ‘listen, we’re a bit nervous about moving to another vendor and having the same thing to us in a couple years,’” O’Donoghue says in the on-demand virtual event.  

This concern will continue to needle businesses as the industry embraces subscription-based virtualization licensing, and moves away from once-standard perpetual licenses, throwing many longtime customers’ IT roadmaps into disarray. 

If you are saying “never again” following Broadcom’s recent acquisition of VMware and the significant changes to the licensing model they introduced, here are a few points to keep in mind.

Subscription licensing will become the standard

The technology world has been moving toward subscription-based licensing for a while now. Whether that’s a good thing is ultimately up to the business using the services. Some like the convenience and scalability subscription-based product licenses provide, while others bristle at the idea of paying month over month and year over year for products that used to be available as one-time purchases.  

Whatever your opinion on the trend, O’Donoghue and other experts caution that subscriptions are becoming the norm for most virtualization providers and the larger tech industry that supports them. Established enterprise software vendors have shown increasing interest in removing perpetual licenses from their offerings (as seen in the recent round of HCL cost increases), and newer companies simply make it their default way of doing business. 

Paying for and maintaining support is just as big a concern 

Product costs are just one consideration companies field when dealing with drastic changes to megavendor licensing models. Keeping an adequate level of support also becomes a serious concern. Thanks to Broadcom’s decision to eliminate support for VMware perpetual licenses, many companies now feel they must trade in for a subscription-based license just to keep their software appropriately maintained.  

In some rare cases, organizations might have a legitimate need to ensure their virtualized environments and workloads have OEM support. But outside of those circumstances, trading in the perpetual licenses you’ve already paid for to guarantee someone will be there to pick up the phone if a problem occurs essentially means you’re willing to give up control just to prevent the OEM’s sudden changes from disrupting your IT operation. 

Hybrid VMware licensing, in which customers rely on independent software maintenance vendors to support their virtualized environment, can be a financially and technically strong option for companies that would prefer to keep their current licenses. Under a hybrid licensing model, customers choose which VMware products move to subscription licensing and which perpetual licenses they’ll keep with the independent provider. 

Hybrid licensing can also assist with: 

• Helping establish a plan based on all available options (not just the ones the OEM provides) 

• Guiding and supporting the implementation process through interoperability testing and other measures 

• Providing maintenance and support for any perpetually licensed virtualization products the customer decides not to move to a megavendor subscription

Open source/private cloud might be more viable than you think  

For customers looking to prevent history from repeating itself, moving your current hypervisor to an open-source alternative is another potential way to recapture control of your virtualization plans without another “never again” scenario befalling your business. Depending on the specifics of the situation migrating to a hypervisor that supports open-source integration, then orchestrating the move, might also be a viable choice. 

The hypervisor can be kept on the customer’s private cloud or moved to a secure, co-located managed service environment, which keeps your perpetual licenses in place for as long as you need them and provides more control over any eventual migration.  

Several open-source virtualization options have established themselves as viable VMware alternatives in recent years, with stable, well-maintained codebases and high levels of configurability for individual use cases. Instead of assuming another commercial solution is on the horizon, taking the time to check your needs off the many available choices can pay dividends, especially if your business is primarily interested in avoiding similar vendor-side disruption in the future.  

When in doubt, consult an outside expert 

Companies need time to make the right decisions with a complex move like virtualization re-platforming or migration, and VMware’s tight timelines don’t make that part of the process any easier. Because new owner Broadcom cancelled Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual licenses, many customers only have until the end of their current agreements to figure out how they’ll keep support.  

If your company is feeling the pressure, it’s important to remember that OEM support is only one option, one that will likely result in you paying more over the mid-to-long term. Consulting outside virtualization experts like an independent software maintenance provider can help you carve out a solid plan and add more time to the clock to figure out what your estate will look like months and years down the line.  

Compared to taking the costly path of least resistance and hoping for the best, this approach offers time to understand all your options – and pick the ones that are best for your business – without major time crunches forcing your hand.  

As the tech world continues its path to perpetual license elimination, it’s good to know there are still options that let you keep the products you’ve already paid for.  

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