After Broadcom acquired VMware in late 2023, VMware stopped selling perpetual licences and moved its products to subscription bundles, priced per CPU core. Many businesses facing a renewal are now asking whether to stay or move. Here are the realistic options.
What changed
- New perpetual licences are no longer sold; products come as subscriptions, mainly in two bundles, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation
- Subscriptions are priced per core, with a minimum number of cores per CPU
- Licences you already own keep working, but updates and support depend on your contract
Check your own renewal quote and contract terms; every environment is different.
Your four options
- Renew the subscription. The least disruptive choice if the quote fits your budget and your hardware is still in good shape.
- Move to another platform. Hyperconverged infrastructure, which combines compute, storage and virtualization in each node, can replace both the servers and the storage array, so there is one system to support and refresh instead of two.
- Move some workloads to the cloud. This suits systems with changing demand. Systems that need to stay on site, or that move a lot of data, often cost more in the cloud.
- Do it in stages. Run the old and new platforms side by side and move workloads in planned waves. This avoids a single big-bang cutover.
How to decide
- Know what you run: how many hosts, cores, virtual machines and how much storage
- Check when your hardware and storage reach end of support, not just your licences
- Put the renewal quote next to the cost of a new platform over the same years
- Test your backups and your recovery before you move anything
How LMI helps
OneCore puts compute, storage and virtual machines on one hyperconverged platform, starting at two nodes. LMI assesses your current environment, sizes the cluster, then supplies, installs and migrates it, with your existing VMware hosts running alongside while workloads move in waves. After go-live, we support the hardware you own.
Not sure which way to go? Book a free site survey or email lori@onelmi.com. If a smaller solution is enough, we will say so.