I'm facing a dilemma with my VMware renewal, which is coming up next month. The renewal costs have skyrocketed, up 100% again! They've offered me a three-year contract that only increases by 10% the second year and 15% the third year. Before we bought into subscription licenses, we were using version 8.03 and I still have all our perpetual license keys. There are third-party vendors that can provide support and security updates for about 20% of what Broadcom charges, but that would lock us into staying on version 8.03 permanently unless we decide to switch to another product. Has anyone gone through something similar, and do you have any advice?
6 Answers
Make sure you’re prepared to reinvest any savings into finding a new virtualization solution. You can’t just wait around and hope for the best with Broadcom as the owner of your current product.
I moved my company to Hyper-V six months before our renewal. When it was time to renew, Broadcom sent us a cease-and-desist letter. I've heard similar stories from others. Honestly, I wouldn't risk Broadcom coming after you; it's best to plan a migration away from them instead.
How big was your environment when you migrated? I found Hyper-V didn't work for us either, even though I know it's improved since last I tried.
I've seen others completely move away from VMware to OpenShift Virtualization. Even in my previous job, no one ended up sticking with VMware long-term; most either paid the price increase or found alternatives.
'Forever' stuck on 8.03 isn't a great idea; version 8 goes out of support next year. Be mindful of any governance requirements you have for running unsupported products.
Just a heads up: VMware told us that once we moved to a subscription, our perpetual licenses were no longer valid, and we received a cease-and-desist letter after that.
Wait a second, that's not entirely true! As long as your support agreement was still valid, you should be fine to use your perpetual license.
Yeah, it seems like a gray area depending on when you switched to subscription.
We switched everything to Azure Local, which has been quite a journey. Initially tested it on my home machine with Hyper-V, but the configuration was a bit tricky with all the module dependencies. Did you need new hardware for that, or was your existing setup okay?
As someone who's dealt with several cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom, we've ignored every single one. They're not usually serious about it; sometimes just blocking their emails has worked for us.