VMware renewal shock: the Proxmox exit, priced core by core

Why your VMware renewal went up (per-core, 16-core minimum, bundles)

Broadcom reduced roughly 8,000 VMware SKUs to a small set of subscription bundles, including VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise Plus, and killed perpetual licences. The model is per physical core, with a 16-core minimum per CPU and a reported 72-core minimum per order from April 2025. Our research also records a 20% late-renewal surcharge in the renewal material reviewed.

At the reported VCF list price of about $350/core/year (Redress Compliance; SummitHQ), roughly 286 billed cores cross $100,000 per year. A 480-core estate reaches $168,000 per year at list before add-ons. The real renewal number depends on core counts, the selected bundle, discounts, and which products were folded into the estate—but the pricing unit is now large enough that an inaccurate core count is expensive. It is the same per-unit repricing pattern Oracle applied to Java — the unit changed, then the bill followed.

How big are Broadcom VMware price increases? (2–4× typical, filings labelled)

The extreme figures need careful labels. AT&T alleged a 1,050% increase in a 2024 U.S. federal court filing. European cloud providers represented by CISPE reported increases of 800–1,500% to the European Commission. Tesco’s UK court filings described a 2026 offer about 175% above its 2021 pricing. Those are filings and reports, not universal outcomes.

The more useful planning range comes from Redress Compliance’s 2024–25 renewal dataset: typical first quotes landed around two to four times the prior run-rate, with negotiated outcomes often 30–55% below list after a core audit. That is why the first step is not “rip out VMware.” It is “count what Broadcom is billing, decide which tier you actually need, and price the exit before renewal leverage disappears.”

The deadline: vSphere 8 end of general support, Oct 11, 2027

Even a customer who negotiates a good renewal is on a clock: vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 reach end of general support on October 11, 2027 (Broadcom knowledge base article 459135). After that date, staying means running the estate without general support, and leaving means migrating from a weaker position. Planning the exit — or the upgrade — while support still runs is the cheap version of this decision; planning it after the deadline is the expensive one.

VMware alternatives compared: Proxmox VE, Azure Local, Nutanix, or negotiate

• Proxmox VE — open-source KVM and LXC virtualization. Software licence: €0. Optional support is per socket (tiers below). Best fit for SMB, mid-market, and managed-service estates that can redesign storage and disaster recovery deliberately.
• Microsoft Azure Local — for Windows- and Azure-committed organisations. Microsoft’s published host fee in the material reviewed is $10/physical core/month, and existing Windows Server Datacenter with Software Assurance may offset part of the practical cost.
• Nutanix NCI/AHV — a supported hyperconverged alternative for enterprises wanting a closer like-for-like operating model. Pricing is quote-only; Redress benchmarks it 30–60% below VCF over three years before migration costs. That is a consultancy benchmark, not a list-price guarantee.
• Negotiate — stay, but on a lower tier after a core audit. In Redress’s benchmarks, tier choice alone is worth $160–$220 per core per year; below a certain estate size (see “When staying on VMware is cheaper”) this is the winning move.

A reported Austrian case from CIIT Software, covering 79 virtual machines, cut annual platform cost from about €10,548 on a VMware minimum to €1,770 on Proxmox—an 83% reduction in that reported case. It demonstrates the shape of the licence gap; it is not a promise for a larger estate with NSX, vSAN, or complex disaster-recovery dependencies.

VMware vs Proxmox cost per core (table)

The 32-core row is list-price math from the figures above — one host, two sockets, billed at the 16-core-per-CPU minimum. There is no like-for-like “old price” row: Broadcom ended perpetual licensing, so the honest comparison is today’s per-core renewal against the exit’s per-socket run-rate. Migration labour, replacement backup or DR tooling, support differences, and any new hardware belong in the business case. Licence savings alone are not total cost of ownership.

How to migrate VMware to Proxmox (ESXi import wizard, VirtIO, Veeam)

1. Audit. Count billable cores, map hosts and clusters, and inventory the hard dependencies: NSX, vSAN, SRM, backup products, monitoring, automation, and licence deadlines.
2. Pilot. Build the target cluster and move the least-critical representative VMs first. Prove storage, networking, backup, restore, and Windows driver handling before committing the estate.
3. Migration. Convert and move in waves with a parallel run. Proxmox VE has shipped a built-in ESXi import wizard since version 8.2 (tested against ESXi 6.5–8.0). Pre-install VirtIO drivers where required, remove snapshots and VMware Tools at the right stage, re-point backup tooling such as Veeam at the new platform, and validate each workload before cutover.
4. Verification. Decommission the old estate only after recovery tests pass, then tie the final Broadcom invoice and renewal position to the new run-rate in a written report.

For a 100–500 VM estate, our research puts the work at weeks to a few months. Large or disaster-recovery-heavy estates can stretch to quarters.

What doesn’t migrate cleanly: vSAN, encrypted VMs, vTPM, NSX, SRM

NSX micro-segmentation, Site Recovery Manager, and tools such as Zerto do not have simple Proxmox equivalents; replacement products must be selected and tested. vSAN-backed and encrypted VMs cannot be imported through the wizard, and vTPM state cannot migrate. Windows guests can fail to boot if VirtIO storage drivers are not prepared before conversion. Broadcom also restricted third-party access to the VDDK migration library in August 2026, which pressures migration tooling. Proxmox is also a smaller vendor than Broadcom or Microsoft, and lower support tiers have ticket limits.

When staying on VMware is cheaper

Scale matters. Below roughly $30,000–$50,000 per year of VMware spend, a paid exit may not pay back in year one; negotiating down to a lower vSphere tier — vSphere Foundation instead of full VCF — can be the better answer, and in Redress’s benchmarks tier choice alone is worth $160–$220 per core per year. From about 300 cores or $100,000 per year upward, the same research indicates payback is often under a year on Proxmox or Azure Local—subject to the dependency audit.

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