If you've missed some of the recent changes relating to VMware by Broadcom, we've rounded them up below.
1. Increase in vSAN allowance in VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)
As of November 2024 VMware increased the amount of vSAN available per core licensed to VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) customers, from 100GiB to 250GiB. Furthermore, this capacity can now also be aggregated across all cores in a VVF environment and is not restricted to each individual cluster.
2. Return of vSphere Enterprise Plus
For customers that aren’t looking for any of VMware’s cloud offerings and just need compute virtualisation, VMware has revived vSphere Enterprise Plus, on top of the existing vSphere Standard offering. This ‘new’ edition importantly gives customers: vSphere Distributed Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage DRS, Distributed Switch and VM Encryption. A full list of features can be found here.
3. Gartner warn that migrating off VMware will be long, expensive and risky
We frequently get asked if other customers are migrating away from VMware. In reality, very few are, and a recent Gartner study, “Estimating a Large-Scale VMware Migration,” helps explain why. The study, which modelled the cost for an organization with over 2,000 VMs, found that migrating from VMware to alternative virtualization platforms can cost anywhere from $300 to $3,000 per VM. Live migrations can cost three times that amount. The study also estimated that these projects can take 18 to 48 months to complete, and require seven to ten full-time employees for a month just for the initial scoping.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/21/vmware_migration_gartner_advice/
Conclusion
With that last point in mind, if your organisation is looking to stay with VMware, then Livingstone can still help you. It is imperative that your business has a strong understanding of what you are consuming to ensure that you are not overpaying or oversold to at renewal.
Livingstone’s expert consultants can help you make sense of your data in the context of these changes to ensure that you’re not spending any more than you need to with Broadcom at your renewal.
Whether you have years left on your VMware agreement, or just a matter of months; whether VMware is a strategic vendor for you going forward and you want to minimize your spend; or whether you’re looking to move away from VMware and want to understand the alternatives, Livingstone will tailor its service to your requirements. Reach out to us today to find out more about how we can help you.
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