The blog, authored by Rick Walsworth, director of product marketing for the cloud infrastructure team, said hopefully: “This portfolio simplification will allow customers to extract more value from their VMware investment, and enable VMware to accelerate delivery of new innovations and ease both deployment and management for customers.”

Whilst concern amongst VMware customers remains heightened about renewal costs and licence changes, the update represents welcome clarity, not least as many exploring alternatives like Microsoft’s Hyper -V are encountering the kinds of issues that they dread in exploring alternatives for mature and entrenched VMware infrastructure-based workloads.

As security researcher Will Dorrman, posted on X for example: “In planning for a post-VMware world, I’m once again poking around with Hyper-V. It took less than an hour to encounter a dealbreaker bug: If you have a snapshot of a powered-on VM that has an ISO mounted, and that ISO goes away, you… can never power that VM on again?” he asked?

Given some hacky workarounds, he responded: “Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m merely in the ‘kicking the tires’ phase of this experiment. And needing to run a PowerShell command to make up for a lacking capability puts it in the probably-not boat…”

Broadcom has clearly frightened the horses and not just with smaller scale home workshop users. Whether it can reassure its base of large enterprise VMware customers – for whom concern about future quality of support and licence fees is rising – enough to stop them seriously actioning moves to Nutanix, Hyper-V or other alternatives remains an open question.