Organisations that decide to reduce their VMware footprints, or quit entirely, will emerge with more complex and less capable infrastructure.

That’s the view of Paul Delory, a research vice president with analyst firm Gartner, who told the company’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference in Sydney that there is no technical reason for VMware users to adopt a rival hypervisor, and that no vendor offers a one-for-one replacement for the virtualisation pioneer’s flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite.

But Delory said Broadcom’s licensing policies, which see it only sell VCF, mean VMware users’ licensing bills typically rise by 300 to 400 percent. Broadcom argues that the full-stack private clouds VCF makes it possible to build are so efficient that VCF quickly pays for itself.

The analyst told the conference he thinks those contemplating a move off VMware will do better if they instead focus on application modernisation. But he said Broadcom’s price changes, and the prospect the company might hike prices again in future, mean many VMware users will look elsewhere.

Those who do, he warned, will end up with more complex infrastructure for two reasons.

One is that few organisations will be able to quit VMware entirely, as they run applications with dependencies that aren’t easy or economical to unwind. Reducing or eliminating a VMware rig therefore means adopting multiple replacements, which creates more infrastructure to manage and therefore extra complexity.

The other is that no rival hypervisor can match the efficiency or VM density possible when using VMware’s products, so moving means acquiring more hardware.

Delory said the best alternatives to VMware are the public cloud, or HCI vendors – these days that acronym denotes both hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The analyst warned that HCI vendors, with the exception of Nutanix, have weak migration tools that will leave users needing to create bespoke migration automations using “Ansible and a Rube Goldberg machine.”

Public clouds, he said, will welcome customers who move 1,000 or more VMs with free migration services.

He recommended against considering OpenStack, which he said remains “too big, too complex, and has too many moving parts for the typical IT shop to handle effectively.”

Delory also warned VMware users that migration projects are significant engineering undertakings that require extensive assessment of every application in a fleet to determine its best destination, and the work required to get it there.

He reminded VMware users that not every workload is certified to run under non-VMware hypervisors, and that some vendors now offer cloud-native versions of their wares and therefore offer an easier on-ramp to containerised applications.

Delory advised exploring those options, and not making architectural decisions that mean you can’t consider moving off VMware.

“VMware is betting that you can’t move off and they can jack the price way up,” he said. “That may be a good bet. But don’t make it easy.”

The analyst finished his talk by predicting most users will minimise their VMware footprints, rather than eliminating them, and restated Gartner’s prediction that 35 percent of workloads currently running under VMware will operate on a different platform by 2028.

VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.

Speaking to discuss the analyst firm’s mid-April publication, “The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026,” Galimberti said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue’s big iron comes out ahead.

“I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronisation and high availability are things I need to build into application logic,” he said. “The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity.”

He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility.

That said, Galimberti doesn’t recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM’s hardware.

IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux “even better and more enterprise-ready.”

Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM’s ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs.

Galimberti said he has seen “multiple business cases” in which moving from VMware to IBM makes sense under Broadcom’s policy of requiring customers to buy its full Cloud Foundation private cloud stack. The analyst said he was surprised those business cases make sense, but insists a mainframe makes sense “under some circumstances.”

AI is another workload Galimberti thinks some users will find works well on mainframes, because IBM recently upgraded its Spyre accelerators

The analyst says items like Spyre show that IBM continues to invest and innovate, and that the mainframe “is not a stale platform.”

Galimberti said the idea that mainframes were a dead end has been around for decades and was justifiable at some moments in history. But he also feels the idea was oversold by consultants who promoted migrations away from mainframes as sure-fire winners – but under-estimated the complexity of a move.

“Global system integrators were always against the mainframe and encouraged migrations,” he said. “Now they are halting the mainframe exit, probably because the number of failures they had were more than their successes.”

The firm now advises assuming that by 2030, 75 percent of vendors offering mainframe exit services operating in the “mainframe exit” market will either change their businesses or vanish, and suggests that only 10 percent of mainframe users will want out by 2030.

Which is not to say mainframes are perfect or easy to live with. Galimberti noted that few third-party software developers support mainframes, and those that do understand the potential to hike prices.

Committing to mainframes therefore means planning “to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritising the business value these solutions can deliver.”

Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customisations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform.

Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don’t contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.

The analyst thinks the mainframe will be around for some time to come, because IBM is “very engineering-focussed” and “engages with customers who are hyper-conservative” – then just creates the products they want.

Half of VMware users plan to reduce their use of the virtualisation pioneer’s products by 2028, according to a survey by independent analyst firm Virtified.

Virtified principal Michael Warrilow, a former Gartner analyst specialising in cloud and virtualisation, said VMware users are uncomfortable with Broadcom’s strategy of only selling a complete private cloud bundle – Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9).

Some users feel the cost of VCF 9 is beyond their means, Warrilow said. Others don’t want all the tools in Cloud Foundation, or the complexity of operating them. Users with those issues will therefore assess their virtual machine fleet and move some to another platform.

The analyst said many migrations are already under way, but believes not all will result in smaller Broadcom bills. Warrilow said he’s heard that when Broadcom gets a whiff of customers down-sizing their VMware estates, it offers less generous discounts – or no discount at all.

Bills may also stay high because migrating away from VMware before the October 2027 end-of-support date for its version 8.x products will be hard to achieve. Warrilow expects many users will therefore find themselves needing to reluctantly acquire VCF 9 to stay compliant.

Others will wait it out past that date, to align a move to a different virtualisation platform with a hardware refresh. Those who choose to continue with unsupported software will likely face a license audit that, if it shows a user will need more entitlements, sees Broadcom offer software at list price or minimal discount.

“Broadcom is hoping this all goes in the too hard basket and you do the upgrade,” he said.

Warrilow said those who don’t plan to reduce their VMware estate may have reached that decision due to various factors that prevent an easy or economical migration. He said lack of suitable VMware alternatives, an inability to move to the cloud, and low risk appetite are among the reasons that some users decide to stay put.

He also thinks those who stick with VMware may well enjoy the experience.

“There is the chance to get greater density and lower license costs,” he said. “And it is possible the engineering of the product will get better. There’s a lot less bickering in the Broadcom era, and potential for a more unified product.”

“But right now VCF 9 includes stuff that people didn’t want unified.”

Warrilow’s findings are drawn from a survey he conducted – using the same market research company he used while at Gartner – that surveyed 450 VMware users across 14 countries. Respondents came from the ranks of operations, infrastructure, architecture, and procurement teams, at companies with over 500 employees. The analyst has also prepared documents he calls “Loops,” that assess the main VMware alternatives.

Like other analysts, he rates VMware as the market leader, but feels Nutanix, Microsoft, and Red Hat are closing the gap.

The plan to terminate VMware’s Cloud Service Provider partner program came on top of other changes following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.

These included price hikes, bundling, and demands for up-front payments alongside minimum commitments based on potential, rather than actual, usage.

CISPE said these moves have increased costs for customers by more than 1,000% in some instances.

“In 2024, within just a few weeks, VMware changed its prices, licensing model, ordering processes, and more — without providing customers with the necessary information or sufficient time to adapt,” said Danielle Jacobs, CEO at Beltug, the Belgian Association of CIOs & Digital Technology Leaders.

“To this day, our members continue to contact us about the difficulties they face. The announced shake‑up of the previously well‑functioning ecosystem between VMware partners and end users has only added to the challenges and uncertainty.”

CISPE’s complaint supports a similar request from Voice e.V, which represents many of the largest IT customers in Germany, filed in May last year. Broadcom has rejected the allegations.