VMware will keep selling vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus version 8 in the European Economic Area until October 2027, with extended support through October 2028, a concession that appears aimed at appeasing regulators.

VMware has quietly extended the availability of its low-end vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus products for European customers, a move that appears designed to ease regulatory pressure from the European Commission.

The virtualisation vendor slipped the announcement into a November 4 blog post introducing vSphere Express, a new low-end product. The Register’s initial report on vSphere Express, based on an interview and materials VMware provided, did not include the extension. The version VMware sent omitted a paragraph stating that customers in the European Economic Area can buy vSphere Standard version 8 and vSphere Enterprise Plus version 8 until October 31, 2027. Active subscriptions to those offerings will include Extended Support until the earlier of the subscription end date or October 31, 2028.

That date extends more than a year past the October 11, 2027, end-of-general-support date for the more capable vSphere 8 and Cloud Foundation 5.x products.

“This has the potential to be a positive development for organisations within the European Economic Area,” independent analyst Michael Warrilow told The Register. “It could provide them up to an extra 12 months to transition vSphere 8 to VCF 9 and/or migrate workloads to another platform.”

Warrilow urged European users to seek “absolute clarity” from VMware about the specifics of the offer. “What level of extended support will be provided and what longer-term commitments will need to be made? I cannot find any of that detail,” he wrote.

The extension follows a history of friction between VMware and its customers. VMware previously promised patches for users who kept perpetual licenses instead of moving to subscriptions. The Broadcom business unit later paused patch downloads for months, claiming it needed to adjust its website to make them possible.

Warrilow suggested “regulatory muscle” is behind the decision to keep selling vSphere Standard only in Europe. Regulators worldwide cleared Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, but European authorities have since revisited the matter. Lobby group Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) succeeded in having the European Commission open an antitrust investigation into whether VMware’s channel changes inappropriately shaped the cloud infrastructure provider market. The Register understands CISPE feels regulators are receptive to its arguments. In the Netherlands, local courts enforced a VMware support contract of the sort that Broadcom has tried to walk away from at other users.

Warrilow wonders if VMware might now change its policy regarding vSphere Standard in other countries. “The subsequent question is how can organisations in other regions get the same concessions from Broadcom? I would encourage them to amplify their voice by rallying industry associations and user groups to the cause whilst lobbying the regulators in their jurisdiction.”

Overall, however, he thinks VMware’s decision isn’t enormously impactful. “Ultimately, all it does is buy a little more time to upgrade or migrate,” he wrote.

It may not even do that. The Register often heard that VMware seldom issued quotes for vSphere Standard or Enterprise Plus. Paul Turner, chief product officer for VMware’s Cloud Foundation Division, told The Register that inappropriate incentives for channel partners caused that situation, and that VMware later fixed it. Continental users will be hoping VMware got that effort right.

After alienating many long-time small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers, Broadcom’s VMware is trying to appeal to its smaller customers.

Yesterday, the virtualisation company announced vSphere Express, a lower-end virtualisation offering for organisations that require “cost-effective essential virtualisation.”

vSphere Express comes after many customers reported that VMware was pushing them to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the flagship private cloud bundle that has many features SMBs don’t need and is expensive. Some SMB users have reported that VMware sales representatives previously told them that vSphere Standard, VMware’s prior entry-level virtualisation offering, wasn’t available anymore.

A VMware spokesperson said that VMware will sell a per-core subscription license at a price that will be “significantly lower” than the VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundle and VCF but wouldn’t provide a price quote.

IT distributor TD Synnex lists vSphere Express as costing $9,600 a year for running on up to 128 cores. The price doesn’t get cheaper with fewer cores, which still presents a challenge to the smallest use cases.

vSphere Express includes basic capabilities, like vMotion, for “live migration of running virtual machines with improved migration speed and efficiency,” and high availability for the “automated restart of failed virtual machines,” VMware’s announcement said.

The product only supports discrete instances, and organisations won’t be able to manage them centrally, Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing for VCF, said.

“We started listening to a lot of our lower-end customers who didn’t really want the VVF but wanted the core virtualisation capability, and [vSphere Express is] really meant for that market,” Shenoy said.

Whereas vSphere Standard hasn’t seen a meaningful update in years, vSphere Express will be updated as frequently as VCF and VVF are, The Register reported.

Proxmox appears to have won the race to woo British supermarket giant and vocal VMware detractor Tesco.

A job listing for a head of software development role at the want-away firm reveals its apparent choice, with stated role responsibilities including “modernising Tesco’s edge virtualisation estate through the migration from VMware to Proxmox.”

An India-based development lead is wanted by Tesco, with the successful candidate tasked with defining architecture, migration patterns, and repeatable build configurations across networking and storage and wider workloads.

What looks to be an initial dip into the open-source alternative to VMware, Tesco wants someone to lead design, engineering, and production validation “before progressive rollout across the retail estate.”

Tesco’s desire for a “safe and predictable migration from VMware to Proxmox” comes as the retailer has been among the most vocal detractors of VMware’s post-acquisition shake-up. It filed a breach of contract lawsuit in late 2025, contending Broadcom failed to honour perpetual licenses it bought in 2021 for vSphere Foundation, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and Tanzu. The jump to Proxmox comes amid previous reports suggesting Tesco was racing to get some 40,000 servers off VMware.

Neither Tesco nor Proxmox has officially commented on the move across, but should the potential migration come to fruition, the retailer would find itself working with a VMware alternative priding itself on open source.

Its virtualisation offerings, like its Datacenter Manager, provide relatively basic management for virtual machines (VMs) and containers, but crucially it doesn’t force users to pay for unwanted or unused software features.

A RunZero report dated last November suggested that want-away VMware users were jumping to Proxmox in droves, with Version 1.0 of its flagship Datacenter Manager offering featuring the ability for live migration of VMs between different clusters, similar to VMware’s vMotion but without the need for a wider Broadcom-esque license.

Tesco’s move to Proxmox would be a blow to Nutanix, which has quickly and repeatedly emerged as the go-to for want-away VMware users. Perpetual license changes and subscription shifts have caused as many as 90% of some 270 surveyed IT leaders to admit they’re considering unsticking from VMware.

Of course, VMware remains unfazed, with CEO Hock Tan previously touting that more than 90% of its 10,000 largest customers signed up to VCF in its first year alone. But that hasn’t stopped it from making it slightly harder for folks to jump ship, having recently culled a software kit used by many of its rivals to migrate VMs to a different virtualisation platform.

T-Mobile is asking a New York court to rule that Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue supporting its VMware perpetual licenses.

In its complaint, T-Mobile said it has tens of thousands of virtual machines using VMware software across approximately 303,140 CPU cores. It also said that it was migrating off VMware but noted the time-consuming and technical challenges involved in migrating over 1,000 applications.

It filed its lawsuit, which was first reported by The Register, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in August 2025.

The mobile company claimed that in 2023, it bought perpetual VMware licenses, plus two years of support with the option to buy a third year. But after Broadcom bought VMware, it stopped sales of VMware perpetual licenses in favour of subscriptions and started bundling VMware products into a few, more expensive bundles.

When T-Mobile tried to extend support for a third year for $5,288,398.45, Broadcom wouldn’t allow it, per an August 2025 filing from T-Mobile. A Broadcom representative reportedly told T-Mobile via email: “Broadcom announced end of available of all perpetual products, which includes Stated Out Year Renewals for perpetual support.”

A judge granted T-Mobile an injunction that allowed it to receive support services from October 2025 through August 3, 2026, for $5.28 million, plus the posting of a $500,000 undertaking.

Now, T-Mobile is seeking a declaration that it was entitled to renew support services and further relief as the court deems necessary.

At one point, T-Mobile wanted support so badly that it offered $20 million for two years of software updates and support services. The company cited litigation costs and “mitigating interruption and security risks to both the network and the business” as part of its reasoning.

In a filing last month, Broadcom claimed that it has incurred $24 million in costs to provide T-Mobile with support for six VMware products and to assign it three dedicated support account managers. T-Mobile responded that it doesn’t use three of the six named products and has opened only two service cases this year.

The case is similar to a privately settled case that Broadcom had with AT&T over VMware support and to an ongoing case with Tesco.

Broadcom previously argued that T-Mobile’s case stands out because T-Mobile waited a long time before trying to extend support.

“Thousands upon thousands have successfully migrated to subscription,” a Broadcom lawyer said in an October 2025 hearing, per the publication. “T-Mobile is the outlier here that is in litigation. … Thousands upon thousands of customers have already transferred under these sorts of provisions and accepted and understood that end of availability applies.”

However, it’s worth pointing out that the financial and technical burdens involved in suing a conglomerate like Broadcom. Those challenges may have deterred organisations, especially smaller ones, from getting into litigation over VMware.

Neither T-Mobile nor Broadcom has publicly commented on the case.

Tesco are moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid “abusive conduct” from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim.

Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK’s High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware’s vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years.

But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honour the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay “excessive and inflated prices for virtualisation software for which Tesco has already paid” and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying “duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products,” the initial complaint read.

Tesco, which reported 73.7 billion pounds (about $98.7 billion) in revenue in its fiscal year 2026, has since started migrating away from VMware and Broadcom’s mainframe products, according to late-May court filings.

In January, Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco’s VMware products, Tesco said, and Tesco has been paying for third-party support since. In its initial filing, Tesco also said that Broadcom refused to upgrade software or provide all security updates to customers without subscriptions.

One of Tesco’s recent filings reads:

HPE is taking advantage of VMware’s expensive licensing changes by offering customers free use of its own VM Essentials product for a year, plus a $1 license for its Zerto data protection product to help ease migrations.

The announcement of the deal came at the Partner Growth Summit staged alongside their HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, and framed them as a migration assistance program intended to arm channel partners who want to help customers reduce their financial risk when migrating virtualisation platforms.

“One of the big things we see is that as customers are going through this journey on transforming their operating model, you end up with double expenses and so we’re really pleased to announce the program around Morpheus and platform migration,” said EVP and CTO Fidelma Russo.

“We are announcing that as a customer goes through this transformation with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, you don’t pay for the first year of licenses. You will get Zerto migration licenses during that period to help you move, and so what this does is it helps mitigate the double-bubble cost problem that customers see as they are looking to migrate from one platform to another.”

Neither Russo nor HPE mentioned VMware as part of their pitch for this migration assistance program, but it seems pretty clear where it is aimed.

At its last Discover event in Barcelona, HPE talked about customers seeing license fees for virtualisation skyrocketing and claimed that it was able to provide “a fully integrated enterprise-grade alternative” with Morpheus and OpsRamp management tools, plus Zerto disaster recovery software.

A survey recently found that half of VMware users plan to reduce their use of the virtualisation pioneer’s products by 2028. Since being acquired by Broadcom, VMware license costs have increased by 800 to 1,500 percent for some customers. VMware also ended partner programs that many service providers relied on.

HPE says it is introducing VM Essentials for Partner IT to help providers transition their virtualised business applications. This will see it provide VM Essentials software licenses free of charge for three years, with partners paying only support costs, to the 600 partners who gain Private Cloud with Virtualisation competency by the end of the year.

The company is also extending its channel-only model to cover HPE Private Cloud PC3000 (formerly HPE Private Cloud Business Edition), HPE SimpliVity PC1000, and HPE Zerto software from July 1. HPE said this follows the success of selling Morpheus VM Essentials through a channel-only route to market.

Also at the Partner Growth Summit, the IT biz will disclose that it is unifying the HPE and Juniper Networks partner programs under its Partner Ready Vantage umbrella. The aim is to have a single, global program for partners to offer services across networking, cloud, and AI.

This change will take effect from November 1, after which partners will operate under one program with a simplified structure, aligned incentives, and a consistent engagement model, while existing investments are protected, or so HPE claims.

The company also says it will help cloud service providers build and operate differentiated private cloud services with CloudOps Software and the backing of HPE Partner Ready Vantage.

“Partners want a simpler way to engage and a bigger opportunity to grow,” said Simon Ewington, HPE’s SVP for Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem.

Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st.

The software giant told partners it will cut prices “to make Cloud PCs more cost-effective for small and medium businesses.”

Microsoft has framed the price cuts as an “update” to the service that will change its performance in two ways: