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.

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.

Security patching remained the most commonly cited challenge across organisations of all sizes. In the survey highlights, 38% said security patches and updates were their biggest open source challenge, ahead of installations, upgrades, and configurations at just over 29%. Technical support ranked third at just under 29%, up 21% year on year.

The report also found that 20% of organisations had no specific process for dealing with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Among large enterprises, 39% said meeting internal service level agreements for vulnerability remediation was difficult.

Compliance risks also featured heavily. Among organisations that failed a compliance audit in the past year, 55% were using end-of-life software, underlining the risks tied to unsupported products and older software stacks.

Audit failure rates were reportedly twice as high for organisations running legacy versions of Tomcat, Spring Boot, and Spring Framework. End-of-life products still in use also included CentOS and AngularJS.

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.