Analyst firm Gartner believes over half of VMware users will start evaluating alternative hybrid cloud platforms yet still rates the Broadcom business unit a leader in two major markets.

Gartner predicted increased interest in VMware exits in its Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure (DHI) – aka hybrid clouds – which opens with a “Strategic Planning Assumption” that “By 2029, 55 percent of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery, up from 25 percent in 2026.”

Gartner’s mention of 2029 feels noteworthy, because that year will be six years after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. As previously written, plenty of VMware users acquired fresh three-year subscriptions in the months before the deal closed. Migrating from VMware to a rival platform is a risky and complex project, and we often hear of customers deciding it is safer to stick with Broadcom for longer while they hatch plans. If orgs in that position refresh for another three-year sub during 2026, 2029 would be a natural jumping off point.

Numerous virtualisation contenders are trying to lure Virtzilla’s customers, yet progress is slow. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has often said it will be several years before some are ready to move. While Gartner predicts a majority of VMware customers will contemplate a move, the Broadcom business unit will keep most of its customers for at least another three years – and recently turned its attention to refreshing its low-end vSphere Standard product, a move that will give it a chance to retain more current users.

The DHI Magic Quadrant rates VMware as a leader in the field, alongside AWS, Nutanix, Microsoft and Oracle. Gartner rates VMware’s core virtualisation technology, formal sovereign cloud ecosystem, and AI-native infrastructure as strengths.

Broadcom appears firmly in the crosshairs of European antitrust watchdogs, with European Union (EU) officials reportedly grilling cloud providers impacted by sweeping licensing changes.

Bloomberg reports that European cloud firms are being subject to questions from antitrust officials on the importance of VMware offerings and to what extent they could be easily replaced. Cloud service providers are also reportedly being asked for any new certification arrangements they might deem “unfair.”

Should the commission eventually decide to escalate the matter, it could launch a formal investigation or intervene more quickly with the option of imposing so-called “interim measures” – temporary orders that can only be implemented in the event officials find immediate risk of serious and irreparable damage to competition. These include ordering companies to pause at-issue practices for a short time.

Such measures, though, are rarely used, and in the event they ever are, legal challenges can be brought by the affected company, further slowing the process. Companies found to breach EU antitrust laws can be hit by fines of up to 10% of their global annual revenue, though such instances are few and far between.

Since its $61 billion takeover of VMware closed in late November 2023, Broadcom has instigated sweeping changes, many of which have caused consternation among some customers.

Ripping up perpetual license offerings to create subscription-based mass bundles resulted in customers purchasing subscriptions to services they don’t need just to access the ones they do.

Broadcom has also shuttered the Advantage Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSP), replacing it with an invite-only system. The White Label model, which allowed smaller cloud service providers to work through Pinnacle or Premier partners, was also retired. And just last week, Broadcom pulled the plug on a software kit that allowed rivals to migrate virtual machines away from VMware.

Customer consternation has seen a considerable number of VMware users jump ship, much to the delight of Nutanix, Red Hat, and even some hyperscalers.

Broadcom, though, has consistently been defiant, maintaining an uncompromising stance amid VMware related-legal spats with disgruntled ex’s like Tesco, Siemens, and more recently, T-Mobile US.

CEO Hock Tan previously proudly proclaimed that more than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers have signed up for the vendor’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform. At the company’s recent Explore event in Las Vegas, chief product officer Paul Turner tried to paint the private cloud offering as a means to better manage surging token costs.

That hasn’t stopped Broadcom from being painted as public enemy No. 1 by the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE). The group took issue with the shuttering of VCSP, filing a complaint with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition alleging that it would force many European communication service providers to exit the market.

Broadcom also recently lost out in a fight with EU antitrust regulators over access to documents it contended were covered by American legal professional privilege. The EU General Court sided with the bloc’s regulators, however, finding that “it is for the commission to decide whether a particular item of information is necessary to enable it to bring to light an infringement of the EU competition rules.”

VMware has defended its decision to end public downloads of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK).

VDDK is an SDK that a Broadcom technical document describes as “a set of libraries and utilities that enable software developers to create applications that can access and manipulate virtual disks used” and also “provides APIs for backup and recovery, cloning, and other operations on virtual disks.”

Those qualities mean VDDK is also useful when moving VMs from VMware to another virtualisation environment.

VMware’s rivals spotted that and made VDDK part of their migration tools. Nutanix’s Move, for example, requires a VDDK library to do the job. Red Hat also recommends using VDDK for migrations.

ShapeBlue, an integrator that specialises in Apache CloudStack, an alternative to VMware, rates VDDK as an important part of migration tools.

“The virt-v2v engine that sits underneath most VMware-to-KVM conversion work supports VDDK as an input transport,” the company wrote in late August.

ShapeBlue’s post appeared a day or two after VMware, without fanfare or an explanation, took down the web pages that offered VDDK downloads.

“A vendor is entitled to change how it distributes an SDK,” ShapeBlue wrote. “Doing it without a word, while the Apache CloudStack administration guide and other projects’ install instructions still tell people to click a link that no longer resolves, is something else.”

“The cost lands unevenly too,” the company added. “A large backup vendor with a partner relationship has someone to call. A three-person migration consultancy, an open-source project, or a customer converting their own workloads has a forum post and a 404.”

In an email, VMware defended its actions. To understand its response, know that VMware calls third party developers who work with its products technology alliance partners – aka “TAPs”.

“Access to the VDDK is still available through select TAP for its licensed use case, which has always been backup and recovery,” said VMware. “Customers needing backup and recovery capabilities can choose from the many approved solutions already available from these partners.”

“The VDDK is not a customer entitlement. It is a software development kit covered by its own developer license and was never included with a Broadcom software purchase,” a company spokesperson added.

VMware’s argument is therefore that users should not expect they can use VDDK, and that migrations is an unlicensed use case for the tool – which remains available as part of products from TAP members.

VMware’s rivals have pointed out that ending public VDDK downloads could disrupt some migration projects that have already commenced, making the withdrawal of downloads jarring given the virtualisation giant hasn’t previously policed use of the SDK.

Services organisations that perform VMware migrations have found workarounds that make it possible to migrate VMs without needing VDDK.

VMware’s decision to stop public VDDK downloads comes at a time when its changed licensing policies have seen some users either consider reducing their use of its products – as was the case at VMware channel partner Rackspace – or shifting to a rival platform.

VDDK has been downloadable for years and VMware cannot have been ignorant of how its rivals used the SDK to facilitate migrations. It’s therefore not hard to conclude that this is a defensive move by VMware, given it allowed downloads for years.

Moving VMs is, however, among the easier parts of a virtualisation migration project. Rebuilding or replacing the entirety of a virtualised environment, across networks, security, and storage, is the hard part and VMware knows it – which is why it offers a site recovery tool that doubles as a migration utility.

Removing easy access to VDDK therefore doesn’t change much for those planning a move away from VMware.

Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur has ditched VMware as part of a wider datacenter and network refresh, saving itself more than 85 percent on licensing costs – though its Chief Technology Officer says the decision wasn’t purely financial.

Transforming Spurs into a winning force on the pitch remains a work in progress. Off the pitch, though, the club is nearing the end of a project to overhaul the tech inside its White Hart Lane stadium in north London.

The ground holds almost 63,000 fans and runs more than 1,650 Wi-Fi access points, 840+ under seat access points, 700 Bluetooth beacons, 20,000 network access points with 1,849 IPTV screens and 519 CCTV cameras connected. A six aisle datacenter is also sited within the arena.

Rob Pickering, CTO at Spurs, said that on the server, storage and networking side, the club has switched entirely to the HPE GreenLake portfolio, “underpinned by OpsRamp and Morpheus (VM Essentials).” HPE will run the hybrid cloud managed service.

In the datacenter, Spurs has moved to ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and HPE Alletra storage MP. Connectivity is being upgraded to WiFi 7 and HPE Aruba Central with self-driving capabilities.

Why migrate from VMware? “Savings is a big part of the reason,” said Pickering. “It’s a significant amount, north of 85 percent,” less than the club was forking out for licensing.

“We moved away as we in put the infrastructure… over the last three months,” he added. “The issues with the Broadcom takeover of VMware are well known in terms of the commercial changes to their structure and the way that they engage with clients.”

Since buying VMware in 2023, Broadcom has discontinued certain standalone products in favour of bundles that are often pricier regardless of whether customers use every components. Broadcom seems only focused on VMware’s 10,000 to 30,000 largest customers, out of a base that numbered 350,000 before the takeover.

Pickering framed virtualisation itself as a commodity: “If it’s not built into a broader AI operation stack, the value is even lower again. Having that all connected back into an operation stack that our team can work from – one pane of glass – is worth more than just the saving that come from moving vendor A to vendor B. We do see significant savings from that, but really it’s all part of the broader story of how do we put AI ops at the heart of what we do from a technology perspective.”

He said the tech team at Spurs is relatively small, so the “ability to use AI operations to proactively see faults and remediate them without the input of a person is really critical to us.”

Spurs declined to disclose what it had been paying VMware or which VMware products it used. Pickering did, however, describe HPE VM Essentials (VME) as a “completely capable replacement.”

The Aruba network upgrade is “running late” and should be completed within a month. Getting it right matters as up to about 30,000 fans hop onto the stadium’s Wi-Fi at any given point during a game. The ground also doubles as a concert venue and hosts NFL matches and rugby league games too.

“The process of replacing all of those consistently in a non-impactful way – given the stadium operates really 365 days a year – is one of the hardest challenges of doing any technology project in a stadium. There’s no real window of downtime in stadium.”

Of course there’s the physics too: “A stadium is a giant Faraday cage. It’s glass and steel. It’s very hard to get RF to work. We make sure we build things that ensure the RS signal can travel the distance it needs to. We also need a lot of density to do that… We’re doing like 1,800 access points across the stadium in totality. So it’s significant in terms of the physical engineering challenge to get it in here, but also the radio engineering challenge.”

With Spurs losing its first two Premier League Games despite spending £300 million on new players during the summer, the club’s technology upgrades may be delivering more reliable returns than its transfer business, at least for now.

Microsoft will phase out the current licensing structure for Azure VMware Solution (AVS). This will eliminate one option for organisations to use VMware in the cloud without licensing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) themselves. Existing customers have until August 2027 to transition.

Under the current version of AVS, the necessary licenses for vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and other components are included in the service Microsoft provides. That model is being phased out. Starting October 31, 2026, Microsoft will no longer sell new AVS environments that include these VMware licenses.

Going forward, customers must have their own VCF license from Broadcom, reports The Register. They can then use it within AVS via the “Bring Your Own License” model, also known as AVS VCF BYOL. Existing users of the current setup must transition by August 30, 2027, at the latest. After that, their existing environments will no longer run the same way.

Centorrino Technologies is replacing VMware across its hosted infrastructure platform with SUSE Virtualisation to avoid higher costs associated with VMware under Broadcom.

The Australian technology provider has already been running the platform in production and is now preparing for a broader customer rollout. That phase is expected to involve migrating thousands of virtual machine instances from VMware to SUSE Virtualisation across customer environments.

The project reflects a broader response from infrastructure providers and enterprise users to changes in licensing and subscription costs in the virtualisation market. For Centorrino Technologies, the work involved more than replacing one platform with another. It also had to migrate production workloads with minimal interruption, support multi-tenant hosting arrangements and maintain service availability.

A key part of the effort has been creating a repeatable migration framework for use across hundreds of customer environments. The process is intended to move workloads at scale while keeping disruption low.

Software giant VMware is suing an Italian distributor for around €30 million in damages, claiming in a London court that the company failed to ensure a customer agreed to delete old software licenses during an upgrade plan.

VMware said Computer Gross should have required Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo to agree to VMware’s licensing terms when it sold the bank VMware’s cloud computing software, according to a newly public High Court claim.

Computer Gross had previously bought the rights to resell the software, the claim says.

VMware said that under its terms, Computer Gross was required to ensure that Intesa deleted its old software licenses once it had the updated versions. But Computer Gross failed to do so, and Intesa confirmed that it never agreed to those terms, according to the claim.

VMware said that it gave Computer Gross an 82% discount on the standard resale agreement, based on the expectation that Intesa would retire its existing perpetual licenses, according to the filing.

The list price of the software was €36 million, but Computer Gross paid only €6.6 million, resulting in a discount worth €29.4 million, the claim says.

VMware said Computer Gross should have prevented the license duplication. By not doing so, Computer Gross essentially sold the software at a heavily discounted price.

As well as damages for the allegedly unauthorised price cut, VMware is seeking an order to prevent Computer Gross from continuing separate civil proceedings in Milan, the claim says.

Computer Gross breached a jurisdiction clause in its contract with VMware when it asked the Italian court to confirm that it did not owe VMware compensation over the software deal, according to the claim.

Broadcom has lost a round in what’s shaping up to be one of the more consequential antitrust fights in European tech regulation. The EU General Court dismissed the company’s request to suspend an information demand from the European Commission, specifically one that seeks documents related to Broadcom’s US legal advisers.

The ruling effectively tells Broadcom that EU regulators can, in fact, ask for those papers. And that trying to challenge such requests could, in the court’s words, weaken enforcement efforts in EU competition law.