VMware Licensing Costs Push 90% of Users Toward Alternatives
Nine out of ten VMware customers are actively evaluating alternatives to their current virtualization environment. That figure, drawn from the 2026 IT Virtualization Survey published by Rimini Street, captures the scale of discontent spreading across enterprise data centers worldwide. The survey, which examined 300 organizations globally that currently run VMware infrastructure, was conducted by Unisphere Research, an independent third-party research firm, lending the findings a degree of credibility beyond a simple vendor-commissioned poll.
The headline statistic is striking on its own terms. But what makes it significant is the context in which it sits. VMware customers are not a niche constituency of cost-sensitive small businesses. These are enterprises with complex, mission-critical workloads built over years — sometimes decades — on VMware's virtualization stack. When 90 percent of that cohort says it is looking elsewhere, something structural has shifted.
That structural shift traces directly to VMware licensing costs. Since Broadcom completed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in late 2023, the company has overhauled how it licenses its products, moving customers from perpetual licenses and à la carte purchasing toward bundled subscription packages. For many organizations, the transition has meant dramatically higher annual outlays. Reports from enterprise IT analyst firms and independent customer communities have consistently flagged renewal sticker shock as the defining issue of the post-acquisition era, and the Rimini Street survey reinforces that pattern.
Why VMware Costs Have Become Unsustainable for Enterprises
The Broadcom acquisition changed more than VMware's ownership structure — it changed the economic logic of running its platform. Under the new licensing model, customers are required to purchase broader product bundles rather than selecting only the components they need. Organizations that had optimized their licensing spend over years found those arrangements dissolved. Renewals arrived with price increases that, by multiple accounts, ranged from significant to extraordinary.
Read next Laika's Wildwood: Stop-Motion Fantasy at TIFF 2026For an enterprise operating thousands of virtual machines, even a modest per-unit cost increase compounds rapidly. At scale, VMware licensing costs that might have represented a predictable line item in annual IT budgets have become a variable and, in many cases, a destabilizing one. The 2026 Rimini Street survey captures this anxiety at the organizational level: the cost pressure is not theoretical, and it is not limited to a subset of customers with legacy deal structures.
It is worth acknowledging the commercial context here. Rimini Street sells third-party support services for VMware, as well as for Oracle and SAP software. The company has a direct financial interest in customers concluding that VMware's official support and licensing costs are prohibitive. That incentive does not automatically invalidate the survey's findings, but it warrants a measured reading. Critically, the survey was fielded by Unisphere Research rather than Rimini Street itself, and its findings align with what analysts and enterprise IT communities have been reporting independently since the Broadcom deal closed. Multiple third-party reports on VMware customer sentiment in 2025 and 2026 have consistently identified licensing cost increases as the primary driver of migration conversations.
The convergence across independent sources carries more weight than any single survey.
Top Barriers Slowing VMware Migration Projects
Licensing dissatisfaction is almost universal among the 300 organizations surveyed. Acting on that dissatisfaction is another matter. The survey identifies operational complexity as the leading barrier preventing organizations from completing or even beginning VMware migration projects.
That finding reflects a reality that any enterprise IT architect will recognize. VMware environments are rarely simple. They are woven into storage, networking, backup, disaster recovery, and security stacks. Virtual machines run databases, ERP systems, and applications that were never designed to be portable. The longer an organization has run VMware, the deeper those dependencies run.
Migration timelines for large enterprise environments are measured in years, not quarters. Teams must audit existing workloads, assess compatibility with target platforms, establish parallel environments for testing, manage cutover windows without service disruption, and retrain operational staff. None of that happens quickly, and all of it costs money — sometimes approaching or exceeding the licensing savings the migration was meant to generate.
Workforce skills represent a compounding barrier. Enterprise IT departments have deep institutional knowledge of VMware administration. Redeploying that expertise toward a different hypervisor or cloud-native architecture requires either retraining or hiring, both of which carry cost and timeline implications. Organizations that are already stretched thin on engineering headcount face a difficult calculus: invest in migration capacity now, or continue paying elevated VMware licensing costs while the migration plan matures.
These barriers explain why a gap exists between the 90 percent of customers expressing interest in alternatives and the much smaller share that have completed significant migrations. Intention and execution are different things in enterprise IT.
Alternatives VMware Users Are Actively Exploring
The 300 organizations in the Rimini Street survey represent a broad cross-section of global enterprises, and their exploration of alternatives is not monolithic. Different organizations are gravitating toward different options based on their workload profiles, cloud strategies, and tolerance for operational disruption.
Cloud migration is a natural consideration for organizations already running hybrid environments. Hyperscale cloud providers offer managed virtualization services that can absorb on-premises VMware workloads with varying degrees of lift-and-shift effort. For workloads where cloud economics make sense and latency requirements permit, this path offers an escape from VMware licensing costs without requiring a full re-architecture.
Open-source hypervisor platforms, particularly those built on KVM, represent another category of alternatives gaining enterprise attention. Proxmox VE has seen increased adoption discussions in enterprise IT forums and analyst coverage since the Broadcom acquisition. Nutanix, which offers its own hypervisor as part of its hyperconverged infrastructure stack, has been a beneficiary of VMware customer conversations, as have Microsoft Hyper-V environments for organizations already deeply invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Third-party support services — the category Rimini Street itself occupies — offer a different kind of alternative: not replacing VMware, but reducing the cost of running it by decoupling support contracts from Broadcom's official support pricing. This option preserves existing environments while lowering the annual cost burden, buying time for longer-term migration planning.
What This Survey Means for Enterprise IT Strategy in 2026
A survey showing 90 percent of VMware customers exploring alternatives is a data point, not a verdict. The enterprise virtualization market does not pivot overnight. But the directional signal is clear enough that IT leadership teams at organizations still running VMware should treat it as an input to strategic planning rather than a headline to absorb and forget.
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware was one of the largest technology deals in history, and its implications for the enterprise software market extend beyond a single vendor's customer base. It accelerated a conversation about vendor lock-in, licensing model risk, and the long-term economics of proprietary infrastructure software that many organizations had deferred for years.
For CIOs and IT directors, the practical implication is that VMware licensing costs have become a board-level line item in a way they were not five years ago. Conversations about virtualization strategy now happen alongside discussions about capital expenditure, cloud spend, and workforce planning. The 300-organization sample in the Rimini Street survey is a proxy for a much larger population of enterprises having similar conversations.
The survey's alignment with other recent industry reports — from analyst firms and enterprise IT communities that have no commercial relationship with Rimini Street — reinforces the conclusion that this is a durable trend rather than a momentary reaction to acquisition uncertainty.
Practical Steps for Organizations Evaluating VMware Alternatives
Awareness that 90 percent of VMware customers are exploring alternatives is useful context. What organizations need is a framework for turning that awareness into a structured evaluation.
The starting point is a workload audit. Not all virtual machines carry equal complexity or equal urgency. Organizations benefit from categorizing workloads by portability, by criticality, and by the cost of keeping them on VMware versus the cost and risk of migrating them. This analysis often surfaces a subset of workloads that are strong migration candidates — smaller, less interdependent, already tested in cloud environments — alongside a core of complex workloads that will take years and significant effort to move.
The second step is a licensing cost analysis that goes beyond the current renewal invoice. Organizations should model what VMware licensing costs will look like across a three-to-five-year horizon under current pricing structures, then compare that trajectory against the total cost of migration alternatives, including engineering time, retraining, and any temporary parallel-environment overhead.
The third step is vendor engagement — not just with Broadcom, but with the full landscape of alternative providers. Competitive pressure from an organization that has done its homework on alternatives carries more weight in licensing negotiations than a complaint about cost increases.
The Rimini Street survey is a useful benchmark for understanding where the broader market stands. The organizations that will navigate this transition most effectively are those that treat it as a strategic planning exercise rather than a reactive response to a price increase.
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