When Broadcom bought VMware for $69 billion in 2023, some “skeptics” knew what was coming.
What happened
Broadcom has a playbook and they stick to it. Buy a market-leading infrastructure company. Jack up prices. Bundle everything into expensive suites. Squeeze the customer base before they can leave.
With VMware, they moved fast:
- Perpetual licenses? Gone. Everything is subscription now.
- vSphere pricing restructured. Some customers are seeing 2x to 5x increases.
- You can no longer buy standalone products — you need the full VMware Cloud Foundation bundle.
- Partner discounts slashed.
- Thousands of experienced VMware engineers laid off.
If you’re running VMware, you know the math. A $50,000 yearly bill becomes $200,000 overnight. For the exact same software. Budgets that were signed off three years ago are now in emergency mode.
Everyone is looking at the exit
I talk to people running infrastructure. Every single VMware admin is evaluating alternatives. The ones who can leave, are leaving. The ones who can’t are working out how to make leaving possible.
There are good open source alternatives out there:
- Proxmox VE — the most popular drop-in. KVM-based, proper web UI, clustering, live migration. Free, with paid support if you want it.
- XCP-ng + Xen Orchestra — the community fork of Citrix Hypervisor. Solid management tooling.
- oVirt / Red Hat Virtualization — more enterprise, heavier to run.
- Kubernetes — a lot of orgs are using this mess as an excuse to accelerate their container migration.
Some years ago I did test VMware in my own lab, not particularly because I wanted to move to it, but more because I was surrounded by admins using it and wanted to learn more about it.
Just the fact that I had to sign up to get the next upgrade file/s didn’t sit well with me. Not because I was worried about my personal data but because it was clear to me that it would have been very easy for VMware to close the tap at any point.
This Broadcom strategy reminds me of those tycoon games back in the 90’s, where you could set the taxes to zero in January to let more citizens join your city and then ramp it up to max at the end of December. It was fun, a bit short-sighted, but fun. Maybe that’s where Broadcom gets its strategies from. :-)
Jokes aside, I certainly learned that lesson a long time ago.
Here’s the bit that gets me
For years I’ve watched IT departments reject open source because they wanted “a vendor they can hold accountable”. Open source was considered risky. VMware was the safe choice — a proper company, enterprise support, certified engineers. You paid the premium because you were buying predictability.
Then Broadcom bought them and that predictability vanished overnight. The safe choice wasn’t safe at all. The vendor went rogue, and your only options are to pay up or migrate in a hurry.
This is the risk of proprietary infrastructure that “experienced IT administrators” proposing the “safe” solutions do not talk about: the vendor can change the rules whenever they want, and you have no say in it.
You can’t fork the code. You can’t take your business elsewhere without a massive migration project. You’re locked in.
But who do I call when something breaks?
I hear this one a lot. The answer is: the same kind of people you called before. Every major open-source project has commercial support behind it. Proxmox sells enterprise subscriptions. Canonical sells Ubuntu Pro. You’re not on your own.
The difference is: if your open-source vendor goes rogue, you have options. The community can fork the project and carry it forward. When Oracle killed CentOS, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux appeared within weeks. When Broadcom torched VMware, the migration tools to KVM got better overnight. The community is your safety net — and proprietary software cannot give you that.
What I’d think about next time
The VMware story isn’t unique. We’ve seen it with Oracle (Solaris, VirtualBox, Java licensing). With IBM and the Red Hat acquisition. Now with Broadcom and VMware. The bigger the proprietary vendor, the more exposed you are to things you can’t control.
I’m not saying everything should be open source tomorrow. But I am saying that vendor lock-in is a real cost, and you should factor it into your decisions — just like you factor in hardware, power, and staff time.
When your vendor triples your bill overnight, that’s not a budgeting problem. It’s a governance problem. You gave them a loaded gun and trusted them not to use it.
Open source won’t solve every problem. But it guarantees you’ll never have that particular problem.
And that’s worth quite a lot.