Are you ready for the VMware licensing and pricing hikes?
Since Broadcom acquired VMware late last year, change has been faster than many were anticipating with licensing arrangements bringing for many, significant cost increases. You don’t need to look too far to find customer stories of 500% price increases!
Indeed, some of our customers have been impacted by this, and to help you come to the best decision for your business we've identified the 3 best options for dealing with the VMware pricing hikes.
Option 1: Stick with Broadcom
For some, this just makes sense. You may have invested significantly in VMware over the years, and it likely serves a critical role within your IT infrastructure. Absorbing any price increase may just be the most practical approach. You also may not have much choice right now given the scale of change that might be required to disentangle yourself from VMWare. However, it’s essential to consider alternatives that could help mitigate the effects of these changes as you might not be as closely coupled as you think.
Pros:
- Ensure continuity of the services: by staying with VMware, you ensure that your existing services and workloads continue to run smoothly without disruptions
- No migration required: avoiding migration to a different platform means you won’t need to invest time and resources in moving your workloads to another system.
- Existing skills remains relevant: your team’s familiarity with VMware remains relevant, minimizing the need for extensive retraining.
Cons
- Licensing costs may increase: based on what we’ve seen, your licensing renewal is likely to be more expensive though it’s hard to say by how much.
- Uncertainty with Broadcom: whilst we’re hoping for a period of stability, more policy changes create future unpredictability.
Option 2: Consider ‘managed VMware solutions’
You get the benefit of remaining within the VMWare technology ecosystem but adopting a managed service ‘locked-in’ to older licensing terms can significantly minimise cost impacts. One of the more prominent solutions in this space is the Azure VMware Service (AVS) from Microsoft. Retaining licensing terms in place prior to Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, you can effectively migrate and leverage your existing VMware ecosystem on the whilst benefiting from the capabilities and scalability of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Pros
- Minimise cost increases: alignment with older licensing approach to minimise surprises.
- Compatibility and skill relevance: it’s the same VMWare stack under the hood so need to retrain.
- Straight forward migration: using Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) makes migrating services to/from AVS extremely straight forward.
- Mitigate impact of hardware obsolescence: exploring innovative buyback programmes.
Cons
- Design/Architecture Change: you’ll need to make changes to your existing estate to ‘stretch’ your existing VMWare implementation into the managed provider e.g. networking changes etc.
- Migration: you’ll need to do one; luckily HCX makes this very straight-forward.
Option 3: Remove VMWare dependency through cloud migration
Sometimes it simply makes sense to cut things up and start over. We’ve helped many customers migrate to public cloud platforms from VMWare for a range of reasons; greater control, increased agility, reduced costs, improved scalability, the list goes on. Often the first step is to migrate existing services on a parity basis and the second to modernise the underlying platform, increasing use of managed database/storage/cache services to reduce maintenance burden and costs. The reasons vary but the results are compelling.
Pros:
- Cost savings: public cloud services often follow commodity based ‘pay-as-you-go' cost models which when applied properly using approaches like right-sizing and intelligent scheduling, can significantly reduce your operating costs.
- CapEx shifts to OpEx: removes the need for hardware refreshes and VMWare licensing renewals.
- Access to a wide range of services: public cloud providers offer diverse services for various business needs.
Cons:
- Skill transition: moving to public cloud may require new skills or adjustments for your team.
- Proper planning needed: a well-thought-out migration plan is crucial to avoid disruptions.
- Thorough testing required: validate the cloud setup and performance.
What's next?
Things are moving quickly; ensure the option that you decide on best reflects your short-term position, while also prioritising the long-term consequences.
If you’re interested in option 2 or 3, please complete the form below to speak with our team of cloud migration and managed services experts today.
