There is a specific email that has been landing in mid-market IT inboxes for two years now. It comes from a Broadcom account rep or a VMware partner, it references your upcoming renewal, and the number in it is two to ten times what you paid last cycle. Sometimes more.
If that email has arrived, or you can see it coming, this post is a checklist for the ninety days before you sign anything.
What actually changed
A quick, honest recap so we are working from the same facts.
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, the commercial model has been rebuilt, and it is still moving. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 was announced in May 2026, positioned around AI and Kubernetes workloads, with more licensing automation layered on. The platform keeps getting more enterprise, which is fine if you are an enterprise and expensive if you are not. The structural changes that matter to a mid-market shop are these:
- Perpetual licenses are gone. VMware is subscription-only now. The licenses you “own” stop receiving support and updates, and there is no buy-it-once option going forward.
- The metric moved from per-CPU to per-core, with a sixteen-core-per-CPU minimum that means a modestly specced host gets billed for more cores than it runs.
- The small-business SKUs were discontinued. vSphere Essentials Plus, the product that fit companies with a handful of hosts, is gone. Those customers are funneled into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), large bundles built and priced for enterprises.
- There is now a penalty for renewing late. Broadcom applies a retroactive surcharge, reported at around 20 percent, on renewals that lapse past their date. The window is not just a deadline anymore; missing it costs money directly.
- The bridge deals are expiring. Many organizations accepted one-year bridge agreements in 2024 to buy time. Those are now rolling into full bundle pricing.
The result for a mid-market shop is the renewal letter described above: a platform you were paying low five figures for is now quoted at six figures, for capabilities you mostly will not use, on a subscription you cannot escape by simply not upgrading, with a surcharge if you drag your feet. Industry surveys now put the share of VMware customers actively evaluating alternatives somewhere in the 50 to 75 percent range. You are not having an unusual reaction.
The trap to avoid
The reflex is to negotiate the renewal down and sign. Sometimes that is the right move for one more cycle. But signing a multi-year VCF agreement to make the immediate pain stop is how you end up exactly here again in three years, with more workloads locked to the platform and less leverage than you have today.
The renewal is the one moment you have leverage. Use the ninety days before it to actually evaluate, not just to haggle.
The 90-day checklist
1. Get your real core count, not your licensed count
Before you can evaluate anything, know what you actually run. Inventory every host: physical cores, populated sockets, and the cores you are genuinely using versus the cores you are being billed for under the new minimums. The gap between those two numbers is often the single biggest line item in the price increase, and it is the number that makes alternatives look good.
2. Separate “VMware the hypervisor” from “VMware the lock-in”
Most mid-market environments use a small fraction of what VCF bundles. You need compute virtualization, some networking, some storage, snapshots, and live migration. You are being asked to pay for a full private-cloud suite. Write down the features you actually depend on. That short list is your real requirement, and almost all of it is available on open platforms without the bundle tax.
A useful tell: the VCF value equation breaks down hardest for deployments in the 50 to 100 core range that are not actually using the high-end bundle components like NSX or vSAN. If you are paying full VCF rates and the advanced networking and storage-virtualization pieces sit unused, you are funding an enterprise suite to run plain virtual machines. That is the clearest signal that your real requirement and your bill have come apart.
3. Map your lock-in honestly
The reason the renewal feels inescapable is switching cost, so quantify it. Which workloads are genuinely VMware-specific (tied to vSphere APIs, VMware tooling, third-party products that only certify on ESXi) versus which are just “VMs that happen to run on VMware”? In most mid-market estates the second category is the large majority, and those workloads are portable to any modern virtualization or cloud platform with standard images and a migration window.
4. Price the alternatives on your real requirement
This is where the math usually turns. The credible landing zones for a VMware exit fall into a few buckets:
- Another on-prem hypervisor (Proxmox, Hyper-V, OpenStack on your own hardware). Lower license cost, but you still own all the operational burden, and you are buying and refreshing hardware.
- A hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, GCP). Solves the capex problem, but trades a predictable VMware bill for a metered bill with egress fees, and trades one form of lock-in for another.
- A managed OpenStack cloud. Cloud economics without the capex, standard open APIs instead of proprietary ones, and someone else operating the platform, on predictable contract pricing rather than per-service metering.
Price your real requirement, the short feature list from step 2, against each. Include the parts vendors leave out: hardware refresh and datacenter cost for the on-prem option, egress and per-service charges for the hyperscaler option.
5. Pressure-test data sovereignty and exit terms
Whatever you move to, ask the question VMware’s model should have taught you to ask: how hard is it to leave? Open APIs, standard image formats, no egress penalty for taking your data out, and clarity on where your data physically lives. The whole point of this exercise is to not be here again, so do not trade VMware lock-in for a different lock-in with a friendlier first invoice.
6. Plan the migration as a project, not a leap
You do not have to move everything before the renewal. A credible plan is: identify the portable majority, stand up the target platform, migrate a low-risk workload group first to prove the path, and keep a shrinking VMware footprint for the genuinely VMware-specific holdouts while you address them. That phased plan is also your negotiating leverage on the renewal itself. A rep who knows you have a working exit path quotes differently than one who knows you are stuck.
Where Open Edge fits
We are a managed cloud built on OpenStack, with US-sovereign datacenters, contract-based pricing, and no egress fees. For a mid-market team staring at a VCF renewal, the relevant points are specific:
- Cloud economics without capex. You are not buying or refreshing hardware to escape the per-core bill. You also are not standing up and operating OpenStack yourself, which is its own real program.
- Open standards instead of proprietary ones. Standard OpenStack APIs, Terraform and Ansible compatibility, standard image formats. Portable in, and portable back out. We say this knowing it cuts both ways, because “you can leave” is the entire promise.
- Predictable contract pricing. A number you can put in a budget, not a metered bill with surprises and not a subscription that reprices every renewal.
- A migration that is a managed project. We help you sort the portable majority from the VMware-specific holdouts, stand up the landing zone, and move workloads in phases with a named engineering team, not a ticket queue.
We are not going to tell you that lifting every workload off VMware is trivial. The VMware-specific holdouts are real and they take work. But the portable majority, which is most of what you run, has a clear path, and the renewal letter is the moment to start walking it.
Before you sign
If a VCF or VVF renewal is in front of you, do these three things first: get your real core count, write down the short list of features you actually use, and price that list against a managed alternative with open APIs and predictable cost. If the alternative wins, you have ninety days to start a phased migration and a much better position from which to negotiate whatever VMware footprint you keep.
The renewal is leverage. Spend it on an evaluation, not just a haggle.
Want help pricing a VMware exit against Managed OpenStack on Open Edge, including the parts other vendors leave off the quote? Reach out at https://open-edge.io/contact.