Featured Article: VMware After the Broadcom Acquisition

For many organizations, VMware has been a dependable part of the infrastructure stack for years. It supported virtualization, disaster recovery, and core workloads quietly and reliably in the background.

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has changed the operating environment around that stability. Most notably, pricing models, packaging structures, and licensing requirements have shifted. For some organizations, renewal costs have increased significantly. For others, the structure of what they are required to purchase has changed entirely.

The question now isn’t whether VMware works.

The question is whether the new model still aligns with your business.

What Has Actually Changed?

Since the acquisition, several structural adjustments have affected customers:

• Transition from perpetual licensing to subscription-based models

• Consolidation of product offerings into bundled packages

• Changes in minimum core counts and licensing thresholds

• Pricing increases at renewal

• Adjustments to partner and support models

These shifts don’t impact every organization the same way. But they do introduce financial and operational variables that many teams were not planning to revisit this year.

For environments that were sized carefully under older models, the new requirements may create cost pressure that feels disproportionate to actual usage.

That’s where the reassessment begins.

The Financial Impact: More Than Just a Line Item

When renewal notices arrive, the immediate focus is often on the percentage increase.

But the deeper financial questions are:

• How does this change affect your three to five year infrastructure forecast?

• Are you paying for bundled capabilities you don’t fully use?

• Does your licensing footprint still match your workload footprint?

• How does VMware cost compare to realistic alternatives, not just theoretical ones?

Some organizations are absorbing increases without evaluating whether the architecture still makes sense. Others are reacting quickly without fully understanding migration complexity.

Neither extreme serves the business well.

Operational Considerations Customers Should Be Thinking About

Beyond cost, there are practical considerations that deserve attention:

Workload dependency

Which systems are truly tied to VMware? Which could be portable if needed?

Disaster recovery strategy

Does your current recovery model depend heavily on VMware licensing structures?

Cloud assumptions

Would moving workloads to public cloud meaningfully reduce cost, or simply shift it?

Compliance and data residency

Are regulatory frameworks influencing where infrastructure must live?

Growth plans

If compute requirements expand, how will the new licensing structure scale with you?

These questions help shift the conversation from “renew or migrate” to “optimize deliberately.”

The Risk of Waiting Too Long

One of the biggest challenges organizations face right now is compressed timelines.

When renewal deadlines drive decision-making, options narrow. Migration planning becomes rushed. Cost comparisons become surface-level. Risk tolerance increases unintentionally.

Infrastructure decisions made under pressure often prioritize speed over strategy.

Evaluating options early preserves flexibility.

This Doesn’t Automatically Mean Leaving VMware

For some organizations, staying with VMware under Broadcom will still make sense.

For others, a hybrid approach may be appropriate. That could include:

• Reducing footprint before renewal

• Moving select workloads to alternative hypervisors

• Reassessing disaster recovery architecture separately from production

• Introducing private cloud or hosted infrastructure models

• Phasing changes over multiple contract cycles

There is no universal answer. The right path depends on workload criticality, operational maturity, financial tolerance, and long-term business objectives.

What matters most is that the decision is intentional.

Questions Every Organization Should Be Asking Right Now

If VMware is part of your environment, this is a practical starting point:

• What will our next renewal realistically cost?

• Do we fully understand the new licensing requirements?

• Are we over-provisioned relative to actual usage?

• What would a partial migration look like?

• How much time would we need to transition safely if we chose to?

• Are we making this decision because it’s right for the business, or because the deadline is approaching?

These are not panic questions. They are governance questions.

The Catalyst Perspective

At Catalyst Group, we are not aligned to a single platform. Our role is to help organizations evaluate infrastructure decisions through a business lens.

The Broadcom acquisition has introduced real changes. For some customers, those changes are manageable. For others, they require a thoughtful re-evaluation of architecture, cost, and risk.

The opportunity right now is not to react.

It’s to assess.

When infrastructure supports the business strategy, pricing shifts and vendor changes become manageable events rather than disruptive ones.

If VMware is part of your environment, now is the time to review your position, understand your options, and make decisions from a place of control rather than urgency.

That conversation can start simply.