Nearly three years after Broadcom purchased VMware, IT leaders still aren’t convinced they will stick with the leading virtualization technology provider over the long term.

Ninety percent of current VMware customer CIOs are considering alternatives to VMware due to higher licensing costs since the Broadcom acquisition, according to a recent survey, with over half saying that Broadcom’s decision to end perpetual license support is a major reason they are evaluating other options.

The survey, commissioned by third-party support vendor Rimini Street, also finds 60% of VMware customers considering multiple-hypervisor strategies, to create more flexible virtualization environments.

Since taking over VMware in late 2023, Broadcom has revamped its pricing models, often leading to cost increases of 50% to 200%. In some cases, customers have reported quotes that would result in price hikes of 1,500%.

Keith Costello, Rimini Street’s EVP and COO, says his company has heard widespread dissatisfaction about the price increases, including the transition from perpetual licenses to a subscription model, as well as the push to adopt VMware Cloud Foundation, an integrated software platform for deploying and managing private and hybrid cloud environments.

“What I’m hearing is that they’re not dissatisfied with the product at all,” he says. “VMware’s customers love their product, but the terms under which VMware is providing alternatives, in terms of migration for their customers, doesn’t work with their timelines, doesn’t work with their economics.”

A VMware spokesman declined to respond to the survey results.

The long road to cost recovery when switching vendors

Widespread dissatisfaction doesn’t necessarily mean IT leaders will abandon VMware, adds Joe Locandro, Rimini Street’s CIO. Alternatives have emerged, but VMware has long been a market leader for virtualization, he notes, and switching to new vendors can be expensive, even considering VMware’s price hikes.

The cost of switching to a new vendor can take three to five years to recover, even when users factor in the price increases, and many CIOs don’t consider the costs of retraining staff in new products and the lost opportunity costs created by a long-term transition to a new vendor with major upfront costs, Locandro says.

“You don’t want to jump from one frying pan to another,” he says. “At the end of the day switching is not a competitive advantage; it’s a bit of the infrastructure and plumbing, and there’s the opportunity cost of investment to other AI initiatives and other things that require capital and expenditure.”

Still, many CIOs want more vendor flexibility and control over their virtualization spending, Costello says.

“One thing clients don’t like, and it’s not unique to VMware software and virtualization capabilities, is that they don’t like being forced into a corner to make a choice,” he adds. “CIOs feel a lack of control over their estate, when, all of a sudden, the price for this big technology that they’ve been relying on for 15 years goes up 3x.”

The survey also finds about two-thirds of IT leaders are considering third-party support for end-of-support versions of VMware’s vSphere virtualization product, a service Rimini Street specializes in.

Rethinking VMware as the default — before renewal removes leverage

While Rimini Street has a huge interest in VMware customers exploring alternatives such as third-party support, other observers of the virtualization market also see broad dissatisfaction with the price increases.

Many CIOs and CFOs have been reevaluating VMware in the wake of Broadcom’s licensing changes, says Thomas Cloud, founder of Vertex CIO Advisory and 48 Technologies and director of IT for an MSP.

But leaving VMware immediately is rarely the right approach, he adds.

“The right answer is to understand which workloads still justify the platform, quantify the real cost of staying, understand the cost and risk of moving, and make the decision before the renewal deadline removes your leverage,” he says. “A VMware renewal should be treated like any other material technology dependency: Understand it before the deadline, quantify the alternatives, and don’t let the renewal date make the decision for you.”

A good approach is to separate the workloads that justify staying on VMware from workloads that can move to other providers, Cloud says. “The biggest mistake I see is treating it as an all-or-nothing migration question,” he adds.

Third-party VMware support can also be a useful bridge, he says. “It can give the company time to avoid making a rushed infrastructure decision simply because a renewal date is approaching,” he explains. “But it should be part of an intentional transition or support strategy, not just a way to postpone the same decision indefinitely.”

In addition to advising clients on potential migrations, Cloud’s organizations are reevaluating their use of VMware as well, he says.

“We’re not looking at it as, ‘VMware is now bad; therefore everything has to move,’” he adds. “We’re looking at where VMware still makes operational and economic sense versus where other platforms such as Hyper-V or Azure may be a better fit going forward. The Broadcom changes have definitely made us more willing to challenge the assumption that VMware should automatically remain the default.”

A defector’s tale

Over at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, engineers and IT leaders began exploring alternatives to VMware in 2021, before the Broadcom acquisition. The center’s transition to SUSE Virtualization was driven more by technical needs, but the price changes at VMware have reinforced the center’s decision, says Maria Grazia Giuffreda, associate director at the center.

The center is also a big supporter of open-source software, and that philosophy drove the organization to seek alternatives, she adds. The center is opposed to paying for software licenses, she notes.

“Cost always has an impact, because you want to reduce your cost wherever possible,” she says. “You sometimes start looking at alternative solutions for reducing the amount of money that you invest, and licenses are an eternal discussion.”

The new solution has reduced the time the center manages infrastructure by 70%, says Dino Conciatore, a systems engineer at the center.

“When we saw the licensing change, we thought, ‘Oh, we’re so lucky, we never liked closed products,’” he adds.

IT leaders seeking options should check out Networkworld’s “5 alternatives to VMware vSphere virtualization platform” and its deeper look at how enterprises are reevaluating their virtualization strategies.

Broadcom is raising the stakes when it comes to preventing its VMware customers from moving to another platform. The company has stopped users from downloading its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK).

While this may not look like significant news VDDK is, in fact, a vital part of tools used to migrate away from VMware. For example, it is used by Microsoft Azure Migrate, Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit, Nutanix Move, and VMware-to-KVM migration products — in other words, many of the applications that will assist disgruntled customers from navigating away from VMware. The kit is still available to larger Broadcom software partners, but can no longer be downloaded by anyone for free.

Broadcom made the move, reported by the VirtualizationHowTo website, with little warning, no deprecation announcement, no alternative link, nor any explanation. The original download link for VDDK now leads to a 404 page, as do many of the support pages for it.

Redditors complained about the missing pages, with one sharing links to copies of VDDK hosted by the Internet Archive. Those files have since been removed from the archive, and the download page has also been excluded from the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive’s index of past web pages. Such exclusions can occur at the site owner’s request, or if the uploads are found to breach the Internet Archive’s policies.

Since purchasing VMware, Broadcom has been making things more difficult for users, with higher prices, unfavorable support terms and unnecessary product bundling. It has boosted its financial returns on the product but customers are seeing fewer benefits.

Making it harder to obtain the tools necessary to walk away from VMware may not be sufficient to stem the tide.

This article first appeared on Network World.

Citrix on Tuesday announced that it has completed the acquisition of longtime partner Numecent, producer of technology that containerizes and manages Windows applications.

The acquisition builds on joint efforts to integrate Numecent’s management tool, Cloudpager, with Citrix Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) after an integration announced in April let administrators natively publish and manage the application containers through familiar Citrix workflows.

Numecent’s other product, Cloudpaging, packages Windows applications into isolated application containers independent of the underlying operating system, streaming them to Windows endpoints on demand rather than requiring them to be included in a desktop image. 

Citrix plans to further integrate the technology into its platform, while also continuing Cloudpaging and Cloudpager support for physical Windows devices.

“Enterprise customers have told us for years that application management is one of the most painful parts of running a Windows environment,” said Shawn Bass, SVP and GM of Citrix DaaS, in the announcement of the acquisition. “Numecent has solved this in a genuinely elegant way. By bringing Cloudpaging and Cloudpager into Citrix, we can make this capability native to every DaaS and physical desktop deployment so IT teams get back the time they spend wrestling with images and app conflicts.”

Analysts and consultants said the move will help enterprise IT to some extent, but will also increase vendor lock-in with Citrix while potentially exposing enterprises to data security risks.

Good for Citrix customers

Gartner VP Analyst Stuart Downes said, “overall, this is a positive for Citrix customers,” but he stressed that the promised conversions “are not 100% compatible.” 

He said, “low-level integrations into the kernel are generally not successful” because code that needs the lowest level of OS integration usually needs direct links to the hardware. Still, he estimated that applications at the low level probably account for only 2% of enterprise applications. 

For the more typical apps, Downes said that there will likely be “north of 90% compatibility. It varies. There are quite a lot of complex factors in app virtualization.” But he emphasized that Numecent offers two components: Cloudpager and Cloudpaging, and “we have yet to see how Citrix will integrate both.”

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, also sees a lot of potential savings for the enterprise.

“Large companies can have thousands of Windows applications, including legacy, custom, industry-specific, and highly specialized applications,” he said. “Many have dependencies on particular versions of Windows, libraries, configurations, or desktop images. Every major desktop refresh, Windows migration, VDI program, cloud move, acquisition, or infrastructure modernization effort can therefore create another application testing and repackaging cycle. The ability to abstract more of the application layer from the environment underneath it can remove a meaningful amount of that friction.”

Noah Kenney, principal consultant at Digital 520, added that the theoretical advantage that Citrix can now offer has great enterprise potential.

But, he argued, this likely amounts to an enterprise IT pay less now, pay more later situation.

“There are operational savings here, which is why customers will adopt it, but the bill comes due when they try to leave,” Kenney said. “This is a good acquisition for Citrix and probably bad for enterprise leverage over time. Citrix can now lose the desktop and still keep the customer. Every application moved into Cloudpager raises the cost of the next migration. Customers get the simplification now and Citrix gets the switching cost later.”

Half right

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that he reads the containerization pitch as half right. “The packaging premise is valid. The cross-operating-system execution premise is not,” he said.

Gogia pointed out that Numecent Cloudpaging packages a Windows application with its dependencies and streams it to a Cloudpaging Player on a physical or virtual Windows endpoint, where it executes locally. “A Mac or Linux user reaches that application through Citrix’s remote delivery, where it still executes on Windows. That is cross-platform access, not cross-platform execution,” he said. “A Windows application does not become a Mac application merely because its pixels arrive on a Mac. The container is a packaging promise and the boundary of that promise is Windows.”

That said, he noted that there is still a lot of value in the Citrix arrangement, because Cloudpaging separates an application from a particular Windows image and carries that package across physical and virtual Windows environments, including Arm-based devices. 

“The real advance is not escaping Windows,” Gogia explained. “It is making application change less dependent on desktop change. Microsoft’s own App Assure data puts enterprise application compatibility above 99.7%, and Cloudpaging’s commercial logic lives almost entirely inside the fraction that remains. At enterprise scale, the final 1% of applications can carry far more than 1% of the business risk.”

But, he added, “Existing Numecent customers need binding answers on entitlements, migration and exit. Citrix has bought control of a useful Windows application lifecycle. Control now has to prove itself, and the proof it owes customers is less complexity, not merely more control for Citrix.”

Possible risk

However, consultant Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, pointed out that the nature of these new Citrix capabilities could expose users to serious security issues, including the risk of data exfiltration. 

He sees Cloudpager as “essentially a privileged switch that can push software to every Windows endpoint at once, which is precisely the kind of mass-distribution channel that produced SolarWinds and Kaseya. Bolting it onto Citrix, whose NetScaler gear has been a favorite ransomware target through repeated ‘CitrixBleed’ flaws, may leave CIOs and organizations wondering who will focus on security for the combined entity, and how will it prevent the type of attacks we’ve seen against Citrix.”

Citrix was asked to comment on these security questions, but did not do so by publication time. 

This article originally appeared on Computerworld.