VMware licensing costs push 90% of users to explore options

VMware costs are soaring. Customers are leaving. That's the takeaway from a new survey of 300 organizations worldwide that use the virtualization software, and it suggests the vast majority of the platform's customers are now heading toward the exit door. Rimini Street published the findings under the title "2026 IT Virtualization Survey, What's Next for VMware Users." The picture? An installed base that's unhappy. They're actively shopping around. And they're increasingly convinced that single-vendor dependency was a mistake, a conclusion that, whether it's fair or not, now colors how these organizations view every renewal, every quote, and every conversation they have with the vendor they once trusted.

The headline number is hard to ignore: 90 percent of participants said they are exploring alternatives to VMware because of higher licensing costs. That is not a rounding error or a handful of disgruntled accounts. It is close to unanimity.

Broadcom's Shadow Falls Over the Survey

To understand why so many organizations are looking elsewhere, you have to understand what changed. Broadcom acquired VMware. And the aftermath has been rough for customers. In the survey, 54 percent of respondents pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders as a reason they're weighing alternatives, a number that shows just how much anger and uncertainty have spread since the deal closed and the old licensing rules were tossed aside.

The pricing story is just as stark. Since Broadcom took over, customers have reported VMware costs rising by as much as 1,000 percent, while many more describe increases in the 100 to 300 percent range, and either way the direction is the same, and it's upward. But it's upward.

It is worth pausing on that 1,000 percent figure. Even if it represents an outlier, the fact that it appears at all in customer accounts tells you something about the scale of the repricing. For IT departments that built budgets around predictable renewal cycles, these are not incremental adjustments. They are structural shocks.

Rimini Has Skin in the Game, and That Matters

Rimini Street sells third-party support for VMware. It also covers other software, including Oracle and SAP. So the company has a commercial incentive here. It's a simple one. They profit when VMware users get frustrated and look for ways out, because that's exactly the market Rimini Street serves, and they're not shy about saying so.

Important. The survey was conducted by a third-party research firm, Unisphere Research, and the results line up with other recent reporting on VMware customers. A biased sponsor does not automatically invalidate a dataset, especially when the pattern shows up elsewhere.

Readers should hold both ideas at once: the sponsor's interest is real, and the numbers still track with what customers have been saying publicly for months.

What Customers Say They Want

Cost savings topped the list. That's what 73 percent of participants named when they made virtualization roadmap decisions, and it's the clearest signal in the whole dataset, the one fact that tells you more than anything else in these numbers. This isn't a technology migration driven by a love of new architecture. It's a migration driven by the finance department. And they're not asking about architecture. They're asking about the bill.

Beyond cost, the survey identified what Rimini described as "major barriers to progress." The most cited obstacles were:

• Operational complexity, named by 40 percent of respondents
• Multi-vendor management challenges, cited by 38 percent
• Securing the increased attack surface, at 37 percent
• Team skills requirements, also at 37 percent

Those four barriers tell a coherent story. Organizations want to move. But they're worried about what happens after they move, and that worry sits there, quiet and heavy, shaping every conversation about timelines and budgets. Splitting workloads across multiple hypervisors sounds appealing until you have to manage the resulting sprawl, and you can't ignore it once it's there.

"These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption."

Multi-Hypervisor Strategies Gain Ground

The survey found that 60 percent of organizations are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy. That's a striking number. It reflects what Rimini called a growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments, the kind of environments that support both operational and financial goals, and that interest, according to Rimini, is only getting stronger as organizations weigh what they need.

Another 47 percent said they favor a hybrid IT virtualization environment combining hypervisors and containers, which the announcement described as a "best of both worlds" approach to workload placement.

And in a detail that should worry VMware's parent company, 48 percent of respondents said they are not planning to move any assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

The Gartner View on Where This Goes

The shift is not just a survey artifact. Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure," released last month, predicted that 55 percent of enterprises will run proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments by 2029. That is up from 25 percent in 2026, which means the curve is expected to steepen, not flatten.

Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst at Gartner, previously described the situation bluntly, saying many clients now see the Broadcom acquisition as "a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor," and that they are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments.

Diversification, Not Just Replacement

Joe McKendrick, lead analyst at Unisphere Research, framed the survey results as evidence of something broader than a vendor swap.

The survey reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependency on a single provider, maintain continuity for mission-critical systems and modernize at a pace that fits their own business requirements, he said. But it's not simple. For many organizations, that means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resilience, security and scalability over time. They can't do everything at once.

That is the part worth holding onto. The story here is not simply that VMware licensing costs went up and customers got angry. It is that years of consolidation into a single virtualization vendor left organizations exposed when that vendor changed its terms. The survey data suggests the response is not a stampede to one competitor, but a deliberate move toward mixed environments where no single provider holds all the power.

It's still unclear. Does that diversification actually cut costs, or does it just move them around across more line items? We don't know yet. Operational complexity, after all, is the single biggest barrier respondents named, and that's a fact worth sitting with. Managing multiple hypervisors costs money too, just in different places.

For now, the direction of travel is clear. VMware licensing costs have become the central issue in enterprise virtualization planning, and the organizations that once treated the platform as a permanent fixture are now treating it as one option among several.