The VMware Exit

Your VMware renewal quote just arrived. It is three times what you paid last year. What do you do?

When Broadcom completed its $61 billion acquisition of VMware in 2023, it triggered one of the most disruptive pricing events in enterprise IT history. Perpetual licenses were eliminated overnight. A catalog of 8,000 SKUs collapsed into four mandatory bundles. The minimum core requirement jumped from 16 to 72 cores per CPU. Organizations that had been running stable VMware environments for years received renewal quotes showing increases of 300%, 800%, even 1,500%.

The organizations that navigated this disruption most effectively were the ones that responded deliberately - that understood their exposure precisely, evaluated alternatives honestly, and executed migrations with sound governance and risk management. Beyond VMware is the guide they needed.

This book covers:

Part I - Understanding the Crisis: A rigorous analysis of what Broadcom actually changed, how to calculate your true financial exposure under the new licensing model, and a decision framework for choosing between negotiation, partial migration, and full platform exit.

Part II - Evaluating the Alternatives: In-depth, honest evaluations of every major alternative - Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI, Nutanix AOS/AHV, Apache CloudStack, oVirt/Red Hat Virtualization, and Scale Computing HC3 - across seven consistent dimensions including architecture, management, HA, storage, networking, licensing cost, and ecosystem.

Part III - Planning Your Migration: How to build the executive business case that secures budget approval, conduct a thorough inventory and workload classification, and design the migration architecture that fits your environment.

Part IV - Migration Execution: Migration governance, workload migration patterns for Windows, Linux, databases, clusters, and container hosts, networking and storage continuity across the dual-platform period, testing and validation discipline, and the commercial work of exiting VMware contracts correctly.

Part V - Post-Migration: Operations, monitoring, and automation on the new platform - including how to replace vCenter capabilities, build a Prometheus/Grafana monitoring stack, and establish the governance and compliance practices that protect the migration's benefits over time.

Written for IT architects, infrastructure engineers, IT managers, and the consultants advising them, this book provides the strategic and technical depth needed to make platform decisions that hold up over a five-year horizon - not just platform changes that reduce next year's invoice.

The VMware exodus is the largest infrastructure transition of the decade. This is the guide for doing it right.