VMware Licensing Costs Push 90 Percent of Users to Weigh Alternatives, Survey Finds

The Numbers Behind the Restlessness

Rimini Street has published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey - What's Next for VMware Users," a study of 300 organizations worldwide that run VMware in production. The headline finding is hard to ignore: 90 percent of participants said they are exploring VMware alternatives because of the vendor's higher licensing costs, and 54 percent specifically cited Broadcom's decision to stop supporting perpetual license holders.

Both figures land against a backdrop that enterprise infrastructure teams know well. Since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware, customers have reported cost increases ranging from roughly 100 to 300 percent in many cases, with some accounts describing hikes as steep as 1,000 percent. It is that spread - a few catastrophic renewals surrounded by a broad, persistent uplift - that appears to be driving evaluation activity rather than outright migration.

Cost is not a secondary consideration in these decisions. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants named cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions, making budget pressure the dominant lens through which platform choices are now being made.

The Barriers Slowing the Exit

Exploration, however, is not the same as execution. Rimini's announcement pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations rethinking their virtualization strategy. Respondents identified four obstacles most often:

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

The clustering of those answers around operational and security concerns rather than licensing alone suggests that switching hypervisors is still treated as a platform engineering project with real staffing implications, not a straightforward procurement swap.

"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 also traces where that cautious change is heading. Sixty percent of the organizations surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which Rimini described as indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals."

Alongside that, 47 percent said they favor a hybrid IT virtualization environment built from both hypervisors and containers, a combination Rimini framed as a "best of both worlds" approach to workload placement. Notably, 48 percent of respondents said they are not planning to move any of their assets onto VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

Read together, those three data points describe an estate that is deliberately diversifying rather than consolidating. As Rimini put it, the trend shows "increasing diversification in enterprise virtualization strategies with a longer-term transition toward bespoke, multi-platform IT virtualization environments," with organizations combining on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and alternative hypervisors to pursue workload flexibility, operational efficiency and better cost control.

Analyst Expectations and a Necessary Caveat

Independent analyst forecasts run in the same direction. In its "Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure" released last month, Gartner predicted that 55 percent of enterprises will run proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery by 2029 - up from 25 percent in 2026.

The strategic shift is bigger than pricing. "Many clients are looking ... at this [as] a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor and are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments," Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst at Gartner, previously said of Broadcom's acquisition.

One caveat is worth stating plainly: Rimini Street sells third-party support for VMware, Oracle and SAP, so it has a commercial incentive to portray VMware users as facing obstacles. The survey was nonetheless conducted by an independent research firm, Unisphere Research, and its results align with other recent reporting on VMware customer sentiment - which is precisely why the numbers are being watched so closely by enterprise architects.

Survey Snapshot

Base: 300 organizations worldwide running VMware
Exploring alternatives due to licensing costs: 90%
Citing end of perpetual license support: 54%
Cost savings as top roadmap priority: 73%
Considering multi-hypervisor strategy: 60%
Favoring hypervisors + containers hybrid: 47%
Not moving assets to Cloud Foundation: 48%
Gartner: alternative DHI proofs of concept
  2026: 25%  |  2029: 55%