After the VMware/Broadcom price hikes: cloud, on-prem, or colocation?
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware changed the rules: a forced move to subscription bundles, the end of perpetual licenses, and bills that have multiplied for many companies. Beyond the frustration, this disruption is an opportunity: to re-examine where, and under which model, your infrastructure should run.
Estimate my cost →What actually changed #
Virtualization, long treated as a fixed cost and forgotten, is once again a major budget line. Renewing as-is is no longer neutral. And when a component this central is called into question, the whole stack is up for debate: the hardware, its location, and the economic model that comes with it.
The options on the table #
- Switch hypervisors: Proxmox, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, or XCP-ng are the most cited alternatives.
- Lean further into public cloud: appealing, but the reason for leaving, cost, often reappears in another form.
- Repatriate to on-premises hardware, or move to colocation: take back control of the hardware and its location.
The real question #
It is not what replaces VMware, but which infrastructure model best serves your business over the next three years. Using this forced migration to compare cloud, on-premises, and colocation on the same cost basis avoids repeating the same imposed trade-off two years from now.
FAQ #
No. Successful transitions move in waves, starting with the most stable, least critical workloads.
It does not replace the hypervisor, but it hands back control of the hardware and of infrastructure costs, which changes the overall equation.
Written on 1 September 2026.
From reading to comparing: relevant data centers
Estimate my cost → Compare data centers