Broadcom has withdrawn VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) from the market in parts of the EMEA region, the company told The Register. Customers should check with their local dealer to see if the product is still available. One affected organization reported that this would increase its annual costs tenfold.
The American chip manufacturer confirmed to The Register that VVF is no longer available in some EMEA countries, but is still available in most. “Customers will have to reach out to sales reps or partners to determine availability of a given product in their region,” said a spokesperson. The changes were implemented recently.
An anonymous customer told The Register that their hardware park has thousands of compute cores. Without affordable options, the annual VMware expenditure would skyrocket from approximately $130,000 to $1.3 million. “We’re currently looking to jump ship to either Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Nutanix, as we can’t eat (that) increase,” said the customer.
No VVF, but VCF
VVF bundles compute, storage, and network virtualization with a platform for containers. The product is particularly useful for hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid clouds, but offers fewer options than VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). That private cloud suite is much more comprehensive and expensive. It is Broadcom’s flagship product and, since the company’s acquisition of VMware at the end of 2023, has been designed for increasingly larger organizations. Smaller parties that still run VMware workloads are therefore in a tight spot and must find an alternative (where possible).
New options around Private AI and Network Security, combined with the need for sovereign clouds, are driving increased demand. A Broadcom spokesperson confirmed that there are no plans to discontinue vSphere Standard in EMEA for the time being. This basic server virtualization product accounts for approximately 60 percent of licenses. It remains a cheaper way to use the VMware hypervisor than purchasing the full VCF suite. However, the spokesperson emphasized: “However, Broadcom product availability can vary by region to align with local market requirements, customer demand, and other considerations.”
Meanwhile, CISPE, a European interest group representing cloud providers, reiterates that the Broadcom-VMware deal should not have gone ahead. The European Commission ultimately did not block the acquisition despite warnings about Broadcom’s tendency to raise prices. Either way, the result is lucrative for VMware alternatives: Microsoft, Nutanix, and open-source options such as Proxmox will win over more former VMware customers in the coming years.