What we Offer | December 20, 2024

VMware licensing changes and the road ahead

By Holland Barry, Field CTO, Cloud and Infrastructure  

VMware has played a key role in the technology world’s transition to the cloud, providing software that powers virtualization, multi-cloud management, infrastructure, networking, security and more.

But many organizations are now reviewing their virtualization strategies following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in late 2023. Their biggest concern has to do with new licensing changes, which involve consolidating more than 160 itemized products, bundles and editions into a handful of subscription-based products — meaning some customers are paying for features they don't use. For many this means less pricing flexibility and higher costs.

Exploring their options

As the license renewal deadline draws closer, many IT leaders (especially those running large-scale VM environments) are re-analyzing their VMware private cloud and virtualization strategies.  

And we urge them to look at this change as an opportunity to approach IT differently and consider alternatives from a business continuity and technical perspective. 

Considering alternative private clouds

VMware, which made its name with tools that allow teams to run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, is dominant in the market and I’m sure plenty of customers will continue to reinvest in the technology under Broadcom’s ownership.

But clients can also consider alternative top-tier private cloud solutions, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Azure Stack, Nutanix AHV, RedHat, SUSE and open-source solutions like KVM.

The team at DXC has conducted extensive assessments of all of these solutions for cost-effectiveness and workload compatibility, focusing on key criteria such as performance, scalability and integration capabilities.

Embracing a hybrid cloud approach

As many companies re-evaluate their cloud and virtualization strategies, we are seeing a tilt towards hybrid cloud solutions that blend the strength of public and private clouds and may offer more agility. 

This might be the time to consider taking a more dynamic approach to your IT infrastructure by adopting a strategy that ensures the right workloads are running in the right venue at the right time.

If moving all your workloads into a public cloud is the best choice for your organization, keep in mind that DXC works with all the major public cloud service providers (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud), and we have a near-perfect (99.84%) cloud-migration success rate.

Whatever approach is best, our experts can help you develop effective strategies to balance the mix of public and private deployments.  

Exploring multiple pathways to success

Businesses have the choice of extending VMware virtualization environments to the public cloud, combining VMware private cloud and public cloud, or modernizing virtualized VMware data centers.

And the good news is that DXC offers multiple routes to realizing the most value from each choice that’s made. For example, we can help those who purchase a VMware Cloud Foundation licensing model gain real cost savings and efficiencies by replacing functionality they’re paying for elsewhere in the IT estate with new components now available (e.g., logging, observability, automation, SDN firewall and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions).

The DXC team can also ensure that customers appropriately realign their hardware footprints that underpin the VMware hypervisor platform to fully exploit the new 16-CPU per-server minimum requirement and calibrate for optimal ratios between memory and CPU cores for best application performance.

Those companies that plan to stick with VMware’s hypervisor technology should note that DXC was the first global service provider to enter into a new contract with Broadcom as a VMware Cloud Service Provider partner, which allows us to secure the most competitive pricing.