You downloaded this because your VMware renewal is coming up. Or someone in procurement flagged the increase. Or your CFO looked at the infrastructure budget line and asked a question that didn't have a comfortable answer.
Either way — good. You're reading this at the right time.
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023. Since then, VMware customers across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond have watched their licensing costs increase materially and consistently. Most have been told this is the new normal. Some have accepted it. A smaller number have started asking different questions.
This guide is for the second group — and for the first group, who haven't asked those questions yet but are beginning to wonder if they should.
Five things. All of them real. None of them complicated. And none of them in Broadcom's renewal pack.
The Pricing Trajectory Is Not a Negotiation — It's a Statement of Intent
Let's be direct about what is happening.
Broadcom acquired VMware to extract returns from the installed base. This is not a criticism — it is the stated model. Broadcom's acquisition playbook is well-documented: acquire a market-dominant software platform, bundle products, reprice to capture more value from existing customers, and enforce compliance to reduce leakage. They have done this before.
Broadcom acquired CA Technologies in 2018 for $18.9 billion. The years following the acquisition were marked by portfolio rationalisation, price increases, and a significant reduction in product investment. Many CA customers found themselves paying more for less, with fewer competitive alternatives presented to them.
Broadcom acquired the enterprise security business of Symantec in 2019 for $10.7 billion. The same pattern followed: bundled licensing, repricing, enforcement. Customers who had built procurement strategies around multi-year Symantec contracts found the terms of engagement had changed materially.
VMware is the third. The acquisition was larger ($61 billion) and the installed base is bigger. The arc is the same.
The implication is important: organisations treating current VMware pricing as a starting point for negotiation are misreading what is happening. This is not a renewal cycle. It is a structural repricing — one that follows a documented commercial logic with a documented outcome.
The cost of staying on VMware is compounding. It is not stable. Treating it as stable is an error that will be corrected at the next renewal, and the one after that.
Zero-Downtime Migration Is Not a Future Capability — It Exists Today
The most common reason enterprises stay on VMware is not commercial inertia. It is a belief about migration complexity.
The assumption — widely held, rarely examined — is that migrating a VMware estate requires downtime windows, weekend outages, months of project planning, and significant internal resource. For large estates with production workloads, this feels like an insurmountable operational risk.
The assumption is out of date.
Coriolis is an automated VM migration tool developed by Cloudbase Solutions and integrated into SUSE Virtualization. It performs agentless, live migrations: VMs continue running while data transfers to the target environment. There is no agent installation required on guest VMs. There are no maintenance windows required. The source VM stays online throughout the process.
Coriolis supports VMware vSphere as a source environment, alongside AWS, GCP, and Azure. SAP HANA workloads are supported. The migration is orchestrated centrally, giving your infrastructure team a single control plane rather than a per-VM manual process.
The practical consequence: the technical barrier to migrating away from VMware is significantly lower than most IT teams currently believe. The conversations we have with infrastructure leads typically involve an initial assumption of 6–12 months minimum migration timeline. The actual timeline, with Coriolis, is a function of estate size — not operational complexity.
The barrier to migration, for most enterprises, is now a perception problem — not a technical one.
The Alternative Is Not a Startup — It's the Infrastructure Behind Some of Europe's Largest Regulated Environments
This is the one that tends to produce the most pushback — and the pushback is almost always based on an incomplete picture.
When we describe SUSE Virtualization as the target platform for VMware migration, a common initial response is scepticism about maturity. Is SUSE enterprise-grade? Is it proven at scale? Is it present in regulated industries?
The answers, in order: yes, yes, and yes.
KVM — the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine. This is the same hypervisor kernel used in OpenShift, in most major cloud platforms, and in a significant proportion of enterprise Linux environments globally. KVM is not an alternative to proven virtualisation technology. It is proven virtualisation technology.
KubeVirt — VM management within Kubernetes. Allows virtual machines to run alongside containerised workloads within the same Kubernetes environment, managed through a unified control plane.
Longhorn — cloud-native distributed block storage. Designed for enterprise persistence requirements, with snapshot, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities built in.
SUSE has been in enterprise Linux for over 30 years. SUSE Linux Enterprise is deployed in financial services, telecommunications, utilities, and government environments across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The SUSE installed base in regulated industries is not a pilot. It is production infrastructure, at scale, under regulatory scrutiny.
The concern that SUSE represents an unproven or immature alternative reflects a misunderstanding of how widespread it already is. This is not a question of enterprise readiness. SUSE Virtualization is enterprise-grade. The question for your organisation is whether you want to evaluate it — and what that evaluation costs relative to the cost of the next VMware renewal.
The due diligence question is not "is SUSE proven?" It is "what does migration look like for our specific estate, and what are the commercial terms?" These are answerable questions. Paringa provides that assessment at no cost.
The Commercial Window Is Open — But SUSE's Delivery Capacity Is Already Constrained
In April 2026, SUSE's CEO acknowledged publicly at SUSECON that demand for VMware alternatives had materially outpaced their delivery capacity. This is an unusual admission from a software vendor, and it is a useful signal for the organisations considering a move.
What it means practically: SUSE is capacity-constrained on onboarding. The organisations that act now have access to current commercial terms — including 10 courtesy VM migrations with any new subscription — and to delivery slots before onboarding timelines extend. The organisations that wait for the next renewal cycle to evaluate alternatives will be evaluating from a weaker position.
There is a parallel commercial dynamic worth understanding. Broadcom's pricing model has created urgency across a large installed base simultaneously. Many enterprises are evaluating alternatives at the same time, for the same reasons, in the same renewal cycle. That concentration of demand has consequences for delivery capacity at every vendor in the ecosystem — including SUSE.
The window is finite in two directions: Broadcom's pricing trajectory makes staying expensive, and SUSE's delivery constraints mean the organisations that act earliest secure the best terms and the fastest onboarding.
The Cheapest Time to Migrate Is Before the Decision Is Urgent
This is the one that matters most from a total cost perspective — and it applies to VMware migration and to the parallel problem of Red Hat audit exposure.
Most VMware migrations happen under one of two conditions.
After a significant pricing event forces the issue — a renewal increase that breaches a budget threshold, an audit finding, or a board-level directive to reduce infrastructure spend.
As a strategic rearchitecting decision made from a position of time and choice — typically 12 to 18 months ahead of a renewal, with no deadline pressure.
The first type of migration is reactive. It is more expensive — both in licensing terms and in internal resource. It happens under time pressure, with fewer delivery options, from a negotiating position that has been determined by the vendor's timeline, not yours.
The second type is cheaper, calmer, and commercially leveraged. You have time to scope properly. You negotiate from a position of optionality — you can stay on VMware, or you can migrate, and the vendor knows it.
Many of the organisations we work with carry both a VMware estate and a Red Hat estate. The commercial logic for both is identical: the cheapest time to address the exposure is before the pressure arrives.
A Global Financial Institution we worked with faced a projected Red Hat audit exposure of approximately £1,000,000. By engaging ahead of the formal findings — mapping the actual estate, identifying ghost subscriptions, and evaluating SUSE Multi-Linux Support as an alternative — the resolved annual cost came in at roughly half the pre-audit projection. Zero infrastructure changes. Zero operational disruption.
The same outcome, addressed after the audit findings had landed, would have been significantly more expensive and significantly more pressured. The saving was not in the technical work. It was in the timing.
The organisations that achieve the best infrastructure cost outcomes are the ones that treat pricing pressure as a planning signal, not a crisis. This guide is intended to help your organisation be that kind.
What to Do Next
The practical version.
If your VMware estate represents a material line item in your infrastructure budget, the next step is an independent assessment of what a migration would look like for your specific environment — scope, timeline, commercial terms, operational impact.
Paringa provides this assessment at no cost and with no commitment. Three things happen in that conversation:
Paringa manages the end-to-end migration process: commercial structuring, technical delivery, and ongoing support — using SUSE Virtualization and the Coriolis migration tool. One partner. One contract.
We also provide SUSE MLS (Multi-Linux Support) for organisations with Red Hat estates — the same model, applied to the same cost problem from a different angle. If you carry both a VMware estate and a Red Hat estate, those two problems can be addressed under a single commercial arrangement.
Email us at sales@paringa.ai with a brief description of your VMware estate size and your renewal timeline. We will come back with a proposed scope for the assessment and available dates. No commitment required at any stage before you decide to proceed.
Paringa is an Infrastructure Cost & Governance Specialist. We work with enterprises in financial services, telecommunications, utilities, and regulated industries across the UK, DACH region, and Middle East.