for the underlying vSphere 8 components of VCF 8. At that point, general product support, updates and security patches will cease — meaning organizations will need to transition to VMware Cloud Foundation VCF 9 or migrate to an alternative platform to avoid compliance violations and security risks. Of course, again, VMware isn’t disappearing, but the models that partners have relied on for years — such as perpetual license sales, renewals and migrations — are coming to an end. “Once the October 2027 deadline hits, everything’s off the table,” explained Chad Muckenfuss, vice president of cloud for Telarus. “Partners have the next 12 months to pivot before the opportunity fundamentally changes.” On the part of IT leaders, earlier movers will escape while leverage still exists, executives at Cloudbolt pointed out, while those that don’t will face premium prices as the customer base shrinks and the squeeze intensifies. With that in mind, the findings from Cloudbolt’s survey of 302 IT decision-makers two years into the Broadcom/VMware era arms partners and providers with an idea of what actually has happened, what IT buyers expect to happen and what they plan to do about it. Arguably the best news, the anticipated price apocalypse of 100 percent to 200 percent never materialized for the vast majority of North American enterprises, showed the Cloudbolt data. Only 14 percent saw 100 percent or more cost increases, far from the 73 percent that expected costs to more than double. The median increase landed at 25 percent to 49 percent, while about six in 10 respondents experienced greater than 25 percent cost jumps. That may be some relief, but it’s not welcomed news, by any means. As Cloudfare executives point out, even when a bully only takes half your lunch money, you still got robbed. “The change from ongoing licenses to all-or-nothing subscription bundles has transformed our predictable capex into a volatile opex liability. We have observed a 400 percent to 700 percent increase in costs in certain enterprise cases,” said one responding IT executive. So, concerns around cost increases continue to shape buying decisions today, with 85 percent of IT decision makers still concerned about price increase disruption. So far, approaching three-quarters (72 percent) of migrating workloads are heading to public cloud IaaS, not alternative hypervisors, said Cloudbolt. Public cloud is the primary destination, with Hyper-V/Azure Stack (43 percent) and SaaS replacements (34 percent) trailing. The vast majority of firms surveyed (73 percent) have migrated up to 50 percent of their environments away from VMware, including the 32 percent that have migrated 25 to 50 percent. “The exodus is happening, just in slow motion,” said the Cloudbolt study. The top deal-breakers, according to respondents, include migration complexity/risk (25 percent), higher costs than expected (23 percent) and technical limitations (21 percent). It should be noted that 62 percent said these obstacles are “challenging but doable” rather than “impossible.” Moving forward, 14 percent of IT decision makers plan to stay primarily on VMware (75 percent or more of workloads), while more than half will take the hybrid approach (25 to 75 percent), and a quarter will actively reduce their VMware footprint by 25 percent or less. Despite the initial chaos, 65 percent of respondents reported an improved risk posture since the Broadcom acquisition two years ago. Although as organizations diversify away from VMware, they inherit the operational burden of managing multiple platforms. About half of IT departments (52 percent) said multi-platform complexity was a top challenge two years after the acquisition, placing it as today’s top risk exposure among respondents. Other top challenges included skills gap (33 percent), patch management, compliance concerns and reduced visibility, all named by about a quarter. “Two years ago, the market was dominated by knee-jerk speculation and worst-case projections,” said Mark Zembal, chief marketing officer at CloudBolt. “This latest study separates noise and speculation from reality. The fear has cooled, but the pressure hasn’t – and most teams are now making practical moves to build leverage and optionality – even if for some that includes the realization that a portion of their estate never moves off VMware.” o Current VMware Position Staying – no changes 15% Staying – optimizing 41% Still evaluating 3% Partial migration 17% Active migration 20% Fully migrated 4% Source: Cloudbolt survey, 2026 Where Migrating Workloads Are Going Public cloud IaaS 72% Hyper-V/Azure stack 43% SaaS replacement 34% Red Hat platforms 17% Managed Kubernetes 31% Nutanix 13% Self-managed K8s 28% Source: Cloudbolt survey, 2026 Alternatives Evaluated (and Ruled Out) Public cloud IaaS 39% Hyper-V/Azure stack 38% Red Hat platforms 33% Nutanix 30% Kubernetes platforms 30% Other virtualization 19% Source: Cloudbolt survey, 2026 53 SPRING 2026 | CHANNELVISION
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