Cost Savings Is The Wrong North Star for VMware Migrations
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware was the wake-up call.
Most people saw it as a price hike. The real message is that you’re at the mercy of your infrastructure provider. Vendors know that. Once you’re locked in, they can charge whatever they want. And you’ll pay for it. If their service goes down, you’re stuck.
Look at AWS. When they have a regional outage, business operations for clients stall because teams can’t move workloads.
If you’re married to your infrastructure provider, you’re vulnerable. IT leaders know this, but they fail to convince their CIOs to migrate away from VMware.
They use cost savings as a lens, which fails because often migrating away from VMware toward an agile infrastructure is a lot of effort without any immediate license fee reductions.
Meanwhile, CIOs are too used to their current infrastructure to see a different POV. Imagine a dog stuck in a crate for years. You open the door. The dog doesn’t walk out. If you do get them out of the crate, they end up looking for another crate because it feels safe. It’s familiar.
The safer play feels like finding a new virtualization provider. That’s the wrong strategy. The smarter play is to step back and ask how to stop getting trapped in the first place.
We’re at a pivotal moment for a lot of businesses.
You can either change how you build infrastructure now or wait for the next price hike and fight the same fire all over again.
The Board Won’t Buy “Cheaper VMware”
VMware got where it is because, twenty years ago, it was the only game in town. It had the most mature virtualization stack, real enterprise features, and it did things other systems couldn’t. You could lose a rack and still keep running. Zero downtime failover.
That mattered.
Teams built whole worlds around that infrastructure and stopped looking anywhere else.
Then the hooks sank in. Disk formats. IP ranges. Networking rules. Everything started speaking VMware’s language. Even automation tools were written that way. Terraform talks to VMware’s API. Move to AWS or Azure, and you rewrite it all. If the provider doesn’t have a module, you build one from scratch. That’s time, risk, and money.
On top of that, you’ve got SSL certificates, DNS, data provenance, compliance windows, and uptime commitments. It’s all spaghetti now. Everyone kept saying, “It’s fine, prices are stable.”
Then Broadcom came along and reminded everyone the true cost of dependency.
The knee-jerk reaction is to shift providers and use the lens of cost savings to anchor against the rate hikes.
But that’s a mistake.
Switching to another vendor rarely produces quick savings because the workloads and operations are tied into the platform and its licensing model. At best, you do a lot of work and no one notices (until there’s a problem, but more on that later).
Cost is a symptom of dependency, not the reason to move. And it’s a weak argument to try and persuade your leadership team that migrating from VMware is worthwhile.
The better argument is infrastructure agility.
The Only True Exit from VMware Is Infrastructure Agility
Infrastructure agility means being so decoupled from your provider that you can move fast without losing data or uptime.
If cost spikes or an outage hits, you can shift workloads somewhere else and keep running.
That only happens if your stack can live anywhere.
You have to first let go of the belief that picking one environment is the efficient move. That’s the trap. Companies say, “We’re an AWS shop, so let’s use everything AWS.” They convince themselves that going all-in is cheaper and cleaner. But AWS is still a business, run by people who change roles every few years. Their incentives change. Their pricing changes.
What works today might not tomorrow. Building around a single vendor assumes they’ll stay loyal to you. They won’t.
That’s where Kubernetes and KubeVirt change the equation.
They aren’t owned by anyone. They’re open source, built on standards that already exist—Linux, containers, APIs anyone can use. You can run two distributions at once, move workloads between them, and design for choice instead of lock-in.
You don’t have to modernize everything first; KubeVirt lets you manage VMs and containers under one orchestration layer, so you can start where you are and gain agility over time.
The Broadcom acquisition just made the point louder. Every CIO now has to decide: keep moving between crates or finally step into an open field. KubeVirt doesn’t lock you to a vendor or a platform. It gives you a standard to build on.
Use that standard. Don’t marry the distribution.
This Is Bigger Than VMware or Price Hikes
This isn’t just a VMware problem. Vendor dependency shapes how the entire business operates—how you build, deliver, and charge.
Take Oracle SQL. It’s the fastest, most robust version out there. It technically follows the SQL standard, but not perfectly. There are differences between Oracle, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL.
Most teams know Oracle’s performance, its latency, its uptime, and they accept the rising cost because they have no real choice. They’ve built too much around it.
If they had treated SQL as a standard (using multiple implementations) they could move between versions without pain. But they didn’t.
The same thing happened with WebLogic and WebSphere. Those who tied themselves to those Java runtimes also tied themselves to their libraries. When newer versions came out or the market shifted to micro frameworks like Spring Boot or Quarkus, they had to rewrite everything from scratch.
And while technologies and customers are frustrated with VMware, investors have a different view. Price hikes drive revenue for stakeholders. Don’t think other businesses won’t follow suit.
It’s the same lesson every time: don’t be married to the distribution. Be married to the standard. That’s what keeps you agile.
Is Infrastructure Agility Right for Your Business?
Most businesses aren’t built to think long-term.
If you’re a CIO who knows you’ll be gone in two or three years, you’re not going to volunteer to rebuild your company’s infrastructure. You’ll renew the license and move on.
The only organizations that can think past that are the ones built for endurance.
Infrastructure agility makes sense when uptime and continuity are existential priorities: when an outage, price hike, or vendor collapse creates risk you can’t absorb. The federal government is a good example. Mission systems (not the DMV). The ones that you can’t afford to go offline.
Businesses where teams think in decades, not quarters, are a great fit for infrastructure agility.
It’s not for teams chasing a quick renewal win or looking to trim this year’s IT spend. It’s for organizations willing to invest upfront to never face vendor lock-in like this again.
This shift demands more than new tooling. It takes financial room, political freedom, and leadership stability. The payoff is long-term control. The freedom to move between clouds, data centers, and providers without re-engineering the business every time the market shifts.
If you’re greenfielding, don’t debate it. Start infrastructure-agile from day one. Build to the standards, not the distribution. You’ll avoid the mess everyone else is paying to escape.
If the downtime is cheap, maybe you ride it out.
Leaving VMware Without Getting Trapped. Again.
Agility isn’t a side project.
It’s one of the bigger transformations a business can take on. Modernizing software improves technology. Building for infrastructure agility changes how the company survives. Its resilience against price spikes, outages, and whatever comes next.
That’s why basing the decision on cost savings is a major strategic misstep.
The goal isn’t speed or convenience, as a digital transformation would typically reduce overhead. It’s about gaining the power to keep your business running when vendors change the rules or drop the ball. You’re building to move between environments, distributions, and providers without breaking the system.
Agility is insurance.
VMware is fresh in everyone’s minds as they migrate to other platforms like OpenShift Virtualization to avoid fees. But it’s not about VMware or price hikes.
It’s about avoiding disruption. Of any kind. Because the question isn’t “Will this happen again?” It’s “Will we be ready when it does?”
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About the author
Derrick Sutherland - Chief Architect at Shadow-Soft
Derrick is a T-shaped technologist who can think broadly and deeply simultaneously. He holds a master's degree in cyber security, develops applications in multiple languages, and is a Kubernetes expert.