From $3K to $21K Overnight: How Broadcom Turned VMware Into a Breaking Point for Small IT Teams

For years, VMware was the boring choice — and that was the point. It wasn't trendy. It wasn't cheap. It just worked. If you were running a small cluster and a couple dozen VMs, VMware felt like the adult decision. You paid the renewal, applied patches, and moved on with your life. Nobody loved it, but nobody questioned it either. That version of VMware is gone. All over small IT shops, renewal quotes are landing like jump scares. Numbers that used to live in the low four figures are suddenly five, six, even eight times higher. Same hardware. Same workloads. Same number of servers humming along in the rack. Just a wildly different bill. One year it's $3,000. Then $17,000. Then $21,000. And once you get past the initial shock, the real problem sinks in: this probably isn't the peak. ## When the math stopped making sense This isn't about sysadmins refusing to pay for software. That's not how real environments work. VMware was never a bargain-bin product, and nobody expected it to be. The problem is that the value didn't change — the price just exploded. For small teams, that's devastating. There's no procurement department to absorb the blow. No legal buffer. No spare staff to quietly spin up a parallel platform while the old one keeps running. A three-host cluster that used to be an easy checkbox in the budget suddenly turns into a high-stakes negotiation. Not because the platform got better, but because staying put now costs more than leaving — and leaving isn't cheap either. That's where the fatigue sets in. Not anger. Just a long, tired pause where you stare at the quote and think, we can't keep doing this. ## Broadcom didn't buy VMware — it bought leverage When Broadcom took over, the strategy didn't take long to reveal itself. Fewer customers. Bigger contracts. Less patience for anyone who doesn't move the needle. This isn't about growing the ecosystem. It's about extracting maximum value from customers who are too big, too complex, or too locked in to move quickly. Fortune 500s with regulatory baggage and sprawling infrastructure can't just flip a switch. Small organizations don't fit that picture. If you're running a handful of hosts and a dozen VMs, you're not a priority. You're overhead. And the message coming through loud and clear is simple: either spend more or get out. Some teams try to negotiate multi-year deals just to stop the bleeding. Others pay for one last year to buy time. Plenty look at the numbers and realize there's no version of the future where this gets easier. ## "Just don't renew" sounds easy — until it isn't On paper, skipping renewal looks tempting. The hosts don't shut down. The VMs keep running. Nothing immediately catches fire. But the risks stack up fast. No patches. No security fixes. No support when something breaks at 2 a.m. And then there's the gray cloud hanging over everything — the threatening emails, the legal language, the vague warnings that make executives nervous. For small IT teams, that pressure lands squarely on one or two people. You're not just making a technical call anymore. You're personally carrying the risk if something goes sideways. That's why so many teams end up renewing one final time. Not because they believe in the platform — but because they need a clean exit. ## "Good enough" is the new gold standard Once the decision to leave VMware is on the table, something interesting happens. The conversation stops being about perfection and starts being about survival. For Windows-heavy environments, Hyper-V keeps popping up. Nobody gushes about it. Nobody calls it elegant. But it works. It's already licensed in a lot of places. And it doesn't come with surprise invoices that make finance panic. The tooling has grown up. Live migration is solid. Clustering does the job. Management isn't pretty, but it's familiar. For shops already deep in Microsoft land, that familiarity matters. Then there's Proxmox, which has gone from niche to near-mainstream almost overnight. It asks more of the admin. It's less polished. But it's honest. Transparent pricing. No artificial limits. No feeling that the vendor is waiting to spring the next trap. For teams that know their way around Linux, Proxmox doesn't feel like a downgrade. It feels like taking control back. Larger organizations flirt with Nutanix, cloud migrations, or container-heavy rebuilds. But for smaller teams feeling the VMware squeeze the hardest, Hyper-V and Proxmox are where the gravity is pulling. ## Migration hurts — but staying hurts every year Nobody pretends migration is free. It isn't. There are tools to ease the pain. Backups can be reused. Downtime can be minimized. Still, it means late nights, test failures, weird boot issues, and at least one VM that refuses to cooperate until you swear at it. But when teams run the numbers honestly, the conclusion keeps coming out the same. Migration is a one-time hit. VMware renewals are a recurring wound — and they tend to get deeper every year. That's why so many shops frame the move as an investment instead of an escape. Pay the cost now so you don't keep paying forever. ## The part nobody budgets for: morale There's another cost that never shows up on a spreadsheet. A lot of sysadmins built their careers on VMware. It was the gold standard. The thing you learned because it felt future-proof. Watching it turn into something that actively punishes smaller customers feels personal in a way most software decisions don't. That bitterness lingers. It shapes how teams talk about vendors. It hardens people the next time someone promises "predictable pricing." When admins say they're leaving "on principle," they mean it. Not out of spite — but because trust, once broken, doesn't come back easily. ## Where this leaves small IT teams If you're still on VMware, you're probably in one of three places right now: You already migrated and wish you'd done it sooner. You paid for one more year and put a hard deadline on getting out. Or you're staring at a quote and wondering how this became your mess to clean up. None of those options feel great. But only one of them ends with control. VMware didn't suddenly become bad software. It just stopped being software that small teams can rely on to stay sane. And for a lot of IT shops, $21,000 wasn't just a renewal price. It was the moment they realized the relationship was over.