What if you don't renew your VMware license and hope for the best?
Letting your VMware license expire poses a huge security risk that you absolutely must avoid. In this blog post, we explain why.
The options after Broadcom
On November 22, 2023, your world changed: Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware, and prices skyrocketed. Simply put, you had four options:
- Accepting the price increase. For many organizations, VMware was at the core of their infrastructure and operating model. In the short term, accepting the price increase was sometimes the only practical option.
- Switching to a VMware alternative. VMware’s competitors were among the few who welcomed the acquisition. Proxmox, Red Hat, Apache CloudStack, Microsoft, Nutanix, and many others saw significant commercial opportunities. But switching to a VMware alternative also comes with risks. Did you dare to take that leap?
- Moving to the public cloud. Another option was to embrace the public cloud and use the cloud provider's hypervisor. For many organizations, this meant a radical strategic change — but some felt compelled to do so.
- Don't renew VMware licenses and hope for the best. It may sound strange, but you wouldn't be the only one who chose to simply hope for the best and let the VMware licenses expire.
Any organization that has chosen option 4 should reconsider that decision.
Security vulnerability in VMware vCenter Server
On Wednesday, September 18, 2024, Broadcom announced a critical vulnerability in VMware vCenter servers. Although Broadcom has released security updates to address the issue, as of the time of writing this blog post (September 19), it was still possible to remotely take control of VMware vCenter servers. It is therefore no surprise that the impact of the vulnerability was rated with a CVSS score of 9.8 (on a scale of 0 to 10). Organizations are strongly advised to install the updates as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, this will not be the last time Broadcom releases updates for critical vulnerabilities. If you no longer have access to VMware support, you must either say goodbye to VMware as soon as possible or purchase a license.
How SUE can help
At SUE, we recommend Apache CloudStack as an alternative to VMware. Apache CloudStack offers a high degree of feature parity with VMware and also has the advantage of being open-source. In recent years, we’ve gained extensive experience with migrations from VMware to Apache CloudStack. After the migration, we can also manage the new environment using Managed Infrastructure: servers, virtualization, storage, and networking—whether in your own data center or at a hosting provider. We’d be happy to discuss a potential transition within your organization with you, with no obligation.
To learn how SUE moves applications and data in waves, visit the page Cloud Migration. The guide “ Cloud Migration ” outlines the strategies and pitfalls.
Are you still running vSphere 8? Find out what to do when vSphere 8 is discontinued.
