How about not extending your VMware license and hoping for the best?
It’s a huge security risk that you absolutely should avoid. We’ll explain more in this blogpost.
The options after Broadcom happened
On November 22 2023, your world changed: Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware and prices skyrocketed. Simply put, you were faced with 4 options:
- Accept the price increase. For many of you, VMware was a crucial part of your infrastructure and operating model. In the short term, accepting the price increase might have been the only practical option.
- Move to a VMware alternative. VMware competitors were one of the very few companies who were happy with the VMware acquisition. Proxmox, RedHat, Apache CloudStack, Microsoft, Nutanix, and many others saw huge sales opportunities. But moving to a VMware alternative doesn’t come without risks. Did you dare to take the leap?
- Move to the public cloud. Another option was to just adopt the public cloud and use the cloud provider’s hypervisor. This would mean a significant change in strategy for many companies – but they might have felt being forced to do so.
- Not extend VMware licenses and hope for the best. It might sound strange, but you wouldn’t be the only one if you chose to just hope for the best while ditching your VMware licenses.
Every company that chose option 4, should reconsider its choice.
Security leak in VMware vCenter-servers
On Wednesday September 18 2024, Broadcom announced a critical vulnerability in VMware vCenter-servers. Although Broadcom released security updates to solve the problem, on the day of writing this blog post (September 19), it was still possible to remotely control VMware vCenter-servers. It’s no surprise that the impact of the leak was rated 9.8 on a scale of 1 to 10. Organizations are urged to install updates as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, this will not be the only time Broadcom released updates for critical vulnerabilities. If you don’t have access to VMware support anymore, you need to either move away from VMware as soon as possible or purchase a license.
How SUE can help
At SUE, we recommend Apache CloudStack as a VMware alternative. Apache CloudStack has a high feature parity with VMware and has the benefit of being open-source. Over the past years, we have gained extensive experience with migrating from VMware to Apache Cloudstack and we are happy to have a non-pressure chat about a possible transition at your company.
