What if you don't renew your VMware license and hope for the best?
It 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 were faced with four options:
- Accepting the price increase. For many, VMware was a crucial part of their infrastructure and operating model. In the short term, accepting the price increase was sometimes the only practical choice.
- 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. However, switching to a VMware alternative also carries risks. Would you be willing 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 servers
On Wednesday, September 18, 2024, Broadcom announced a critical vulnerability in VMware vCenter servers. Although Broadcom has released security updates to fix the issue, at the time of writing this blog post (September 19), it was still possible to remotely take over VMware vCenter servers. It is therefore no surprise that the impact of the leak was rated 9.8 on a scale of 1 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 has a high degree of feature parity with VMware and also offers the advantage of being open source. In recent years, we have gained extensive experience with migrations from VMware to Apache CloudStack. We would be happy to discuss a possible transition within your organization with you, without obligation.
