VMware has fundamentally altered its development strategy, shifting from aggressive 2-year major release cycles to a more measured 3-year cadence while extending support lifecycles, a strategic retreat that reflects mounting enterprise resistance to forced upgrades amid dramatic cost increases.
The company announced that VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, now generally available, will be supported for six years instead of the previous five, with minor releases spaced nine months apart rather than every six months.
“In response to customer feedback, we’re modifying the support model and release cadence starting with VCF 9.0,” VMware said in a statement. The company added that these changes will provide more “predictable release dates, offer longer support periods, and provide more flexibility to better fit into customer update windows.”
The slower pace represents a significant philosophical shift for a company that has historically pushed rapid innovation cycles.
“CIOs are treating the current 24-36 month period as critical for platform strategy decisions,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research. The extended timelines arrive as enterprises face license cost increases of up to 500% and a hard deadline to migrate from VCF 8 support ending in October 2027.
Enterprise fatigue drives strategic shift
The cadence change acknowledges what industry analysts call “upgrade fatigue” among enterprise customers struggling with Broadcom’s licensing overhaul. Since the acquisition, starting in 2025, Broadcom requires customers to license a minimum of 72 cores per order, regardless of actual needs, while bundling previously separate products into comprehensive subscription packages.
This shift in approach comes as enterprises face unprecedented pressure to make platform decisions quickly.
“Most CIOs are advancing structured pilots in 2025, knowing that decisions made after early 2026 may result in rushed execution or forced renewals,” Gogia noted. “Vendor-enforced term rigidity and SKU bundling are limiting room for negotiation, triggering earlier replatforming evaluations than in previous refresh cycles.”
The pressure reached a legal flashpoint when the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management successfully sued VMware, forcing the company to provide two years of migration support after the agency faced an 85% cost increase.
These mounting challenges have influenced VMware’s approach to product development and support lifecycles, industry watchers said.
Extended timelines provide strategic options
The new release model delivers four minor versions per major release (VCF 9.0 through 9.3), with initial releases receiving 27 months of support and the final version getting 45 months. This structure gives enterprises multiple upgrade paths rather than forcing lock-step progression.
“Large enterprises should allocate 2.5 to 3 years to effectively evaluate, plan, and execute their migration strategy,” said Tanvi Rai, senior analyst at Everest Group. She recommended completing proof-of-concepts and commercial negotiations by the first half of 2026 to enable phased migration through mid-2027.
The extended support window is critical given that Forrester Research estimates up to 20% of VMware’s enterprise customers are evaluating alternatives, citing “exhaustion” with price hikes and forced bundling.
Technical improvements may offset some cost impacts
Despite the licensing challenges, VCF 9.0 introduces performance enhancements that could help justify higher costs in certain environments. The platform delivers a 40% improvement in server consolidation through Advanced NVMe Memory Tiering and introduces vSAN Global Deduplication for improved storage efficiency, the statement added.
“While licensing reforms have elevated per-core costs by 85–500%, recent platform releases offer measurable gains, such as 38% improvement in memory tiering efficiency,” Gogia said. “Organizations are now compelled to assess value across three parallel planes: licensing simplicity, infrastructure density, and automation scope.”
Rai noted that the total cost equation varies significantly by deployment type. “The total cost of ownership can improve or remain flat in CPU-constrained environments due to technical and structural enhancements,” she said. “Enterprises that refresh hardware and optimize their use of the full VCF stack may find the new model cost-neutral or even slightly beneficial.”
However, the impact varies by sector, with organizations in logistics, utilities, and digital commerce facing particular challenges due to high workload variability.
Market diversification emerges as an enterprise strategy
The combination of cost pressures and extended support timelines is driving a new approach to virtualization strategy. Rather than wholesale platform replacements, enterprises are pursuing what Gogia called “controlled decentralisation.” Alternative platforms, including Nutanix AHV, Azure Stack HCI, and OpenShift Virtualization, have matured to handle most general-purpose workloads, supporting high availability, disaster recovery, and GPU virtualization.
“We are nearing a functional tipping point where roughly 70–80% of workloads could move off VMware today, but full VMware-free enterprise-scale operations, especially for tier-1 systems, likely won’t be mainstream until late 2026 or beyond,” Rai noted.
The emerging strategy involves continuing VMware for mission-critical workloads while deploying alternatives in edge locations, development environments, and new container-native applications.
“This is not an ideological shift, it is a pragmatic hedging strategy designed to manage cost, optionality, and roadmap alignment,” Gogia observed.
Source:: Network World