What alternatives are people considering to VMWARE or Broadcomm ?

This is indeed a broad question, and understandably so. Broadcom has built a vast portfolio through acquisitions in recent years. While the products themselves are often solid, many organizations, including ours, have felt increasing unease around pricing and the frequent price hikes. For us, the migration discussions are not about product quality, but about financial stability and long-term sustainability.

There is no single answer that fits all products, but I can share our journey:

IBM Mainframe Alternatives: We relied on a significant number of Broadcom tools here, and found strong alternatives with Rocket Software. Their offerings gave us confidence to move forward without compromising functionality.

Scheduling Tools (Automic): Again, Rocket Software is on our radar as a viable replacement.

Connectivity Software: We are evaluating Macro 4 Tubes as a promising option.

VMware: We still have a three-year contract in place, but we are actively reducing dependency. We’ve had excellent results with SUSE Harvester, and we are investing in SUSE Rancher and containerization strategies to shrink our VM footprint. This approach not only reduces vendor lock-in but also aligns with open standards.

Spring Boot: We continue using it as before. Given its global adoption, we are convinced Broadcom will struggle to push it into a paid model, the open-source community would immediately ensure continuity through forks.

Our philosophy is to keep an open mindset and prioritize solutions built on open standards. This gives us flexibility, resilience, and the ability to innovate rather than being locked into one vendor’s roadmap.

Of course, replacing tooling is never easy, it rarely brings direct added value to the customer. Yet, we managed to build a positive business case by redirecting budgets toward innovation with other vendors. Internally, we even gave our migration project a playful name: Project Brexit. It will run for nine months, and while challenging, it has already sparked new energy and creativity within our teams.

The lesson for us has been clear: every disruption also creates opportunities. Broadcom’s acquisitions may frustrate us, but they also open doors for competitors to innovate and for us to rethink our strategies.

And perhaps the most intriguing question to leave open: who will be next in Broadcom’s line of acquisitions?

Have a look at https://www.redhat.com/de/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization, a modern approach of how to deal with VMs. These are orchestrated by kubernetes and can be managed as code. Besides network, storage and of course containers...

In reducing VMware’s footprint on premise we are moving to Proxmox.

Azure Local

We are strongly encouraged by what we see from Nutanix, especially considering the other costs associated with VMWare, like compute and storage - the Nutanix costs are in line with or less than VMWare.  This was especially true for us as the hardware and SAN infrastructure for VMWare was aging and in need of replacement over the next year or so.  The easy migration claims appear to be true as well.  Per our CIO, we will never spend another dollar with Broadcom (which they don't care about) when our current contract expires.  We anticipate signing with Nutanix in the spring of 2026 or sooner.