VVF to VCF Transition: What It Means for VMware Customers

There's a specific kind of dread that comes with being too deep into a vendor's ecosystem. You've spent years building stability — virtual clusters humming along quietly, HA and DRS running like clockwork, and the occasional vCenter hiccup being your biggest headache. You know your setup inside out. Then one morning, every discussion in your professional circles is suddenly about the same thing: VCF is the future. VVF is disappearing. Broadcom has spoken. And suddenly, your virtual infrastructure feels less like a carefully tuned data center and more like a hostage situation. ## The Simplicity That Worked For a long time, vSphere Foundation (VVF) represented the perfect middle ground. It gave small to mid-sized organizations — universities, non-profits, regional businesses — the enterprise-grade features they actually needed without forcing them into unnecessary complexity. VVF meant clusters with vDS, DRS, HA, and standard storage setups like iSCSI or Fibre Channel. It was clean, familiar, and stable. No NSX, no vSAN, no "cloud transformation" roadmap forced on top. Just virtualization that worked. But Broadcom has made its stance brutally clear: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is the product going forward. Everything else is legacy. The logic, from their perspective, makes sense. VCF is an integrated stack, bundling compute, storage, networking, and management tools into a single, cohesive system. The problem is that not everyone needs — or can afford — that level of integration. For smaller IT teams, especially those in education or public sector environments, the modular simplicity of vSphere was the entire appeal. Now they're being told that model no longer fits the company's future. ## The Economics: "We Paid $400,000 for Five Years, and They Still Don't Want Us." One story making the rounds in IT circles comes from an academic institution that recently renewed its VVF licensing. The renewal cost? Nearly $400,000 for five years. Previously, the same organization had been paying closer to $70,000 for the equivalent Enterprise Plus licenses. The reason was simple: Broadcom's licensing overhaul eliminated the discounts and flexibility that once made VMware accessible to non-enterprise customers. Academic, non-profit, and small business pricing tiers were either reduced or removed entirely, replaced with the all-inclusive VCF model. Even worse, that model forces customers to pay for components like NSX and vSAN whether they use them or not. A team running simple iSCSI-based storage suddenly finds itself paying for a hyperconverged license stack it will never deploy. The shift is clear: VMware's new owner no longer wants customers who just need a hypervisor. It wants customers who will buy into an entire ecosystem. ## The Broadcom Playbook To understand what's happening, you have to look at Broadcom's history. This isn't the first time the company has done this. Every major acquisition — CA Technologies, Symantec Enterprise, and now VMware — follows the same pattern: Simplify the product lineup. Eliminate low-margin customer segments. Push subscription-based, high-value bundles. Focus entirely on large enterprise clients. In that sense, VVF isn't being "retired" so much as it's being absorbed into a business model that doesn't make room for flexibility. Broadcom's leadership has said openly that they want to sell "the whole car, not the parts." For large enterprises that can afford it, this might actually be fine. But for small to mid-sized organizations, especially those that built their infrastructure around traditional vSphere, it's devastating. ## Technical Tradeoffs: vSAN vs SAN, VCF vs "Just vSphere" The technical debate that's emerged from all of this isn't just about pricing. It's philosophical. Some administrators argue that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) makes perfect sense. A vSAN-based deployment, tightly integrated with VCF, offers simplicity and scalability in one package. Others see it as unnecessary lock-in — a model that forces you to replace perfectly functional external storage with software-defined alternatives you don't need. For example: Organizations using established SAN environments value flexibility. They can mix vendors, scale storage independently, and avoid tying storage refresh cycles to compute hardware. HCI models like VCF tie storage to compute. It's convenient on paper, but it removes a layer of independence that many IT teams depend on. The issue isn't that vSAN or NSX are bad technologies — far from it. They're powerful tools. The issue is that they're now mandatory, bundled into licensing whether or not they fit the organization's design or budget. ## The Alternatives: What Comes Next? With VVF being phased out and VCF dominating the roadmap, IT teams are being forced to look at alternatives — many for the first time in over a decade. Here are the leading contenders being actively evaluated across the industry: ### Proxmox VE A KVM-based, open-source hypervisor that's rapidly becoming the go-to for smaller data centers. It's free, stable, and offers features like clustering, high availability, and even software-defined storage with Ceph. Advantages: Minimal licensing cost. Strong community and rapid development. Flexible storage backends (ZFS, NFS, iSCSI). Disadvantages: Limited enterprise support. Lacks advanced resource management features found in vSphere. Migration tools are improving but still basic. For labs, educational environments, and smaller IT shops, Proxmox is becoming the "Linux of virtualization": fast, adaptable, and community-driven. ### Nutanix Once a direct competitor to VMware, Nutanix is now emerging as a potential successor. Its hypervisor, AHV, offers the same kind of hyperconverged experience that VMware is pushing — but with more transparent licensing and customer support that still prioritizes smaller enterprises. Advantages: Strong management interface. Integrated HCI platform with easier deployment. More approachable pricing and support options. Disadvantages: Still a proprietary ecosystem. Limited third-party integration compared to VMware. In many ways, Nutanix is becoming what VMware used to be: a balance between flexibility, power, and customer empathy. ### Microsoft Hyper-V / Azure Stack HCI For organizations that are heavily invested in Windows infrastructure, Hyper-V remains the most straightforward pivot. It integrates with existing Active Directory and System Center environments and provides a natural on-ramp to hybrid cloud deployments using Azure. Advantages: Familiar management for Windows-centric teams. Azure hybrid integrations for cloud extensions. Consistent licensing and support. Disadvantages: Feature set and performance lag behind VMware in some areas. Less elegant management experience compared to vCenter. It's not glamorous, but it's stable. And for many businesses, that's enough. ### The Cloud Temptation For larger workloads, the public cloud is once again being positioned as the escape hatch. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are offering aggressive migration credits, discounted instances, and even VMware-compatible services that can run virtual machines natively in the cloud. But the math isn't always favorable long-term. Cloud migrations look cheap in year one but often become significantly more expensive as data egress fees and storage costs accumulate. Latency, compliance, and architectural constraints also make "lift and shift" far more complicated than it looks on paper. In short, the cloud is a tempting short-term solution, but it isn't a panacea. ## The Emotional Undercurrent Beneath all the technical analysis and cost modeling, there's an emotional reality to this transition. For years, VMware was the cornerstone of countless IT environments. It was trusted, predictable, and widely supported. IT professionals built their expertise, certifications, and workflows around it. There was a sense of partnership — that VMware understood what its users needed and met them where they were. That feeling has evaporated. Now, smaller organizations are being told — explicitly — that they're no longer the target audience. The company they once viewed as an ally in their digital transformation has turned into something else entirely: a gatekeeper of its own walled garden. ## What Happens Next VVF still technically exists, and some customers are being offered one-year renewals. But make no mistake — this is a transitional period, not a stable one. Within the next 12 to 18 months, VVF will likely be retired completely, leaving VCF as the only officially supported path forward. If you're still running VVF today, the smartest move is to treat it as a grace period, not a long-term strategy. Start evaluating migration paths now. Build small-scale pilots with Proxmox or Nutanix to test performance and management workflows. Quantify your actual VMware usage. You might be paying for far more than you need. Begin budgeting for 2025–2026 as a potential migration window. The teams that start experimenting now will be the ones best prepared when renewals force the issue. ## Final Thought There's an irony to all of this. VMware spent two decades helping the world escape hardware lock-in. It gave IT teams the power to abstract, virtualize, and control their environments with unprecedented flexibility. Now, under Broadcom, that same software has become the new lock-in. The walls are higher, the costs are steeper, and the choice is narrower. But the same spirit that made virtualization so transformative in the first place — the drive for independence, efficiency, and control — isn't going anywhere. It's just finding a new platform to run on.