Do All Your VMs Really Need vSphere? How to Cut Costs by Right-Sizing Your Virtualization Estate

As renewal season approaches, every IT leader should be asking: Does your entire VM estate actually need vSphere features?

vSphere isn't a bad product, but paying vSphere prices for VMs that don't need vSphere features is a bad deal, and it gets worse with every renewal.

Since Broadcom completed its $61 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023, you've been paying premium prices for every single VM, whether it needs premium capabilities or not. And with each renewal cycle, those costs step up again.

The Cost Spiral: Why Every VM Now Costs More

Three years on since the acquisition, the pattern has become clear: The price increases are  structural, and they compound at every renewal:

• Perpetual licenses are gone. Broadcom scrapped perpetual licenses and flexible pay-as-you-go models, moving customers to mandatory multi-year subscriptions with predetermined pricing that doesn't reflect actual usage.

• The product catalog has been condensed into expensive bundles. Thousands of SKUs were consolidated into a handful of bundles, so customers now pay for advanced networking and storage products across their whole estate, whether every workload uses them or not.

• Minimum purchase requirements are under threat. In early 2025, Broadcom moved to raise the minimum license commitment from 16 cores to 72 cores per product line, a punishing change for organizations with smaller or right-sized clusters. Industry backlash forced a retraction, but the episode showed Broadcom is willing to test steep minimum-commitment increases with little warning.

The results speak for themselves:

• Nearly three-quarters of IT leaders surveyed expected their VMware bills to more than double after the acquisition, and Gartner has seen client costs as much as triple.

• European cloud providers have documented price increases of 800% to 1,500%, with tenfold jumps described as common.

• AT&T publicly stated it was quoted a 1,050% price increase.

The Real Problem: One Premium Price for a Very Mixed Estate

In the typical virtualization estate, a minority of workloads need to leverage advanced vSphere features, such as tight integrations, specialized tooling, and complex operational requirements. However, most workloads are much simpler. Workloads like web servers, internal applications, dev/test environments, and file servers tend to be steady state and require minimal attention or changes. They don’t benefit from the use of VMware’s advanced capabilities. 

Both categories now incur the full cost of vSphere, dramatically increasing your per-VM cost. That second category, often the majority of the estate, is where your money is quietly leaking. You're paying Ferrari prices to leave cars parked in the garage.

You Don't Have to Pull It All Out at Once

This isn't an all-or-nothing decision, and it shouldn't be treated like one. The smarter play is vSphere reduction, not wholesale replacement:

1. Tier your estate. Identify which workloads truly need vSphere's advanced features and which are stable, low-touch VMs that just need reliable, well-run infrastructure.

2. Move the large percentage that's over-served. Migrate static and standard workloads to a much less expensive private cloud, dramatically shrinking your vSphere license footprint.

3. Keep vSphere where it earns its cost. Retain a right-sized vSphere environment for the workloads that genuinely justify it, now at a fraction of the licensing spend.

The result: immediate, substantial savings at your next renewal, reduced exposure to future price hikes, and negotiating leverage you simply don't have when 100% of your estate is locked in. And you make the transition at your own pace, workload by workload, without all the risk of a wholesale rip-and-replace.

Mirantis Private Cloud: Battle-Tested Virtualization for the Rest of Your Estate

This does not suggest that workloads moved from vSphere aren’t deserving of enterprise-grade infrastructure: this is about paying appropriately, not compromising on quality. That's exactly what Mirantis Private Cloud delivers.

Mirantis has been building and operating enterprise private clouds for well over a decade. Today, we power some of the largest private cloud deployments in the world, spanning telecommunications, technology, financial services, and e-commerce leaders. Mirantis powers open source infrastructure for a third of the Fortune 100. It is the most battle-tested private cloud solution in the industry for enterprise virtualization.

Workloads on Mirantis Private Cloud take advantage of a full feature set for enterprise virtualization — self-service VMs, software-defined networking and storage, high availability, rich observability, and GPU virtualization — but with a dramatically lower cost of ownership. By using an open infrastructure platform with no vendor lock-in, customers typically save 50% or more per VM. 

Real Results: 60% Savings, Migrated in Phases

Our approach is proven. One fast-growing SaaS company started with a pilot to validate their workloads, and then progressively migrated 3,000 VMs from VMware to Mirantis Private Cloud, ultimately saving more than 60% in cloud infrastructure costs. Deployments that used to take three months could now be completed in as little as one week, and within twelve months they had scaled to more than a dozen production clusters worldwide, with Mirantis operating the clouds for them.

We've Guided This Journey Many Times

Mirantis has extensive experience in helping vSphere customers realize significant savings by migrating workloads to Mirantis Private Cloud, and just as importantly, experience helping them decide which workloads to move first:

• Assessment and workload tiering to map your estate against what each VM actually needs

• A proven end-to-end migration methodology with automated tooling that minimizes downtime

• Migration experts who have moved thousands of production VMs across industries

• Flexible migration bundles combining software, support, services, and training

And if you don't want to run the new environment yourself, you don't have to. Mirantis also operates private clouds for customers through fully managed services, so your static workloads get expert 24/7 operations while your team stays focused on higher-value work.

The Bottom Line

vSphere is a solid product with advanced features that genuinely matter for certain enterprise workloads. But why pay for these premium features across your entire virtualization estate? You don't need to rip everything out. You need to stop overpaying for the large percentage of your estate that a much less expensive, battle-tested private cloud can serve just as well.

If you're ready to start saving on your vSphere expenses, give us a call. We'll help you assess your estate, identify the workloads that are costing you the most for the least benefit, map out a phased migration and, if you want, run the whole environment for you.