This blog was authored by: Jamie Robinson, Cloud Portfolio Lead, Private Cloud and Dan Rickards, Head of Strategic Cloud Consulting | 30 June 2025
How to assess, optimise, and modernise your infrastructure with flexible cloud strategies
It’s been almost a year and a half since Broadcom’s surprise takeover of VMware and with it, the uncertainty that followed. One of the most significant changes has been the introduction of a new ‘license per core’ pricing model. A minimum of sixteen cores is required, even if your usage is significantly lower. For many organisations, this has significantly increased costs, especially for mid to large-scale infrastructure environments. Additionally, the consolidation of VMware’s product portfolio has been streamlined from 168 products to just four primary offerings. This consolidation led to the discontinuation of several standalone products, compelling customers to adapt to new bundled solutions, whether they need the full suite.
For organisations still heavily invested in vSphere and other VMware tools, the idea of finding an alternative and exiting VMware can seem daunting. Many companies are simply unable to swallow these extra costs and have now reached a critical decision point: If not VMware, then what are the alternatives? However, with careful planning and the right strategy, it can also be a chance to modernise and unlock new value.
Step One: Interrogate Your Current VMware Environment
This is the perfect opportunity to do a deep clean of your environment. Interrogate your existing infrastructure, examine the complexity of workloads and map interdependencies between workloads. Too often, infrastructure environments drift and shape with services deployed but never decommissioned. Service owners often insist they need the same capacity, so everything is treated as mission-critical.
By understanding exactly what is running, why it is running and whether it’s critical to your business, you can make informed decisions about potential options to reduce VMware consumption.
Tools, such as HPE’s CloudPhysics, can help. The platform offers in-depth visibility into VMware infrastructure, facilitating informed decision-making regarding workload optimisation, cost management and modernisation efforts. Regardless of the tool, this interrogation should be automated. Use a tool to collect all the relevant utilisation metrics and map your resources back to applications, business units or service owners.
Step Two: Optimise VMware Licensing and Consumption
Simplify and rationalise your existing VMware consumption. Identify orphaned resources, such as unattached volumes, idle VMs or duplicate templates, consolidate infrastructure where possible, reduce if non-critical, and examine potential repurchases for workloads better suited for SaaS. Use all levers possible to reduce the VMware licensing required. Waste often builds up inside infrastructure environment; it’s important to optimise it.
As a real-life example, one public sector organisation I worked with mitigated their 40% VMware price increase by reducing their estate down by 25%, so they only had to request a 15% uplift from finance. It was more than expected, but not a doomsday event.
This is a lever you can use to maximum value once, and once only. Why? Because once the waste from your infrastructure environment is removed and you’ve renewed the minimum number of cores required, it becomes harder to keep optimising. In reality, this step buys you more time if you want to move towards a new architecture.
Option One: Simplify & Remain on VMware
Some businesses may opt to continue with VMware, absorbing the increased costs and adjusting to the new subscription model. This approach suits organisations deeply integrated with VMware’s ecosystem and those seeking to avoid the complexities of migration. It may be that moving to an alternative is simply too expensive with too high a risk of mission critical workload outages.
Remaining on-premises with VMware whilst consolidating infrastructure to reduce core count and lower licensing costs is the path of least resistance and change. Sometimes, staying with a known quantity feels less risky than venturing into the unknown.
Option Two: Alternative Hypervisor to VMware
Retaining on-premises and exploring alternative virtualisation platforms can lower costs, offer flexible licensing, and reduce vendor lock-in, enhancing infrastructure agility and negotiation power. Many organisations will remain on-premises and leverage a Nutanix, OpenShift or HPE VME virtualisation and hypervisor alternative by relocating VMs. However, this path requires careful evaluation of compatibility, performance, and the total cost of – areas where our experts at Telefónica Tech really shine and are ready to provide guidance tailored to your needs. To help you explore the available paths forward, here are some of the key alternatives to consider:
Option Three: VMware Cloud
If your teams, tools and workloads are locked into VMware, making an exit tricky, but you want to move away from on-premises licensing models, relocating to VMware cloud foundation for either a hybrid or cloud first platform is another option. For some organisations, this makes a perfect stepping stone for future cloud modernisation.
Options Four: Cloud Modernisation
Many organisations already considering a cloud migration and modernisation are seeing this as the perfect time to make the move. If renewal costs are too high, moving to the cloud and modernising could be lower in a multi-year total cost of ownership.
To start this journey:
1. Define cloud drivers and the benefits you want to achieve to create a north start during the migration
2. Build a cloud business case and strategy by conducting a thorough 7R rationalisation exercise to identify the best future state for workloads agnostically across the cloud continuum
3. Construct a total cost of ownership considering your existing cost base, future cloud cost base and cloud migration costs.
Equipped with this, the cloud modernisation journey of building a landing zone, rehosting, replatforming and refactoring workloads and redesigning your operating model to truly exploit the benefits of a public cloud platform can begin.
Additionally, hyperscalers will provide funding and support, such as the AWS Migration Acceleration Programme and the Azure Migrate and Modernise Programme across the entire cloud journey. This may include providing expert resources to help migrate, run rate credits to lower the post migration costs or training and upskilling enablement for technical teams. There are options to lower the overall migration cost hurdle to exit the VMware environment.
Summary
The landscape of virtualisation is undergoing significant transformation so organisations must carefully evaluate their current positions and explore viable alternatives to adapt effectively, ensuring a resilient, compliant and robust infrastructure environment.
There are options, from simplifying footprints to remain on-premises, to a full cloud modernisation to reimagine workloads. We’ve been working with organisations across all industries and sizes to help map their cloud strategy and define the best path forward for them.
Reach out if you’re unsure of your options and want to discuss further.
Ready to optimise your VMware environment or plan your cloud migration?