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Can small businesses afford the upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation?
Strategic Shift in EMEA Markets
Broadcom has initiated a discontinuation of VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) across specific territories within the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). This strategic withdrawal forces existing customers to reassess their infrastructure planning immediately. You must verify your current licensing status with local distributors to confirm if your specific region retains access to VVF. Organizations unable to renew VVF licenses face a binary choice: migrate to the comprehensive VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) suite or transition to third-party competitors.
Understanding the Product Gap
To make an informed decision, you must understand the technical distinction between the two primary offerings.
VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)
This package optimizes enterprise workloads by combining virtualization for compute, storage, and networking. It effectively supports hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and containerized workloads but remains a mid-tier solution.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
This serves as Broadcom’s flagship private cloud suite. VCF offers a full-stack implementation that rivals public cloud capabilities but requires significantly higher resource commitment and financial investment.
The Financial Reality for SMBs
The removal of VVF presents a severe financial challenge for small-to-mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). Without the mid-tier option, organizations face steep cost increases.
One anonymous virtualization manager reported a potential budget escalation from $130,000 to $1.3 million annually—a tenfold increase. This customer, managing thousands of computing cores, noted that absorbing such costs is impossible. Consequently, many IT directors are actively evaluating migration paths to Microsoft Hyper-V or Nutanix to maintain fiscal sustainability.
Broadcom’s Consolidation Strategy
Broadcom is deliberately pivoting VMware from a “general store” model to a focused private cloud provider. Yves Sandfort, CEO of Comdivision, suggests this move aligns with a vision to prioritize high-value enterprise clients.
The strategy creates a deliberate consolidation:
- Reduce Product SKUs: Eliminate lower-margin, mid-market options.
- Force Upgrades: Push customers toward the full VCF stack.
- Increase Core Count: Drive revenue through higher adoption of VCF cores per client.
While this alienates smaller customers, Broadcom anticipates that revenue growth from large enterprises adopting the full VCF stack—specifically for private AI and sovereign cloud requirements—will offset the loss of smaller accounts.
Current Availability Status
Broadcom confirmed that product availability now varies by region to match local market requirements. While a spokesperson stated that vSphere Standard remains available and fully supported in EMEA, the more advanced VVF package is restricted.
Advisor Recommendation
Do not wait for your renewal date. Audit your current license usage immediately. If you rely on VVF features that are absent in vSphere Standard but cannot justify the cost of VCF, begin proof-of-concept testing for alternative hypervisors now to avoid vendor lock-in leverage during negotiation.