This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues.
Learn more ▼
Issues may include:
This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content
How you can help:
Add documented examples with verifiable sources
Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
Flesh out the article with relevant information
This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, please visit the Moderator's noticeboard, or the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.
VMware is a major player in the enterprise virtualization software market. The brand has been a subsidiary of Broadcom since November 2023.
Since the Broadcom takeover, licensing and business model changes bordering on extortion, price increases, litigations against corporate users such as Siemens, deliberately ending support for perpetual license products, have left many customers facing skyrocketing virtualization costs.
Consumer-impact summary
Overview of concerns that arise from the company's conduct regarding (if applicable):
User freedom
User privacy
Business model
Market control
Add your text below this box. Once this section is complete, delete this box by clicking on it and pressing backspace.
In 2024, Broadcom removed the ability to extend support for perpetual licensing, and required that customers switch to subscription licensing. The product you bought can no longer be updated, to receive updates you must throw away your perpetual licensing and buy new subscription licenses. AT&T claimed an annual cost increase of 1050%.[1]
Incidents
This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the VMware category.
Alternatives include the popular free and open source project Proxmox, which has a less polished user interface but is otherwise functionally very close and is backed by an Austria-based company that offers subscription-based support plans for corporate users and QEMU, a fast emulation software whose name means ‘Quick Emulator’ and is open source,.
Linux virtualization (e.g. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is available with corporate levels of support. The VMware hypervisor shell is based on Red Hat. Nutanix offers comparable efficiency to VMware.
