VMWare

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VMware is a major player in the enterprise virtualization software market. The brand has been a subsidiary of Broadcom since November 2023.

VMWare

Basic information
Founded	1998
Legal structure	Subsidiary
Industry	Virtualization Software
Official website	https://www.vmware.com

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

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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%.

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.

Cease and Desist Letters/Notifications

An incident of a customer receiving a cease and desist letter from Broadcom, regarding perpetual licensing and other services offered.

Products

This is a list of the company's product lines with articles on this wiki.

• Example product line one (release date): Short summary of the product's incidents.
• Example product line two (release date):

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See also

Broadcom Inc.

Alternatives

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.

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.

References

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/broadcom-sends-cease-and-desist-letters-to-subscription-less-vmware-users/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jzqbte/vmware_threatening_perpetual_license_holders_than/

https://imgur.com/FbrdQya