CRW

Home Wiki

VMware

View on consumerrights.wiki ↗

Work in progress
This article has been flagged for additional work. Treat its claims as provisional.
Stub
This article is a stub. The wiki community is still building it out.
Contents7
  1. Consumer-impact summary
  2. Incidents
  3. Cease and Desist Letters/Notifications
  4. Products
  5. See also
  6. Alternatives
  7. References

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

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
Basic information
Founded 1998
Legal Structure Subsidiary
Industry Cloud, Information Technology, Virtualization
Also known as
Official website https://www.vmware.com

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

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.

Cease and Desist Letters/Notifications

Main article: VMware extraordinary price increase for licenses since acquisition by Broadcom

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

Re: Notice of Expiration of Support. Dear <Customer>, The above referenced Order(s) between ("Customer") and VMware LLC (as successor in interest to VMware, Inc. and hereinafter referred to as "VMware") expired on or before February 15, 2025 ("Expiration Date"). Accordingly, Customer's right to receive Support Services for the perpetual Software listed in the Order(s) expired on or before such date. As no new order(s) for subscription licenses and support services has been executed between the parties, Support Services are no longer available for the perpetual Software listed in the Order(s) and such Software licenses deployed in your environment are running unsupported. VMware, therefore, immediately demands that all use of Support Services associated with VMware Software, including Maintenance Releases/Updates, Minor Releases, Major Releases/Upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes or security patches (with the exception of zero-day security patches for vSphere 7.x and 8.x, CVSS score greater than or equal to 9.0, so long as those are generally provided by VMware at no cost) be ceased. The implementation of any of the aforementioned (excluding select zero-day patches as defined above) past the Expiration Date must be immediately removed/deinstalled. Any such use of Support past the Expiration Date constitutes a material breach of the Agreement with VMware and an infringement of VMware's intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorneys' fees. Additionally, Customer must comply with any post-expiration reporting requirements related to the Order(s) and governing license agreement. Failure to comply with such requirements may result in a breach of the Agreement by Customer and VMware may exercise its right to audit Customer as well as any other available contractual or legal remedy. If you have questions, please contact your Broadcom/VMware Account Director or authorized reseller. This communication shall not prejudice or waive any rights or remedies that Broadcom or VMware may have as respects the subject matter set forth herein, all of which are hereby expressly reserved. Sincerely, <Representative>
Notice of Expiration of Support by Broadcom[2]

Products

  • VMWare Horizon (date): summary of incident (software key)
  • VMWare Workstation Pro (date): summary of incident
  • VMWare Esxi (date): summary of incident

See also

Broadcom Inc.

[3][4]

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 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.

References

  1. ↑ Sharwood, Simon (2024-10-01). "AT&T claims VMware offered it a 1,050 percent price rise". The Register. Archived from the original on 2025-11-28. Retrieved 2025-09-08.
  2. ↑ "Notice of Expiration of Support by Broadcom". 2025-04-16. Archived from the original on 13 May 2025. Retrieved 2025-09-11.
  3. ↑ Harding, Scharon (2025-05-07). "VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 13 Oct 2025. Retrieved 2025-09-11.
  4. ↑ HJForsythe (2025-04-15). "VMWare threatening perpetual license holders than haven't purchased subcriptions". Archived from the original on 25 Apr 2025. Retrieved 2025-09-11 – via Reddit.
Filed under