VMware Acquisition and Price Increase: What It Means for SMBs in Richmond, VA

The virtualization market is facing major disruption. If your business relies on VMware vSphere, ESXi, or other VMware-platform technologies, you’re probably seeing changes in cost, licensing, and flexibility. 

If you don’t follow tech news closely, you may not have heard that Broadcom, known for semiconductors, cable modem hardware, and wifi and Bluetooth controllers, officially acquired VMware on November 22, 2023.

The deal, valued at about $69 billion, resulted in Broadcom immediately restructuring VMware’s business model from top to bottom – discontinuing licenses, eliminating small-business support, and moving all customers to a subscription-only model focused on enterprise-scale clients.

Now, businesses sticking with VMWare are reporting steep price increases and predatory business practices.

Hermetic Networks, a trusted IT Support Company in Richmond, helps organizations navigate these changes by offering tailored virtualization and infrastructure solutions designed to maintain stability, control costs, and ensure long-term scalability.

For Richmond, VA businesses, this matters because budgets are tight, agility is everything, and getting locked into the wrong vendor can stall growth fast. Here’s what changed, why it matters, and what smart companies are doing about it.

What’s changed with VMware:

• Many organizations report renewal costs rising by 150%-300% or more as licensing thresholds increase.
  
• VMware is shifting away from traditional perpetual licensing toward subscription-only models.
  
• Increased license minimums are pushing smaller deployments into higher tiers, reducing cost-efficiency.
  
• Feature sets and editions are being repackaged, sometimes forcing customers to pay for capabilities they don’t use.

Why Richmond SMBs should care:

• If your IT budget is fixed, higher virtualization costs directly reduce your ROI and free cash flow.
  
• Vendor lock-in risk increases: if you stay locked into one stack, you limit your ability to pivot or adopt newer cloud/hybrid models.
  
• Infrastructure agility matters. Businesses that can scale, adjust workloads, and adopt hybrid-cloud models win.
  
• You may be paying for features or licenses your team doesn’t use, which is wasted spend.

Alternative paths to consider:

If your current virtualization stack is becoming a cost drain, consider exploring alternatives:

• Microsoft Hyper-V: A strong choice if you run Microsoft servers and cloud solutions.
  
• Open-source platforms, like Proxmox/KVM, offer cost savings with in-house expertise.
  
• Hyper-converged solutions: Bundled compute-storage-virtualization in one stack.
  
• Hybrid/multi-cloud workload strategy: Mix on-prem, private cloud, public cloud to match cost/performance.

How Hermetic Networks can help:

Hermetic Networks, as a trusted IT Support Company in Virginia, specializes in helping businesses evaluate current VMware usage and costs, build pragmatic migration or optimization roadmaps, and execute with minimal disruption. Our service includes:

• A full audit of your VMware environment: licensing, usage, renewals, hidden costs.
  
• Strategy session: We advise whether to stay, optimise, or migrate.
  
• Migration planning & execution: We handle workload movement, testing, and downtime minimisation.
  
• Continuous optimisation: Once changes are in place, we monitor, refine, and ensure your stack stays cost-effective, agile, and protected.

What to do next:

1. Review your upcoming VMware renewal or contract terms.
   
2. Identify workloads that could move first with minimal risk.
   
3. Connect with our team to build a cost analysis and migration or optimization plan.
   
4. Align your IT leadership and finance team around the decision timelines to act before renewal.

Ready to take control of your virtualization costs? Contact Hermetic Networks in Richmond, VA, today for a free VMware environment assessment. Let’s build a smarter, more agile infrastructure together.