VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware.
Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware.
Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’s an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers.
For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini’s survey said they’re exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware’s higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.
Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini’s survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions.
“Significant barriers”
In today’s announcement, Rimini pointed to “significant barriers to progress” for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent).
“These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption,” Rimini’s announcement said.
Broadcom’s takeover has spotlighted the challenges of being overly reliant on a single vendor.
“Many clients are looking … at this [as] a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor and are looking for more diversity in their on-premises environments,” Tony Harvey, a senior director analyst at Gartner, previously told Ars, referring to Broadcom’s acquisition.
Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of “growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals.”
“In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for ‘best of both worlds’ workload placement,” the announcement said.
Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren’t planning to move any of their assets to VMware’s hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.
“The trend shows increasing diversification in enterprise virtualization strategies with a longer-term transition toward bespoke, multi-platform IT virtualization environments. As organizations reevaluate their paths to modernization, they are increasingly adopting approaches that combine on-premises infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and alternative hypervisors to support workload flexibility, operational efficiency and better cost control,” the announcement says.
In its “Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure” released last month, Gartner predicted that 55 percent of enterprises will make “proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery” by 2029, which is an increase from 25 percent in 2026.
In a statement today, Joe McKendrick, lead analyst at Unisphere Research, pointed to interest among VMware users to do more than just replace their virtualization vendor.
“[The survey] reflects a broader effort by enterprises to reduce dependency on a single provider, maintain continuity for mission-critical systems and modernize at a pace that fits their own business requirements,” he said. “For many organizations, that means balancing support for existing environments with new investments designed to improve resilience, security and scalability over time.”