The bill finally comes due
For two years, the Broadcom-VMware pricing story was mostly about sticker shock: perpetual licenses gone, per-core minimums up, bundled subscriptions replacing a la carte products. That phase is ending. The enforcement phase is starting, and it looks less like a price increase and more like a compliance audit.
Broadcom ended the sale of new perpetual VMware licenses and Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals on December 11, 2023. Existing licenses were not revoked, so customers who had already paid kept running their software. What changed in 2025 and into 2026 is what happens once support lapses. Since May 2025, Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to customers whose SnS contracts expired, alleging they applied patches after support ended and reserving the right to audit (Broadcom Knowledge Base, 2025; Redress Compliance, 2026). Three-year SnS contracts, the most common term sold before the cutoff, are expiring through the end of 2026. That is the population now receiving letters.
Why this is a licensing story, not just a pricing one
Coverage of Broadcom's VMware strategy has focused on the headline economics: the shift to per-core licensing with a 16-core minimum per CPU socket, and a minimum order of 72 cores, which can multiply costs two to five times over the old per-socket model for high-density servers (Redress Compliance, 2026). That part of the story is now well understood by IT buyers.
What is less discussed is the mechanism doing the actual enforcement work: telemetry and audit rights. Broadcom's own support terms note that a perpetual license's underlying entitlement is not revoked when SnS lapses, and that ESXi hosts and vCenter Server keep running. Patch access is what gets cut off (Broadcom Knowledge Base, 2025). That distinction matters, because it means a company sitting on an expired-support VMware estate is not technically in breach just by continuing to run it. The exposure comes from anything that looks like continued vendor support after the cutoff: applied patches, opened support tickets, or added hosts and core counts. Those are the specific triggers audit-defense consultancies say are drawing letters (Redress Compliance, 2026).
For a buyer, that reframes the decision. This is not "should we pay more for VMware." It is "what does our actual license posture expose us to if Broadcom decides to look." Those are different questions with different owners inside an enterprise: procurement and finance handle the first, legal and IT asset management handle the second, and right now a lot of organizations only have the first one staffed.
The numbers behind the standoff
The scale of customer pushback is now measurable, not anecdotal. A CloudBolt survey of 302 IT decision-makers at North American enterprises with 1,000 or more employees, fielded in January 2026, found 88% worried about further VMware price increases and 86% actively reducing VMware usage, though the majority described this as workload-by-workload reduction rather than a full exit (CloudBolt, 2026, vendor study; reported independently by Network World, 2026). Fifty-nine percent of respondents in that survey had already seen list prices rise more than 25%, and 14% had seen prices double. CloudBolt sells cloud cost tooling, so treat the figures as directionally useful rather than neutral, but the direction matches independent reporting: enterprises are shrinking their VMware footprint in place, not migrating wholesale, because full replatforming off vSphere is itself expensive and slow (Network World, 2026).
The dispute has also gone regulatory. On March 19, 2026, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) filed a competition complaint with the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition, asking for interim measures against Broadcom. The complaint followed Broadcom's move to end its VMware Cloud Service Provider program in Europe in January 2026, which CISPE said excluded most European cloud providers from reselling VMware products entirely, on top of pricing changes CISPE said had raised some partners' costs by more than 1,000% since Broadcom's $69 billion VMware acquisition closed in October 2023 (CISPE, 2026; The Register, 2026). The European Commission confirmed receipt of the complaint and said it was reviewing it under standard procedure (CISPE, 2026).
What buyers should actually do before their SnS expires
Set aside whether VMware's new pricing is defensible. The immediate, dated action item for any enterprise still holding perpetual VMware licenses is an internal audit of its own compliance posture before Broadcom's does it for them: confirm exact core counts against what was licensed, confirm the SnS expiration date on every contract, and stop applying vendor patches or adding capacity to any host running on lapsed support. That single step avoids handing Broadcom the exact trigger its cease-and-desist letters cite.
The second decision is time-boxed by a real date. General support for vSphere 8 ends October 11, 2027 (Broadcom Knowledge Base, 2025). Migration planning that starts in 2026 has more than a year of runway to test alternatives such as Nutanix, Hyper-V or OpenStack-based platforms under normal conditions. Planning that starts in late 2027 does not.
The pattern worth watching beyond VMware
The mechanism here, not just the vendor, is what other enterprise software buyers should note. Broadcom did not need to raise prices on customers who quietly kept using expired licenses; it needed only to define compliance narrowly enough that ordinary maintenance activity became a contract violation, then enforce that definition with letters instead of lawsuits. That is a cheaper and more scalable way to convert a legacy install base into recurring revenue than a straightforward repricing, and it does not require the customer's consent the way a renewal negotiation does. Any enterprise buyer holding a large perpetual-license estate from a vendor that has recently changed hands should ask whether the same mechanism could be pointed at them next.