What the survey actually says
Rimini Street released the 2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What's Next for VMware Users on October 6, 2026. Unisphere Research surveyed 269 executives, managers and professionals across VMware user organizations between December 2025 and February 2026. The headline finding is that 90% of respondents said they are considering alternatives to VMware due to higher licensing costs, while 54% cited the end of perpetual license support as another reason.
That is not the same as 90% having an exit plan. It means nine in ten of the people asked said cost was pushing them to look around. The 54% figure likely overlaps with the 90%, so don't add them together.
Some outlets describe the sample as "300 organizations", which is a rounding of "nearly 300". The methodology puts it at 269 respondents.
The sponsor has a stake
Rimini Street commissioned the research and provides third-party support for VMware and other enterprise software, including Oracle and SAP. Ars Technica made the same point, saying Rimini has an incentive to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. It also noted that an independent research firm ran the survey, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers.
Treat the numbers as stated opinions from a sponsored sample at a point in time. They are not a census of the VMware installed base.
The other numbers
All of these are survey percentages, and they come from different questions. Don't stack them into a funnel.
| Finding | Share |
|---|---|
| Cost savings is a top priority in roadmap decisions | 73% |
| Considering a multi-hypervisor strategy | 60% |
| Favoring hybrid hypervisors plus containers | 47% |
| No current plan to move assets to VMware Cloud Foundation | 48% |
| Using or considering third-party support | 66% |
The third-party support finding is a combined figure. 66% of respondents are currently using or considering third-party support. The main reasons given were security (60%), installation and implementation support (57%) and service-and-support concerns (54%).
TechRadar's version says 18% are already using third-party support. The release gives only the combined 66%, so I'm not treating 18% as a verified figure.
Barriers to leaving
The barriers respondents named explain why interest in leaving doesn't turn into migrations quickly. They were operational complexity (40 percent), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent).
None of these is a licensing problem. All of them are staffing, tooling and risk problems. A cheaper hypervisor licence doesn't help if the team has no experience with it, or if running two platforms means two sets of patching, monitoring, backup and access controls.
Evaluating isn't leaving
The 48% who don't currently plan to move assets to VMware Cloud Foundation aren't necessarily leaving VMware. Heise reports that almost half of surveyed perpetual-license users are not planning to move their VMware resources to such a subscription. They could stay on existing deployments, buy third-party support, or move partly elsewhere.
Heise adds a timing point for perpetual-license holders. General support for vSphere 8 ends on October 11, 2027. Moving to vSphere 9 requires a subscription to either VMware vSphere Foundation or VMware Cloud Foundation. That deadline is a more concrete planning anchor than any survey percentage.
Broader context
- Ars Technica reports that customers have said their VMware costs rose by as much as 1,000 percent, with many pointing to more modest increases of around 100 to 300 percent. These are customer claims, not audited figures.
- The Register notes that in May 2025 cloud groups ECCO and CISPE claimed VMware licensing costs had risen to between eight and 15 times previous levels. It also reports Broadcom's response that it is working to advance EU sovereign cloud objectives.
- Gartner's separate forecast, reported by The Register, is that 55 percent of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure products by 2029, up from 25 percent in 2026. That is a prediction about proofs of concept, not completed migrations. It is also not part of the Rimini survey.
- Gartner analyst Tony Harvey told Ars that many clients see Broadcom's takeover as a wake-up call about single-vendor dependence.
What this means for IT teams
This is my own analysis, drawn from the reported barriers rather than from any surveyed checklist. If you are weighing options, price per core is only one line in the budget. A sensible evaluation covers:
- Workload compatibility. Inventory what depends on VMware-specific features, tooling and backup integrations.
- Skills and staffing. Budget for training or hiring, since skills were a top barrier.
- Security operations. A second platform means a second patching and monitoring path. Rimini's release also points out that a compromised hypervisor can expose many guests.
- Support model. Third-party support is an option for staying put. The security claims behind it, including the 77% of security leaders who said they'd value real-time threat visibility rather than relying solely on Broadcom's patching, come from a vendor-commissioned survey. Weigh them accordingly.
- Timeline. Anchor planning to your actual renewal dates and the vSphere 8 end-of-support date.
Joe McKendrick of Unisphere Research framed the shift as more than replacing one vendor with another. He described it as an effort to cut dependence on a single provider while keeping mission-critical systems running. That is a more useful reading than "everyone is leaving".
Bottom line
Nine in ten of the surveyed VMware users said licensing costs had them looking at alternatives. A sponsored survey of 269 people can't tell us how many will actually migrate or when. The more reliable signal is that cost pressure is real, the work of leaving is hard, and many organizations are likely to blend approaches rather than make a clean break.