The landscape for virtualisation has changed overnight. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many UK businesses are receiving renewal quotes that are double, triple, or even ten times their previous rates. The shift to mandatory subscription bundling and high per-core minimums has turned a standard IT expense into a major financial burden.
At Bridgeall, we are cloud migration and infrastructure specialists, and we believe that while the price increases are frustrating, they present a perfect opportunity to modernise your infrastructure. Here are the three most effective paths to cutting costs and future-proofing your business.
Three Migration Options for VMWare Users
- The On-Premise Refresh: Moving to Microsoft Hyper-V
If your business requires hardware to remain on-site for latency or data sovereignty reasons, you don’t have to stay on VMware. Moving to a dedicated on-premise server environment running Microsoft Hyper-V is the most direct way to eliminate VMware licensing fees.
Hyper-V is built directly into Windows Server. If you already have Windows Server Datacentre licenses, your hypervisor is essentially free, allowing you to run unlimited virtual machines on that hardware without a separate VMware bill.
- Pros:
- Drastic Cost Reduction: Eliminates the per-core “VMware tax” entirely.
- Familiarity: Your team likely already uses Windows Admin Centre and Active Directory, making the learning curve minimal.
- Performance: Modern Hyper-V handles enterprise-grade workloads with the same reliability as VMware.
- The Cloud-First Move: Native Azure Migration
For organisations ready to get out onto the cloud, migrating to Microsoft Azure is the ultimate exit strategy. This shifts your infrastructure from a rigid capital expense (CapEx) to a flexible, scalable operational expense (OpEx). Azure offers a range of different ways you can host your resources depending on how much you want to manage yourself and how fixed or flexible you require them. Connectivity and acceptance of monthly billing is needed.
With Azure’s pay-as-you-go model, you stop paying for peak capacity. Instead of buying servers that sit 60% idle, you pay only for the compute you use, with the ability to turn servers off after hours to save money.
- Pros:
- No More Renewals: Say goodbye to VMware contract negotiations forever.
- Advanced Security: Benefit from multi-billion-pound investments in security and compliance that are impossible to replicate on-premise.
- Agility: Spin up new servers in minutes, not weeks.
- The Best of Both Worlds: The Azure Hybrid Approach
Many businesses find that an all or nothing approach doesn’t work. The Azure Hybrid approach allows you to keep some workloads on your own non-VMware servers while seamlessly linking them to the cloud.
It uses Azure Arc to manage your on-premise servers as if they were in the cloud. You get the stability of local hardware with the management simplicity of Azure. It does bring a slightly more complex environment but with the benefits of both approaches.
- Pros:
- Azure Hybrid Benefit: It allows you to use your existing on-premise Windows Server licenses to pay significantly lower rates (up to 85% less) for your cloud VMs.
- Phased Transition: Move to the cloud at your own pace without a big bang migration.
- Centralised Control: Manage security, updates, and backups for both your local servers and cloud servers from a single dashboard.
Which Path is Right for You?
As a cloud migration and infrastructure consultancy, we have undertaken a number of these exercises for our customers, and every outcome is different. You need to weigh up your workloads, business model, skillset and cloud adoption all to give you the best outcome for your business. The key point is a move from VMWare is highly likely to save you money and worth the effort.
How Bridgeall Makes It Easy
A key service within our cloud migration services is our cloud readiness and infrastructure assessment service. We can carry out a full analysis of your situation and provide you a detailed report evaluating each option, including the associated costs and benefits available to ensure you make the right decision. Contact us today for more information.
