By Tanvi Bagadiya
Publication Date: 2026-10-19 21:00:00
The VMware renewal conversation has become a Jenga challenge for a lot of IT teams: Finance wants a number, leadership wants options, and suddenly you are explaining why a “simple” hypervisor change touches storage, network policy, backup jobs, disaster recovery, monitoring, and that business-critical application nobody has dared to touch since 2018.
VMware fatigue is a thing, but the market isn’t seeing a mass overnight departure. A CloudBolt survey of 302 North American enterprise IT decision-makers found that 88% worry about future VMware price increases, while 86% are actively reducing their VMware footprint. At the same time, 54% said they plan to stay with VMware while reducing dependence on it. That feels about right. Most organizations aren’t looking for a dramatic exit. They’re looking for room to maneuver.
I recently attended Spiceworks’ online webinar, Architecting for Agility: Virtualization Strategies That Escape Vendor Lock-In, with Aberdeen Strategy & Research and Lenovo. The central idea was worth keeping: your next virtualization move should give you more choices later, not trade one set of handcuffs for another. You can find other Spiceworks online webinars and event discussions in the community.
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