TLDR¶

• Core Points: Most VMware users are still actively reducing their VMware footprint, with ongoing migrations and consolidation driving changes.
• Main Content: A CloudBolt survey highlights strategic shifts away from VMware, against Broadcom’s stated emphasis on selective customer engagement.
• Key Insights: Consolidation, cloud adoption, and cost considerations are primary motivators; vendor strategies may influence customer behavior.
• Considerations: Organizations must balance modernization with risk management, ensure skill availability, and plan phased transitions.
• Recommended Actions: Assess current VMware dependencies, map alternative solutions, design migration roadmaps, and monitor vendor strategies for alignment.

Product Review Table (Optional)¶

(No hardware product review applicable.)

Content Overview¶

The virtualization landscape continues to evolve as organizations reassess their reliance on VMware technologies. A recent CloudBolt survey examined how VMware users are managing their footprints amid broader industry shifts, offering a snapshot of contemporary IT modernization practices. The findings indicate that a substantial majority of VMware users remain actively committed to reducing their VMware footprint. This trend persists even as Broadcom, which owns VMware, emphasizes a strategic stance focused on serving select customers rather than attempting to retain every single client.

The survey results come at a time when enterprises are increasingly pursuing multi-cloud strategies, containerization, and tooling that automate and simplify cloud operations. Efficiency, cost management, and agility are at the heart of these efforts. By analyzing user behavior, motivations, and outcomes, the CloudBolt study provides a lens into how organizations approach virtualization retirement, platform consolidation, and the adoption of alternative technologies such as public cloud services, Kubernetes, and software-defined infrastructure.

The key takeaway is that while VMware remains foundational for many environments, there is a growing push to reduce dependence on VMware-specific stacks where feasible. The reasons include operational complexity, licensing costs, and the pursuit of more flexible and scalable options that align with modern IT practices. However, this transition is nuanced. Enterprises weigh the risks associated with migration, compatibility of workloads, and the need to maintain performance and reliability during and after transitions. The broader context includes vendor messaging about customer value and the strategic direction of the parent company, Broadcom, which has signaled a preference for working with a curated set of customers and a focus on profitable relationships rather than universal onboarding.

This article synthesizes the survey’s findings with industry context to present a balanced view of the current state of VMware usage, the drivers behind footprint reduction, and the implications for IT strategy and vendor engagement.

In-Depth Analysis¶

The CloudBolt survey centers on the notion of “actively reducing the VMware footprint,” a phrase that captures several related activities. Foremost among these is the consolidation of virtual environments. Organizations are combining multiple VMware clusters, data centers, and resource pools to simplify operations, reduce licensing overhead, and improve governance. Consolidation often goes hand-in-hand with rationalizing the mix of virtualization technologies in use. In many cases, teams are evaluating whether to migrate workloads to public cloud platforms, containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, or alternative virtualization stacks that offer different cost and management profiles.

Licensing costs and complexity are recurrent themes in discussions of footprint reduction. VMware’s vSphere and associated products can entail significant ongoing expenses, particularly in larger deployments with many hosts and virtual machines. For some organizations, the cost-benefit analysis tilts toward re-architecting or re-hosting workloads in the cloud or moving to open-source or vendor-agnostic virtualization solutions. This does not imply a blanket departure from VMware but rather a strategic rebalancing that seeks to optimize total cost of ownership, governance, and operational speed.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies are both enablers and accelerants of footprint reduction. As enterprises adopt cloud-native approaches and prefer capabilities such as automated scaling, resilient microservices, and rapid deployment cycles, the relative value propositions of traditional VMware-centric architectures may change. These forces push organizations to consider a broader set of options, including managed services, Kubernetes-based workloads, and serverless paradigms where appropriate. In some environments, VMware remains essential for certain mission-critical systems, legacy applications, or specific workloads that benefit from mature virtualization features and tooling. In others, teams progressively shift to cloud-native stacks or other virtualization platforms to achieve greater portability and elasticity.

Another dimension is workforce and skill availability. As IT teams upskill in cloud-native technologies, containerization, and automation tooling, there is a natural tendency to favor platforms and practices that align with new expertise and processes. The survey hints at a shift in the human capital cost calculus: investing in new skill sets and tooling can offset existing reliance on VMware, enabling developers and operators to deploy and manage modern workloads with less dependency on traditional virtualization administration.

Vendor strategy and messaging also factor into these dynamics. Broadcom’s stance on VMware—prioritizing select customers and focusing on a profitable, sustainable model rather than universal customer wins—creates a perception that VMware’s strategic trajectory is becoming more exclusive. This framing can influence customer decisions, as enterprises assess where they stand within Broadcom’s broader ecosystem, including opportunities for enhanced support, specialized services, and cross-product synergies. While this approach may align with the needs of some customers who seek deeper, more tailored partnerships, it may also prompt others to explore alternatives or complementary solutions to maintain strategic flexibility.

Technology trajectories outside VMware are clearly materializing in IT roadmaps. Public cloud services—such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and multicloud management platforms—offer attractive economics and agility for certain workloads. Kubernetes and containerization present compelling options for modern application architectures, enabling portability across cloud environments and on-premises data centers. Software-defined networking, storage, and virtualization technologies that deliver policy-based automation and dynamic resource provisioning further support the migration away from traditional VMware-centric stacks where appropriate.

The survey’s findings thus reflect a broader industry pattern: enterprises are increasingly comfortable distributing workloads across a spectrum of environments, rather than locking into a single vendor-neutral or vendor-specific platform. This diversification aligns with governance, risk management, and resilience considerations. However, the practical execution of footprint reduction is complex. It requires careful planning, including workload assessment, compatibility testing, data gravity considerations, security and compliance alignment, and change management. Organizations must also consider the potential need for interoperability across clouds, consistent monitoring and observability, and synchronized backup and disaster recovery strategies.

The timing of the survey is notable as it coincides with ongoing debates about the role of virtualization in modern IT ecosystems. While some analysts argue that virtualization remains foundational, others contend that it is increasingly a subcomponent within a broader cloud-centric or cloud-native architecture. The reality for many enterprises is a hybrid stance: VMware powers certain data center workloads while new development and modernization efforts leverage cloud-native technologies and managed services. In this context, reducing the VMware footprint becomes less about abandoning VMware entirely and more about optimizing its use, retiring or migrating noncritical workloads, and ensuring that the remaining VMware deployments deliver maximum strategic value with minimized total cost of ownership.

From a risk perspective, organizations should approach footprint reduction with a structured methodology. A phased migration plan—prioritizing low-risk, high-impact workloads first, and preserving critical systems with well-tested migration paths—helps mitigate disruption. Establishing a governance framework that tracks licensing, capabilities, and dependencies across environments is essential to maintain control over the evolving architecture. In addition, a robust testing regime and rollback strategies are crucial to ensure data integrity and service continuity during transitions. Engaging with trusted partners, whether vendors, system integrators, or MSPs, can provide the necessary expertise to navigate complex migrations, optimize configurations, and implement automation and monitoring solutions that support ongoing management.

The CloudBolt survey thus contributes valuable empirical insight into how organizations are navigating virtualization strategy, cost pressures, and platform diversification. While VMware continues to be a central pillar for many environments, there is a clear and growing appetite for footprint reduction, driven by economic incentives, modernization initiatives, and strategic repositioning within broader technology strategies. Enterprises that succeed in this transition will likely combine careful workload assessment with staged migration plans, robust governance, and a pragmatic approach to integrating new tools and platforms into existing operations.

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Perspectives and Impact¶

The broader implications of sustained footprint reduction efforts are multifaceted. For technology leaders, the trend underscores the importance of designing flexible architectures that can accommodate evolving workloads and deployment models. It also highlights the significance of cost governance in IT strategy. As licensing and maintenance expenses associated with VMware can be substantial, organizations are incentivized to explore optimization opportunities, consolidate where possible, and pursue modernization paths that reduce overall dependency on traditional virtualization infrastructure.

From a vendor perspective, Broadcom’s strategy signals a shift toward selective engagement and higher-margin offerings. Enterprises must interpret this stance in the context of their own maturity, risk tolerance, and strategic priorities. For some customers, a closer, more customized relationship with Broadcom and VMware could yield benefits in terms of specialized support, integrated tooling, and long-term roadmaps. For others, especially those with a broader multi-cloud strategy or a push toward containerization, the drive to diversify away from VMware may be stronger, accelerating adoption of alternative technologies and platforms.

The impact on the channel ecosystem—systems integrators, managed service providers, and independent software vendors—should not be underestimated. As organizations reallocate workloads and adopt new tooling, partners with deep expertise in cloud-native architectures, migration planning, and cross-cloud management will play an essential role. Successful migrations require not only technical execution but also governance, security, and compliance competencies that align with enterprise policies and regulatory requirements. Partners that can offer end-to-end services, from discovery and assessment to testing, migration, and optimization, will be well-positioned in a market that increasingly favors agility and resilience.

Security and compliance considerations also figure prominently in footprint-reduction efforts. Migrating workloads to alternative environments can alter threat landscapes and require updated controls, identity and access management models, data protection strategies, and incident response plans. Organizations must ensure that security posture remains robust throughout the transition and that new platforms integrate with existing security tooling and processes. Data sovereignty and cross-border data flows can become more complex in multi-cloud contexts, necessitating careful policy design and ongoing monitoring.

Another dimension concerns skill development and workforce planning. The move toward cloud-native and multi-cloud architectures demands new capabilities. Training and upskilling programs need to align with contemporary deployment patterns, including container orchestration, automation, infrastructure as code, and platform engineering principles. Cultivating these capabilities is not a one-off effort but an ongoing investment that supports long-term flexibility and innovation. Organizations that anticipate this shift are better prepared to execute staged migrations and to optimize their remaining VMware-centric workloads for efficiency and effectiveness.

The future trajectory of VMware and its footprint within enterprise IT will continue to unfold. While the CloudBolt survey confirms that many users remain committed to reducing their VMware footprint, achieved through various strategies, it also implies that VMware will continue to coexist with a spectrum of technologies in diverse environments. The rate and manner of this coexistence will be shaped by business goals, regulatory considerations, and the evolving landscape of cloud services, virtualization technologies, and container platforms. Stakeholders should monitor vendor communications, licensing models, and new product offerings that may alter the cost-benefit calculus of VMware usage versus migration to alternatives.

In terms of best practices, organizations aiming to navigate footprint reduction successfully should emphasize: (1) comprehensive workload inventory and assessment to identify candidates for migration; (2) a clear migration strategy with defined milestones, success metrics, and rollback plans; (3) a staged approach that prioritizes low-risk, high-value workloads and preserves critical systems; (4) governance that integrates licensing management, security, and compliance controls across all environments; and (5) a talent strategy that aligns with the technologies in use, supporting continuous improvement and organizational resilience.

As automation and orchestration play an ever-larger role in modern IT operations, the ability to manage hybrid and multi-cloud environments with consistent policy enforcement becomes a competitive differentiator. The ongoing trend of consuming more cloud-native services and decoupling from single-vendor virtualization platforms suggests that successful organizations will blend VMware where it delivers clear value with complementary technologies that enable faster deployment, greater scalability, and reduced total cost of ownership. The net effect should be a more agile, cost-conscious, and resilient IT organization capable of adapting to changing business needs.

Key Takeaways¶

Main Points:
– A majority of VMware users are actively reducing their VMware footprint.
– Drivers include consolidation, cost control, and modernization toward cloud-native approaches.
– Broadcom’s strategy emphasizes selective engagement with customers, influencing enterprise decisions.

Areas of Concern:
– Migration risk and workload compatibility during transitions.
– Security, governance, and compliance across diversified environments.
– Skill gaps and the need for ongoing training to manage hybrid architectures.

Summary and Recommendations¶

The current IT landscape reveals a balanced tension between preserving VMware’s value and pursuing modernization through diversification. The CloudBolt survey provides evidence that many organizations are not seeking to abandon VMware outright but are instead pursuing deliberate footprint reduction. This approach aligns with broader industry trends toward cloud-native adoption, multi-cloud strategies, and more efficient cost management. Enterprises should approach this transition with a structured, evidence-based plan that minimizes risk while maximizing strategic benefits.

Key recommendations include:
– Conduct a comprehensive inventory of VMware workloads to identify candidates for migration or decommissioning.
– Develop a phased migration roadmap that prioritizes low-risk, high-impact workloads, with clear milestones, success metrics, and rollback options.
– Invest in cross-team governance to manage licensing, security, and compliance across on-premises and cloud environments.
– Build a talent development plan focused on cloud-native technologies, containerization, automation, and platform engineering to support ongoing modernization.
– Engage with trusted partners and maintain awareness of vendor strategies and product roadmaps to inform decision-making and ensure alignment with business goals.

Ultimately, organizations that combine thoughtful planning, disciplined execution, and continuous optimization will be best positioned to reap the benefits of footprint reduction—gaining agility, reducing costs, and maintaining resilience in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.

References¶

• Original: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/most-vmware-users-still-actively-reducing-their-vmware-footprint-survey-finds/
• Additional references:
• Broadcom VMware strategy and performance updates
• CloudBolt survey methodology and executive summary
• Multi-cloud and cloud-native adoption trends in 2025-2026
• Industry analyses on virtualization footprints and cost optimization
• Guides on workload migration, security in hybrid clouds, and governance best practices

*圖片來源：Unsplash*