“Negative” views of Broadcom driving thousands of VMware migrations, rival says

Amid customer dissatisfaction around Broadcom’s VMware takeover, rivals have been trying to lure customers from the leading virtualization firm. One of VMware’s biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers.

Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that “about 30,000 customers” have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom’s VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today.

“I think there’s no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom,” Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.

Since Broadcom acquired VMware in November 2023, numerous VMware users have sought to reduce or end their reliance on VMware technologies. The most common drivers for migrations are that VMware is getting too expensive; users are being forced to bundle products; the company ended perpetual licenses; and VMware has become harder to work with after Broadcom culled channel partners.

Broadcom’s strategy has made VMware unaffordable or impractical for most small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs) and narrowed VMware’s focus to enterprise-size customers.

Nutanix hasn’t specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments.

During this week’s press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter’s most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix’s “strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years.”

“Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform,” he said.

During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores.

Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom’s history of “decent lines of communication” with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had “challenges partnering with them.”

Shaw also pointed to Broadcom’s efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said.

Abandoning VMware

During its event this week, Nutanix reportedly also touted Everland, the biggest theme park in South Korea, and a separate, unnamed company with 100,000 cores, as new customers that came from VMware. Ramaswami said during a Wednesday investors call that Nutanix has migrated multiple 100,000-core workloads “in less than a year to get customers completely off of Broadcom,” per a transcript from Seeking Alpha. Ramaswami pointed to the Wynn Hotel in Boston, which he said has fully migrated off of VMware.

Other companies, including Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Proxmox, have also been aggressively courting disgruntled VMware customers.

While not a complete picture of VMware users’ migration plans, in a January survey, conducted by hybrid cloud management platform provider CloudBolt Software, of 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American firms with 1,000 employees or more, 95 percent of respondents had migrated at least 1 percent of workloads off of VMware. Among those respondents, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, and 43 percent moved to Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure stack. Last year, Gartner predicted that 35 percent of VMware workloads would be migrated elsewhere by 2028.

Despite thousands of customers abandoning VMware, Broadcom’s acquisition is broadly considered a success. Further, Broadcom has maintained a strong grip on the enterprise customers that VMware had pre-acquisition. Amid efforts to push customers to larger, pricier VFC private cloud and vSphere virtualization bundles, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in September that more than 90 percent of VMware’s biggest vSphere customers had bought VCF.

In its Q1 2026 earnings report last month, Broadcom said that it expects software revenue to grow by 9 percent to $7.2 billion in Q2, largely buoyed by VMware. At the time, Tan pointed to AI and the RAM shortage as factors driving customers to VMware products.

Broadcom didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.