Organisations using vSphere 8 have until October 2027 to migrate to vSphere 9 before product support ends, with additional costs needing to be considered beyond the complexity of migrating potentially business-critical IT infrastructure over to a new virtualisation platform.
VMware vSphere 8 was the last version that could be perpetually licensed, which means IT buyers need to move to a Broadcom subscription with vSphere 9. In 2025, Broadcom announced changes to VMware’s per-processor licensing model, which raised the minimum per server licence fee to 72-cores from 16. It also revamped product bundles for VMware Cloud Foundation. All of these hanges are likely to have a big impact on organisations that need to migrate to vSphere 9.
Speaking to Computer Weekly about the challenge vSphere 8 users now face, Martin Biggs, managing director of third-party support provider Spinnaker Support, said: “The move to version 9 is quite a substantial upgrade and you can’t get VSphere 9 on a perpetual license because perpetual licences haven’t been sold since January 2024.”
With the imminent end of life of vSphere 8, Biggs warned that along with the additional costs customers will face moving to the product bundle subscription Broadcom now sells for vSphere 9, migration is non-trivial.
“VMware underpins a huge amount of an organisation’s IT operations. There isn’t a longer support life cycle. This is a very rapid change and not just about upgrading vSphere,” he said, pointing out that the VCF product bundle includes network and storage virtualisation, which makes the product suite far more pervasive.
Spinnaker Support has been on of the companies carving out a niche to help VMware customers who want to continue running their existing perpetually licensed vSphere software. Biggs said: “We launched our offer to provide an alternative to VMware software support two years ago. We thought it was going to be for a brief gap as people moved off perpetual licences to subscriptions. But we are in a crazy situation now, which we never expected.”
Biggs said Spinnaker Support is now having conversations with people who had purchased VMware subscriptions from Broadcom. According to Biggs, these organisations are on vSphere 8 nd do not want to upgrade to version 9, even though they have been paying for the VCF subscription.
“They are now talking to someone like us to provide another service on top of that to keep the older version of vSphere fully supported through 2027, 28 and possibly 29. That doesn’t seem fair,” he said.
When asked about the risks in using a third-party support provider for VMware support, Biggs said: “It’s a different paradigm. It’s a change of religion compared to patching. Fundamentally, what you don’t get are new versions of the software.”
He noted that organisations buying support from Broadcom for VCF tend to have a VMware strategy where they want to stay current because they need the new functionality the latest version provides.
Among the questions IT leaders may ask if they choose third-party support is around how they can keep their VMware estate secure in the event of a zero-day cyber attack.
“We provide support including providing alternatives to security through defence in depth and compensating controls. We’ve been working with regulators to demonstrate that these are equivalent, if not better than patches, because we’re helping clients harden against zero day attacks, whereas patches can only react to these,” Biggs added.