Broadcom’s VMware Overhaul Sends Enterprise Infrastructure Into A Market-Wide Standstill

The Broadcom-VMware deal was supposed to kick off a new era for enterprise infrastructure. Instead, it has put the market on pause. Shifting product plans, reworked partner programs, and mixed signals from Broadcom have left customers and vendors stuck in a cycle of reassessment, hesitation, and in some cases, legal action. The hesitation isn’t due to complacency. It reflects a hard technical truth: for much of the enterprise, the platforms meant to replace VMware still fall short of the mature capabilities their infrastructure depends on.

Nate Amsden is a Principal Systems Engineer with three decades of Linux experience, specializing in hosting internet infrastructure and SaaS application stacks. A VMware customer for more than 25 years, he brings a practitioner’s perspective to the confusion and constraints shaping today’s enterprise infrastructure decisions. His experience helps clarify why so many organizations feel stuck not by indecision, but by the limits of what the current alternatives can actually deliver.

"The really scary part is that VMware solved shared block storage in 2009, and sixteen years later the alternatives still can’t do it. If you can’t support customers’ storage, they either abandon their infrastructure or stay on VMware longer," says Amsden. With VMware in flux, customers are scrambling to evaluate alternatives. As a result, many have adopted a market-wide waiting game, a situation explained by VMware's market share domination prior to the acquisition, which left the field of alternatives unprepared for the sudden opportunity.

• Hurry up and wait: While Dell customers are exploring alternatives like Hyper-V, Proxmox, and Nutanix, Amsden cautions that migrating a mature VMware estate to these platforms remains a difficult undertaking. "Honestly, if you're in the shared storage realm, you're in a holding pattern at this point. The strategy is to wait and see how quickly the open-source alternatives can address the problems in their storage layer. How long you can wait depends on your current infrastructure and how soon you need to make a choice." He points to HPE VM Essentials as a potentially promising option, noting that it is one of the few offerings advertising full shared storage support built on open source KVM and Ubuntu, an area where most alternatives still fall short.

Faced with on-premise uncertainty and opaque licensing shifts like VCF and VVF, the default executive move is often to look to the public cloud. Amsden traces that instinct to years of cloud marketing that framed migration as a cure-all for cost and complexity. In practice, those assumptions often collapse under real financial analysis, driven by decisions that ignore basic architectural tradeoffs and force expensive reversals later on.

• Back to basics: Focusing on fundamentals reframes the debate. It isn't about an old guard resisting change, but about architectural pragmatism: using the right tool for the right job. "The best use case for VMs is for stateful workloads you cannot afford to have go down, like database servers, caching systems, and anything with a single point of failure," Amsden says. "The core value of a VM is that when a host fails, the workload moves to another host and comes back online automatically. You don’t have to rebuild anything."

• The cost of waiting: Ignoring workload reality can turn cloud strategy into an expensive lesson learned too late. "Some companies keep at it for years, like Geico. They reportedly used the cloud for a decade before concluding it was too expensive," Amsden recalls. "I have to assume that at some point, a leader at the highest level saw the $300 million bill and forced a fundamental change in strategy."

Beyond cost, Amsden points to a deeper misconception around availability. Cloud platforms don’t eliminate responsibility for resilience, they redistribute it. Building real protection against large-scale outages still demands deliberate, and often expensive, engineering that many organizations underestimate or defer.

• Costs vs. clicks: The logic persists because incentives aren’t aligned. Executives are drawn to cost-saving narratives, while engineering teams often optimize for speed and convenience. As Amsden puts it, "Executives are sold a story that the cloud will save tons of money, and that’s what they care about. The engineering folks are often the opposite. They don’t care about cost; they just care that it’s easy to spin up more VMs." The result is a familiar cycle where rising bills trigger concern, only to be waved off by the fact that, operationally, everything appears to be working just fine.

Ultimately, the strongest case against a universal cloud-first mandate comes from the companies best positioned to benefit from it. After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, the company announced plans to migrate its entire infrastructure to Azure, only to quietly abandon the effort later. "If the cloud was so good, why didn’t LinkedIn move to Azure after Microsoft acquired them?" Amsden asks. "LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. They could have had any change they wanted to accommodate them, but it still didn’t make sense."