Dive Brief:
- Oracle announced plans to comply with Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation license portability entitlement model on Thursday. Customers currently licensing VMware software through the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution program will migrate to VCF subscriptions purchased directly from Broadcom or an authorized reseller.
- The transition will happen in stages, as Oracle executives outlined in a Wednesday blog post. Customers will continue to operate under existing OCVS agreements through March 21, after which a Broadcom bring-your-own-license subscription will be required for new deployments. Oracle will make BYOL its standard VMware operating model beginning May 21.
- Broadcom revamped its VMware hyperscaler licensing policy in November, at the start of its current fiscal year. The portability model is designed let customers run workloads in the public cloud as well as on-premises data centers and supported endpoints, Abhay Kumar, global head of managed services in Broadcom’s VCF Division, said in the August announcement.
Dive Insight:
Broadcom signaled that major changes were afoot in the VMware hyperscaler ecosystem shortly after finalizing its $61 billion acquisition of the virtualization software company in 2023. In addition to replacing perpetual licenses with subscriptions and paring hundreds of offerings down to several large private cloud bundles, it revamped its agreement with the public cloud giant.
Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan interceded to correct “false reports that VMware Cloud on AWS may be going away” in May 2024. “VMware Cloud on AWS is no longer directly sold by AWS or its channel partners,” Tan said in the blog post. “It’s that simple. What this means is that customers who previously purchased VMware Cloud on AWS from AWS will now work with Broadcom or an authorized Broadcom reseller to renew their subscriptions and expand their environments.”
Google Cloud announced its support for the BYOL initiative in February 2024. Microsoft signed on three months later, announcing plans to support VCF subscriptions on its Azure VMware Solution.
“Customers that own or purchase licenses for VMware Cloud Foundation will be able to use those licenses on Azure VMware Solution, as well as their own datacenters, giving them flexibility to meet changing business needs,” the two companies said in a co-authored blog post.
AWS responded to the licensing change with an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud option that went into preview in November 2024. Amazon Elastic VMware Services, which reached general availability last year, gives customers the option to self-manage their deployments or lean on AWS partner services to operate VCF environments.
Oracle expects BYOL for OVCS to be generally available in March. In the interim, VMware workloads in OCI will “continue operation as-is,” the company said Wednesday.
