Throwing Out a Life Raft: How OVHcloud Rescued Customers from the VMware Licensing Crisis

Crack, splash, boom! In 2024, the VMware ecosystem endured a seismic shift. Broadcom acquired VMware and quickly introduced a controversial change in its pricing model — shifting from a vRAM-based system to one centered on per physical core (pCore) licensing — and shaking the veritable ground users stood upon.

What once allowed customers to pay for what they used (GB of reserved memory) suddenly turned into a fixed core-based cost model of costly uncertainty. This expensive paradigm shift — a complete disruption of customer expense and infrastructure woe — was particularly painful for the SMBs, or small and mid-sized enterprises. With their small configurations (less than 16 cores per host), they had not been using advanced VMware features as NSX, yet were suddenly facing all new requirements to obtain a license.

Innovation, disrupted.

As a solution for these customers over the last 15 years, OVHcloud has delivered the most powerful, certified VMware platform across 3 continents: Managed VMware vSphere, a dedicated and fully-managed VMware service.

Though this change did not impact customers with large configurations and many activated features, OVHcloud customers that were using small hardware configuration of managed VMware vSphere environments were now struggling to find footing on this new shaky ground, as were their service providers. Our Managed vSphere offers were significantly impacted by the rise in cost, a fact that could have a devastating impact on our customers.

Even as many businesses found themselves suddenly uprooted and disoriented, we at OVHcloud were proud to provide a new avenue for migration and choice, while maintaining a trusted continuity of service. The great OVHcloud solution allowed our customers to keep using our services while mitigating this destabilizing change — their building foundations standing strong once again.

A new way forward: OVHcloud migrates you to Public VCF as-a-Service

The idea of “Innovation for Freedom” is at OVHcloud’s very core: we believe in the accessibility of tech for all. As such, we proudly launched a large-scale initiative to propose to the most impacted customers the migration from Managed VMware vSphere to our brand new Public VCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) as-a-Service, sparing them from suffering broken infrastructures, a would-be massive price hike, and the painful bruises of manual migration.

We saw an opportunity to support our customers during a challenging time, rather than leaving them to navigate licensing changes on their own. This situation prompted us to innovate and develop new solutions that would benefit our customers, ensuring they could continue to thrive without disruption.

Why with Public VCF as-a-Service? 

Customers were primarily concerned with the price increase stemming from the change, rather than the product. The transition toward VCF makes sense and bring a lot of good things, and VMware is a strong and efficient solution. So we addressed the price, kept the quality, and included a seamless migration for our customers a key part of the project’s objectives.

• A cost-effective shared infrastructure that absorbs the spike in core-based pricing.
• A seamless transition with no reskilling required, one that mirrors the existing VMware environment.
• A sovereign and trusted cloud — our datacenters are located in Europe and Canada, aligned with GDPR, ISO/IEC 27000, and SecNumCloud certifications.

Customer segmentation: a tailored migration strategy

Our hero strategy? Trying to save as many as we can! To optimize risk-sharing and minimize disruption, we grouped our customers based on their technological context. We started with:

1. Customers with a simple footprint —often without hybrid capabilities.
2. Microsoft-licensed customers — operating with centralized licensing servers.
3. Network virtualized customers — heavy NSX deployments needing precise mapping.
4. vSAN/Hyperconverged environments — complex storage structures requiring careful transition.

How we rebuilt the tech city: fully automated, risk-free migration

Like a city crumbled by disaster, migration at this scale required more than planning—it demanded precision. That’s why OVHcloud built a fully automated orchestration stack (based on Golang and our open-source Zpod project). Here’s what that blueprint looked like:

• Pre-checks: Scan for blockers, validate configurations, freeze periods.
• Customer context creation: Networking (VXLAN/VLAN), NFS storage, user access.
• Migration execution: vMotion, IS and billing mapping, end-of-window verification.
• Final validation: Public IP, health checks, affinity rules, segment profiles.

Challenges overcome

We came together on this one — it wasn’t a simple “lift and shift” of the rubble. Among the technical and operational challenges our teams tackled:

• Lifecycle and deployment hardening at scale
• Layer 2 connectivity and VXLAN bridging
• Multi-tenant orchestration with LACP complexity
• Preserving customer-specific network and software topologies

It must be said, these are real-world obstacles were such that only an experienced partner could solve and fix them efficiently. OVHcloud is proud to not have shrunk away from the challenge, and to count this among the wins that will help keep the tech world growing strong.

Why this matters: freedom, continuity, and cost protection

What makes the OVHcloud solution unique? We decided to prioritize the big picture and the every-customer, seeing the future we could rebuild together and not the money we could skim on the side. Innovation, freedom, togetherness. We stand tall in OVHcloud’s values, while even managing to:

• Ensure a price freeze for 9-12 months, despite the VMware price hike, while we migrated the customer to their new “Public VCF as-a-Service” environment
• Not allow a service disruption, and planning migration while running, with “hot” vMotion and real-time storage mapping
• Introduce License Portability (BYOL) coming soon—bring your existing VMware licenses and activate in minutes to Managed VMware vSphere, not weeks.

Power of Choice, Powered by OVHcloud

OVHcloud’s Managed VMware solutions offer businesses a fully managed, enterprise-grade virtualization platform that combines VMware’s industry-leading software with our trusted infrastructure, support, and security.

Current Managed VMware solutions

With VMware’s new pricing model placing pressure on thousands of businesses, OVHcloud didn’t just react—we innovated. We designed a new way forward, delivered it with little cost to you, and scaled a migration model that turns a pricing crisis into a platform evolution that you can rebuild on.

Continuing the transformation

Like heroes who care, we won’t stop here. We will keep on adapting our offering to the need of our customers: 

• New hardware for Managed VMware vSphere, reviewed to better fit the new licensing rules and provide, as always, the best price/performance ratio
• A whole new managed VMware Cloud Fundation solution to give you all that VCF 9 has to offer, including a fully managed stretched cluster version already in alpha
• For those seeking on-premise solutions, with OPCP (On-Premise Cloud Platform) already allows to bring VCF at home

To our customers, big and small: we see you, and we value you. Your freedom to choose, adapt, grow and stay safe, even in the face of disaster—this is our mission that we are proud to uphold.

Up, up and away!