The company announced that EMEA customers must now check with local resellers to see whether VMware vSphere Foundation, known as VVF, is still available in their country.
“VVF is no longer available in some EMEA countries, but for the majority, it is still available,” a Broadcom spokesperson said.
“Customers will have to reach out to sales reps or partners to determine the availability of a given product in their region. These changes were recent.”
VVF bundles compute, storage, and networking virtualisation, alongside container support, and is widely used in hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud deployments. However, it lacks the full capabilities of VMware Cloud Foundation.
One affected customer said their reseller flagged the change when VMware’s new fiscal year began in November, forcing an urgent rethink.
The anonymous customer said their organisation runs thousands of compute cores and was staring at its annual VMware spend jumping tenfold from around US$130,000 (€120,000) to US$1.3 million (€1.2 million). It is considering a jump to Microsoft’s Hyper-V or Nutanix.
Comdivision chief executive Yves Sandfort said the move signals a future of fewer products sold at significantly higher prices.
Sandfort, whose firm is one of EMEA’s leading VMware systems integrators, expects Broadcom to push customers steadily towards its private cloud strategy.
“Whilst I understand the concerns of different customers, it is important to focus on the core vision set forward by Broadcom, which is to be a private cloud platform provider, not just being a hypervisor company,” Sandfort said.
Before Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition, VMware functioned like a DIY shop, allowing customers to assemble their own cloud environments from a wide product range, he said.
“Now they are selling a true private cloud solution, which is much easier to implement. So I think this decision of focus makes sense,” he said.
Sandfort acknowledged the approach will not work for every customer and that Broadcom will lose some along the way.
“When we just look at the number of customers, yes, there is a high chance it is going to see a decrease in count,” he said. “When we look into the number of VCF cores, however, I would expect we will see growth.”
Broadcom said it has no plans to withdraw VMware vSphere Standard in EMEA, which accounts for roughly 60 per cent of licences and remains the cheapest route into VMware’s hypervisor.
“We have not announced any changes to the availability of vSphere Standard in EMEA, nor the end of support for vSphere Standard. The product remains fully available across EMEA today.”
The product cuts come as the European cloud trade group CISPE asks the EU General Court to annul the merger that brought VMware under Broadcom’s control.
CISPE argued this week that Broadcom’s stated aim to lift EBITDA by 60-80 per cent in three years in a market growing five to eight per cent annually could only be achieved through aggressive price rises and forced bundling.
CISPE secretary general Francisco Mingorence said: “The Commission looked at this merger through half-closed eyes and declared it safe. By rubber-stamping the deal, Brussels handed Broadcom a blank check to raise prices, lock in and squeeze customers.”