Most of my infrastructure work is about building things. This one was about refusing to let a vendor rebuild my cost structure for me. Two licensing fights landed in the same stretch, VMware under Broadcom and Veeam’s push off socket-based licensing, and both came down to the same discipline: know where the vendor is trying to take you, and know your own entitlements well enough to treat the contract as leverage instead of a formality.
Reading Broadcom’s direction
When Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware, the direction showed up fast. Perpetual licensing was gone, everything was being pushed toward the VMware Cloud Foundation bundle, and the cheaper vSphere Foundation tier we relied on was getting squeezed on both price and, in some markets, availability. The renewal a shop our size was offered by default was a single year of VVF, which meant walking back up to the table every twelve months while the price trajectory only pointed one way. For a cost line that size, a one-year term is not a renewal, it is a standing exposure.
So I pushed for a three-year VVF term instead. Across [X hosts / Y sockets / Z cores], negotiated [direct with Broadcom / through our reseller], that locked our pricing and, more to the point, bought time. The lock is what turns our planned move to Proxmox into a deliberate migration rather than a fire drill: we get to leave VMware on a schedule we set, not the one Broadcom’s next renewal would set for us. Measured against the trajectory of annual VCF pricing, the three-year hold protects [$ amount / renewal delta] and takes the yearly re-exposure off the table.
Holding the Veeam line
The Veeam fight ran on the same principle. Veeam was pressing customers to trade grandfathered socket-based licensing for per-VM subscriptions and telling us the migration was mandatory. It was not. Holding the line meant knowing the entitlement better than the people asking us to give it up, so I kept our 42 socket licenses and revalidated the grandfathered status in writing at each renewal, pushing the claim back through the reseller every time it resurfaced. We are still on socket-based licensing today, which avoided a forced repurchase worth [$ amount] that would have bought us nothing operationally.
The real win is optionality
The through-line is that a contract is leverage, not paperwork. The savings are real and they matter, but the outcome I care about more is optionality: the company decides when and how it moves off a platform, instead of having the timing and the cost dictated by whoever holds the license. Reading where a vendor is heading, and knowing your own position cold, is what keeps that decision on our side of the table.
The VMware term was settled in Q1 2026. The Veeam position holds, and gets revalidated at every renewal.