Microsoft closes the last bundled VMware route on 31 October

The bundle closes on 31 October

Microsoft will stop selling the licence-included version of Azure VMware Solution on 31 October 2026. Customers using it have to buy a VCF licence from Broadcom and move to the bring-your-own-licence arrangement by 30 August 2027, and Microsoft's own advice is to start assessing current AVS environments immediately. The service keeps running in the meantime; the purchasing route does not.

AVS was one of the last places a customer could get vSphere, vSAN, vCenter and NSX without buying the whole Cloud Foundation suite. Broadcom has gone all-in on VCF and no longer sells a standalone low-end server virtualisation product, and The Register understands the channel almost never sells vSphere Foundation unless it is part of a bigger deal that includes VCF. Hyperscale partners are not allowed to sell VMware licences at all, which is why the bring-your-own-licence rule reached the cloud providers first.

The date matters for budgeting more than for operations. A renewal that lands after 31 October cannot be satisfied with the bundled SKU, and a tenant built on it inherits the 2027 migration whether or not the workload itself needs to move anywhere.

What a VCF licence is counted in

VCF is sold per core per year. Redress Compliance, which tracks Broadcom quotes, puts the 2026 list at 350 dollars per core per year and realised prices between 185 and 275 dollars for enterprise-scale buyers, with the spread set by spend tier, term length and whether a credible alternative is on the table. Broadcom does not publish a price list for the suite.

Two multipliers move the bill more than the discount does. The first is a 16-core-per-socket floor, which Redress says inflates licensable cores by 10 to 25 per cent on hosts with 8- or 10-core CPUs. The second is a 72-core-per-CPU minimum that Redress reports was floated in April 2025 and withdrawn after customer protest, yet still appears in quotes. The floor belongs in writing before a core count is countersigned.

The vSAN entitlement is the quiet part of the bundle. VCF includes 1 TiB per core, and Redress puts overage at roughly 20 to 35 dollars per TiB per month, so a storage-heavy estate can pay twice for the same capacity decision: once in the licence and again at the capacity line.

Four exits and the number that decides each

The exit that wins depends less on the hypervisor than on how the estate is counted. A per-socket price and a per-core price are not comparable until the same host fleet has been run through both.

Proxmox prices per socket, not per core

Proxmox VE's published subscriptions are EUR 370 a year for Basic, EUR 550 for Standard, EUR 1,100 for Premium and EUR 120 for Community, all per CPU socket, net of VAT, with a one-year term from purchase. On a two-socket host that is a fixed annual number regardless of how many cores the CPUs carry, which is precisely the unit Broadcom moved away from.

The support tier is where the practical difference sits. Premium carries 24/7 coverage from 19 October 2026 and Standard gains 24/7 support by the end of 2026, according to the same page. Proxmox also ships an ESXi import path and CPU controls, and sells a Datacenter Manager for cross-cluster management, so a migration is a project rather than a rebuild. It is not VCF, and a shop that depends on NSX or vSAN policy will feel that daily.

What the exit actually costs

Every route out carries a migration tax the licence comparison hides. Nutanix does not publish list pricing, so that comparison arrives as a quote and the terms are the negotiation. Rebuilding on Proxmox means re-testing backup, monitoring and storage drivers against a new hypervisor. Moving to a hyperscaler under BYOL means buying the VCF licence anyway and paying consumption on top of it.

The cheapest-looking option is often the one that keeps the vendor. Staying on VCF with a five-year term at the top of the discount band is a defensible answer when the core count is large and the alternative is a platform rebuild, because term length is the largest published lever: Redress puts five years at 28 to 38 per cent off list, against 18 to 28 per cent for three.

Nutanix and the hyperscalers both arrive as quotes, and a quote is only comparable once the migration project and the storage overage sit in the same column as the licence. That is the column procurement tends to leave out, and it is the one that decides whether a cheaper list price is actually cheaper.

The decision rule

Above roughly 10,000 licensable cores, the discount band and the vSAN entitlement make VCF the cheaper answer, and the work is to normalise the core count and buy a long term. Across a few hundred cores on a handful of hosts, the per-core quote does not compress and a per-socket subscription does.

The grey zone is where most readers sit. Between 1,000 and 5,000 cores, Redress puts realised pricing at 22 to 38 per cent off list, which is real money and also a real discount to walk away from. The test is whether the workloads actually use NSX and vSAN. If they do, staying is cheap; if they do not, the hypervisor is a commodity and the exit is a project with a date on it.

Whatever the answer, the ordering is the same. Normalise the core count, get the floor in writing, then compare a five-year VCF term against a per-socket subscription plus the rebuild it implies. The comparison that ignores the rebuild is the one that keeps a customer who should have left.