Microsoft ends one of the last ways to buy VMware without big bundles
- ID
- 15917
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Aug 2026, 10:13 AM
- Fetched
- 20 Aug 2026, 1:17 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/virtualization/2026/08/20/microsoft-ends-one-of-the-last-ways-to-buy-vmware-without-big-bundles/5290044
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 20 Aug 2026, 1:18 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developerssaas_founders
What happened
Microsoft will stop selling the license-included Azure VMware Solution (AVS) on October 31, 2026, and existing AVS environments will stop working after August 30, 2027. Customers must acquire Broadcom's Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses directly and move to a BYOL arrangement, as Broadcom now requires all hyperscale partners to stop selling VMware licenses. This closes one of the last ways to run VMware without buying the full VCF bundle.
Why it matters
If your org runs VMware workloads on Azure via the license-included AVS, you have a hard deadline of August 30, 2027 and must start negotiating VCF licenses with Broadcom now—Microsoft explicitly warns current rigs won't work after that date. For Malaysian SMBs or enterprises that relied on AVS as a cheaper VMware path, this forces a migration decision: buy full VCF, move to an alternative hypervisor (Proxmox, Hyper-V, etc.), or refactor to cloud-native. The October 31, 2026 sales cutoff means no new license-included AVS deployments after that date.
Discussion angle
Whether Malaysian orgs still running VMware should treat this as the trigger to evaluate alternatives like Proxmox-on-Arm or cloud-native refactoring rather than paying for Broadcom's full VCF bundle—and what the real cost delta looks like.