# Know your VMware options and costs before the renewal lands.

> A VMware exit assessment is a fixed-price review of your VMware estate that sizes the realistic alternatives and gives you a written exit plan with costs and timings, from £1,365 for up to 25 VMs. Since Broadcom bought VMware, licensing has moved to subscriptions and bundles, and many small estates now pay more for features they do not use.

Source: https://wharfcloud.co.uk/vmware-exit · Last updated 21 October 2026 · WharfCloud

## At a glance

- **Up to 25 VMs:** £1,365 one-off (list £1,950)
- **Up to 100 VMs:** £2,450 one-off (list £3,500)
- **Access needed:** Read-only vCenter account or an export
- **What you get:** Written exit plan and walkthrough
- **Our bias:** None: staying can be the right answer

## Why so many VMware customers are looking now

Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and then reorganised the product line. Perpetual licences were replaced by subscriptions, many standalone products were folded into a small number of bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation, and pricing moved to a per-core basis. Broadcom set out the subscription move in its own [announcement](https://news.broadcom.com/news/vmware-by-broadcom-business-transformation).

For a business with a few hosts and a few dozen virtual machines, the outcome is often a larger renewal for a bundle it does not fully use. That does not automatically mean you should leave. It does mean you should know the alternatives and their real costs before you sign.

Our guide [Leaving VMware after Broadcom](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/guides/leaving-vmware-after-broadcom) walks through the options in more depth.

## What the assessment covers

Table: Scope of the two VMware exit assessments

| Item | Up to 25 VMs | Up to 100 VMs |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Estate inventory: hosts, VMs, storage, networks, snapshots | Yes | Yes |
| Right-sizing from real usage, not allocated resources | Yes | Yes |
| Platform comparison with running costs | Yes | Yes |
| Written exit plan with risks and timings | Yes | Yes |
| Application dependency mapping |  | Yes |
| Phased migration schedule across sites or teams |  | Yes |

### Platforms we compare

- **Stay on VMware**, on the smallest bundle that covers what you use, with a renegotiation checklist.
- **Proxmox VE**, an open source hypervisor with optional paid support subscriptions.
- **Microsoft Hyper-V**, often already licensed if you run Windows Server Datacenter.
- **Managed servers**, where we run the operating system for you and you stop running a hypervisor at all.
- **Public cloud**, where a workload genuinely benefits from it, sized from your real usage.

## How it works

1. **Book online.** Choose the estate size and pay by card. A person checks every first order before work starts.
2. **Read-only access.** You create a read-only vCenter account for us, or send an inventory export (for example from RVTools). We never need write access.
3. **Analysis.** We size each VM from its actual use, group them by risk and dependency, and price each option.
4. **Plan and walkthrough.** You receive the written plan and a call to go through it. The plan is yours, whoever carries it out.

> **Migration onto our managed servers is free** If the plan recommends moving some workloads onto our [managed Linux](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/managed-servers/linux) or [managed Windows](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/managed-servers/windows) servers and you go ahead, we move them at no extra charge.

## Price

- **Up to 25 VMs:** £1,365 intro price (first 50 customers), £1,950 list price (one-off). For small estates. Includes: Estate inventory and sizing; Platform comparison; Written exit plan.
- **Up to 100 VMs:** £2,450 intro price (first 50 customers), £3,500 list price (one-off). For larger or multi-site estates. Includes: Everything in the 25 VM assessment; Dependency mapping; Phased migration schedule.

Prices in GBP. No VAT is added: we are not VAT registered. Order online: https://wharfcloud.co.uk/app/order/vmware-exit-assessment?plan=25-vm

## Questions we get asked

### Do you sell VMware licences?

No. We have no licence to sell you, which is why we can tell you honestly when staying on VMware is the cheaper option.

### What access do you need?

A read-only vCenter account, or an inventory export you send us. We do not change anything in your environment during the assessment.

### We have more than 100 VMs.

[Tell us about the estate](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/contact?topic=vmware-exit-assessment) and we will quote a fixed price before you book.

### Is Proxmox really production-ready?

Many businesses run it in production, and paid support subscriptions are available from its developer. Whether it suits you depends on your backup tooling, storage and in-house skills, which the assessment covers. Our [Proxmox vs Hyper-V comparison](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/guides/proxmox-vs-hyper-v-after-vmware) sets out the trade-offs.

### Can I estimate the cost myself first?

Yes. The free [migration cost calculator](https://wharfcloud.co.uk/tools/migration-cost-calculator) gives a rough figure from a few numbers.

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