Ebook: VMware cost optimization guide

| Posted October 27, 2026

| Next-Generation Infrastructure | Ebook

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In brief:

This VMware cost optimization guide helps you evaluate your virtualization environment before you migrate. It helps you assess your existing assets before you make costly decisions. This guide helps you make the most of your current resources as you migrate from vSphere to VMware Cloud Foundation or other platforms.

Optimize before you migrate and modernize

Most VMware estates have been built up piece by piece over a decade or more, usually without much documentation or intention along the way. Mergers brought in new clusters, urgent projects added virtual machines (VMs), and the standard answer to a capacity problem was to add another host. The result is a virtualization environment that few teams can describe accurately: oversized VMs, hosts sized for workloads that retired years ago, storage nobody has audited since the last refresh, and licensing shaped by old purchasing decisions rather than what you consume today. And by 2027, VMware users will need to migrate from vSphere 8 to another platform, such as VMware Cloud Foundation.

October 2027 is a planning window, not a cutoff

October 11, 2027, is a key date that VMware customers keep circling. It’s when Broadcom ends its standard updates and security patches for vSphere 8, and everyone still running the vSphere hypervisor has to decide what comes next.

This guide makes the case for a different order of operations: optimize first, modernize second. Use the runway to 2027 to find the waste, right-size what you have, rationalize licensing, and only then choose between VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), a full private cloud operating model, or something else entirely. Do it well and the savings you find in the first phase help pay for the second. This guide is not suggesting every organization should end up on the same platform. Whichever one you choose, you should not be paying to move problems you could have fixed first.

So before you sign on for a migration to VMware Cloud Foundation, ask the bigger questions:

We virtualized these workloads years ago. Do they all still need to be virtualized?
What should be retired, consolidated, or re-platformed instead of migrated?
Does our roadmap need virtualization, or a genuine private cloud operating model with automation to match?
How do core counts, renewal dates, and the next hardware refresh change the math?

NEXT STEPS:

Learn more about SHI and VMware here.

If you need help, speak to an SHI expert.

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Cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, Distributed infrastructure, Hybrid Infrastructure, infrastructure modernization, VMware by Broadcom

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