Abandoning VMware
During its event this week, Nutanix reportedly also touted Everland, the biggest theme park in South Korea, and a separate, unnamed company with 100,000 cores, as new customers that came from VMware. Ramaswami said during a Wednesday investors call that Nutanix has migrated multiple 100,000-core workloads “in less than a year to get customers completely off of Broadcom,” per a transcript from Seeking Alpha. Ramaswami pointed to the Wynn Hotel in Boston, which he said has fully migrated off of VMware.
Other companies, including Microsoft (Hyper-V) and Proxmox, have also been aggressively courting disgruntled VMware customers.
While not a complete picture of VMware users’ migration plans, in a January survey, conducted by hybrid cloud management platform provider CloudBolt Software, of 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American firms with 1,000 employees or more, 95 percent of respondents had migrated at least 1 percent of workloads off of VMware. Among those respondents, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, and 43 percent moved to Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Azure stack. Last year, Gartner predicted that 35 percent of VMware workloads would be migrated elsewhere by 2028.
Despite thousands of customers abandoning VMware, Broadcom’s acquisition is broadly considered a success. Further, Broadcom has maintained a strong grip on the enterprise customers that VMware had pre-acquisition. Amid efforts to push customers to larger, pricier VFC private cloud and vSphere virtualization bundles, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said in September that more than 90 percent of VMware’s biggest vSphere customers had bought VCF.
In its Q1 2026 earnings report last month, Broadcom said that it expects software revenue to grow by 9 percent to $7.2 billion in Q2, largely buoyed by VMware. At the time, Tan pointed to AI and the RAM shortage as factors driving customers to VMware products.
Broadcom didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.
_Update 4/15/2026: After this article was published, a Nutanix representative reached out saying that Ramaswami said that Nutanix had about 30,000 customers, not 30,000 customers from VMware._ Senior Technology Reporter
Senior Technology Reporter
Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She's been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.
