AVS retires 30 August 2027 — your real deadline is Q1 2027

No. AVS BYOL requires a valid VCF subscription key issued by Broadcom, and a perpetual licence under third-party support cannot be registered against it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is going to waste your time. What we offer are exits from AVS — migration to Azure native services or back on-premises — not a way to stay on it.

15 Oct 2025: last day of sale for AVS Reserved Instances with licence included. 1 Nov 2025: Broadcom's hyperscaler BYOL-only model takes effect. 31 Oct 2026: licence-included pay-as-you-go nodes stop operating under the old arrangement. 1 Jun 2027: VCF 5.0 and 5.1 reach vendor end of support. 30 Aug 2027: licence-included AVS SKUs are retired entirely. 11 Oct 2027: vSphere 8.x, ESXi 8.0, vCenter Server 8.0 and VCF 5.2 reach vendor end of support.

It's measured against the cost of equivalent vendor support, which is the figure we quote across our whole software and hardware portfolio. Where it lands inside that range depends on your estate size, versions and coverage level. It is not a claim about your total migration cost, and it isn't a number we'll stand behind until we've seen your environment. Phase one produces a five-year model for your specific estate — including the cost of migrating — so you can compare it against your Broadcom quote directly rather than against a range on a web page.

Automation carries the analysis and documentation work across the whole migration: parsing inventory exports, reconciling entitlements, sizing the target, modelling costs, inferring workload dependencies, sequencing waves, generating per-wave runbooks and building validation checks. That compresses work which has traditionally taken weeks of senior engineering time. It does not mean an unattended system touches your production environment — cutover, network and security configuration, and the final entitlement position are engineer-owned and engineer-signed. Anything the tooling can't translate with confidence is flagged for a human rather than guessed at.

Only for the keep-VMware-on-premises option. Many AVS customers never bought licences at all — they consumed them inside the AVS SKU. If that's you, your real choice is between buying portable VCF (staying) and re-platforming to Azure native services. Customers who moved to AVS from an on-premises estate often still hold entitlements worth auditing.

The licences remain valid and the software keeps running. But you won't receive updates, and since May 2025 Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to perpetual licence holders shortly after support lapses — asserting that post-expiry patches may not be applied, and reserving the right to audit. Running unsupported is not the same as running under third-party support: we take on the support obligation, provide vulnerability remediation, and document your entitlement position — a materially different risk profile from going quiet and hoping.

Yes. A perpetual licence grants you the right to run the software indefinitely. Support is a separate service, and you're entitled to buy it from whoever you choose — third-party support has operated across Oracle, IBM, SAP and enterprise hardware estates for two decades. What it does not grant is access to Broadcom's proprietary patches and binaries once your support has lapsed. We're precise about that distinction and will walk your legal team through it before you commit to anything.

Then your problem is negotiation, not support — and the most useful thing we can do is help you build a credible alternative. A costed, evidenced exit plan is the single thing that most reliably changes the shape of a Broadcom renewal conversation. Some customers use us for exactly that and ultimately stay put on better terms. That's a fine outcome and we'll tell you when it's the likely one.

Yes. Broadcom applied the portability-only model across all hyperscalers, so Google Cloud VMware Engine and Amazon's VMware service moved to the same bring-your-own-licence requirement. If you run VMware in more than one cloud, you're facing this in more than one place.