A 3D Printer, Five Shirts, and Twelve Questions About VMware

Last month we ran a quiz. Three questions a week about life after VMware, one drawing entry per correct answer, and a Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer for whoever the wheel picked. Monday morning, the wheel picked Mark H.

Forty-one entries went on the wheel, one per correct answer, and Mark earned nine of them. Congratulations, Mark. We hope the printer’s first job is something completely unnecessary.

Shirt #1 of 8

Five players answered nine or more questions in September and earned the first numbered OST shirt: Parker B., Jared S., Austin N., Mark H., and Matthew G. The slogan on shirt #1: “Alterations welcome. Renewals optional.”

Earn a shirt every month through April and shirt 9/8 is yours. Yes, that’s the joke. No, you can’t buy it.

What the twelve questions were really about

If you skipped the quiz, here’s the whole course in one sitting.

Week 1: How we got here

Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, and the licensing model changed within weeks. Perpetual licenses were discontinued in favor of subscription bundles. And because VMware held well over half the server virtualization market, one company’s licensing decision became everyone’s budget problem. That ransom-note feeling when the renewal quote arrived? Not your imagination.

Week 2: Know your escape routes

Proxmox, the open-source hypervisor, has become the leading VMware alternative for small and mid-sized environments. Nobody can acquire it and triple your renewal, which is why it’s the engine behind our fully hosted private cloud at Flexential in Salt Lake City with DR/HA site in Boston, MA. On the other path, AWS’s Migration Acceleration Program puts real money behind qualified migrations. Most businesses have never heard of it. The rule of thumb: around 20 VMs is where a funded AWS migration starts beating hosted private cloud on economics. Below that, private cloud usually wins.

Week 3: Migration myths

Leaving VMware does not mean rebuilding every server. Lift-and-shift tooling replicates running VMs to their new home. The first step of a well-run exit is an assessment of what’s running and what it costs, never a cancellation. And the color of the server racks remains, sadly, not a decision factor. Ours are a lovely gray, though.

Week 4: The bigger picture

The lesson of the whole episode is to avoid single-vendor lock-in where you can. Lock-in is the tax you don’t see until the invoice arrives. The question that surprised people: under Broadcom’s per-core model, the minimum is 16 cores per CPU socket, so a modest 8-core server bills like a 16-core one. And the final question, a 12-VM business asking what to do about its renewal: a hosted private cloud probably fits best, but “probably” earns a real assessment, not a guess.

What’s next

October is our Utah Mammoth skybox night on the 19th. November brings a new game: one click a week, no forms, bigger prize. Details after the game.

Facing the renewal for real, not for fun? The assessment is free, and we’ll tell you when the answer is “stay where you are.” Call us at 801-218-3354 or start at ostailors.com/vmware-assessment.

The September drawing was held October 5, 2026 by random wheel, 41 entries, one per correct answer. No purchase was necessary to enter or win. Public-sector and education participants played for the leaderboard and shirt only. Players appear by first name and last initial. Full rules: ostailors.com/quiz-rules.