VMware customers face a hard deadline as general support for vSphere 8 ends in October 2027, forcing organisations to decide whether to upgrade or migrate their infrastructure. This comes as many enterprises had assumed the disruption from Broadcom's acquisition of VMware was largely confined to earlier licensing and pricing changes, but the looming support cut-off means IT leaders must now grapple with a compressed timeline for potentially major hardware and operational changes, at the same time as managing modernisation, cost control and growing demands from AI and cloud-native development.

Industry analysts reportedly expect more than a third of VMware workloads to shift to alternative platforms by 2028, reflecting growing unease over vendor lock-in and unpredictable costs amid supply-chain delays and rising hardware prices. The piece, published as partner content by Nutanix, frames the deadline as an opportunity to modernise infrastructure so it can run virtual machines, containers and AI workloads together across on-premises, cloud and edge environments, and cites Nutanix's Lee Caswell noting that some enterprises are containing existing VMware environments while evaluating fuller platform transitions elsewhere.