VMware costs are rising on two fronts. There's a faster move than public cloud

If you run VMware on hardware you own, two bills are about to rise together: Broadcom's licensing changes and the cost of the servers underneath. Claranet is one of a small number of VMware by Broadcom Pinnacle Partners in the UK, and that status matters here. It means we can move your existing VMware estate onto our Managed Private Cloud with minimal change, take the hardware problem off your books, and give you room to plan any further modernisation on your own terms rather than under a renewal deadline. 

What 'Pinnacle Partner' actually means for you

Broadcom has reshaped the VMware partner programme since acquiring VMware in 2023. The four old tiers are now three, Pinnacle, Premier, and Select, and the entry-level Registered tier has gone. Pinnacle is the top tier, and the bar is deliberately high: Pinnacle partners hold advanced VMware Cloud Foundation accreditation, maintain dedicated technical and sales teams, and plan jointly with Broadcom. 

Why does that matter to you? Only Cloud Service Providers who are Pinnacle partners keep full, direct access to VMware licensing, support, and the product roadmap. For a customer, that's the difference between a provider who can carry your VMware workloads with the vendor's full backing, and one who's quietly being moved out of the ecosystem. Claranet holds Pinnacle status across several of our European countries, not just the UK, so you're backed by a multi-country group rather than a single local provider. 

The cost of tin is the part nobody budgeted for

Most of the VMware conversation has focused on licensing. The bigger surprise for many of the organisations we talk to is hardware. 

We're seeing the cost of server hardware, the 'tin', climb steadily. Lead times are long, refresh cycles are getting more expensive, and the capital tied up in a data centre full of ageing hosts is hard to justify when every host needs replacing on a three-to-five-year cycle. Add the new VMware licensing model on top, and the economics of running your own platform look very different to the business case you signed off three years ago. 

Here's the part that's easy to miss: doing nothing isn't free. Every month on owned hardware is a month of depreciation, maintenance, power, and risk, with a renewal date getting closer. 

Why private cloud first, public cloud later

When the licensing and hardware bills land together, the instinct is often to jump straight to public cloud. We'd argue for a more measured view. 

A direct move to Azure or AWS is rarely quick. It means re-architecting applications, retraining teams, and rebuilding operational practice. That's months of work, and a real risk of cost overruns if workloads aren't ready for cloud-native consumption. Done under time pressure, with a licensing deadline bearing down, it tends to go badly. 

There's a faster, lower-risk step. Because Claranet's Managed Private Cloud runs on VMware, we can move your existing estate onto our platform with minimal change. Your VMs move broadly as they are. The hypervisor, the tooling, and the operating model your team already knows stay the same. You swap a depreciating capital asset and an uncertain renewal for a predictable monthly operational cost, and you get out of the hardware refresh business entirely. 

That buys you two things that matter: control of cost today, and time to plan. If public cloud is the right long-term home for some of your workloads, you can move them deliberately, application by application, once you're already off your own tin and the deadline pressure has gone. 

What you actually get

Claranet's Managed Private Cloud is a fully managed infrastructure-as-a-service platform. It includes:

• Compute, memory, storage, and networking from our Tier-3+ UK data centres, with a self-service tenant portal to deploy and size VMs.
• Full platform management up to and including the hypervisor. We own the patching, the upgrades, and the hardware refresh, so you don't.
• Backup tiers and disaster recovery with defined recovery points, replication, and tested runbooks.
• Optional managed operating system support, so we handle OS patching and monitoring too.

One contract, one team, and a cost you can forecast, instead of a stack of hardware, licensing, and support contracts you have to assemble and maintain yourself. 

The measured move

If you have an existing VMware estate, the next 12 to 18 months will bring a licensing renewal, a hardware refresh, or both. You don't have to absorb both shocks at once, and you don't have to rush into public cloud to escape them. 

As a Pinnacle Partner, we can move you onto a managed, VMware-based private cloud, take the hardware problem off your books, and give you the breathing room to plan what comes next. That's the pragmatic first step. 

If you'd like to see what your VMware estate would look like on our platform, and what it would cost, let's talk.