Your VMware provider expires before your contract does

Yesterday IBM sold the contracts of "hundreds" of its VMware cloud customers to another company. Not one of those customers signed the deal. What changed hands was not a datacentre or a subsidiary: it was a book of contracts IBM will not be able to keep serving from April 2027. If your machines live in somebody else's VMware cloud, the date that really governs you is not in your contract. It is in the partner agreement your provider signed with Broadcom, and you are not going to be shown that one.

What was published yesterday

The Register ran it on 8 October 2026 at 14:01 UTC, by Simon Sharwood. IBM has sold contracts for VMware cloud service customers to 11:11 Systems, one of the partners Broadcom retained. The "hundreds" figure does not come from IBM: it comes from the buyer. It is the buyer who characterises the book, too: its chief executive, Brett Diamond, says these are customers running "versions 7 and 8 of VCF" and therefore "ripe for migration". 11:11 has forty to fifty points of presence for its VMware cloud and this is its eighth acquisition of a VMware service provider.

It is worth saying "migration" with its destination attached, because without it the phrase reads backwards: Diamond is not talking about leaving VMware, he is talking about moving up to VCF 9, which is forced because —again per the article— VMware ends support for "VCF 8" next year. He says so himself: "The customers we manage are very large multinationals and Fortune 5000s who want to stay on VMware". In other words: the book is not bought to take it off VMware, it is bought because it will need an upgrade project somebody gets to invoice.

IBM did not answer the outlet's questions, and one of those questions is the one that matters here: The Register asked about "some customers that we understand are not making the move to 11:11". So there are customers of that cloud who are not part of the deal. How many, who they are and where they go is precisely what nobody has answered.

The January sentence that explains October

On 31 January 2026, also in The Register and by Paul Kunert, the email Broadcom sent its cloud partners was published. The literal wording: "we have closed the current Broadcom Advantage Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) partners, and will not be renewing any of your VCSP partner contracts with Broadcom after 26 January 2026". And the commercial instruction that followed: "we encourage you to close any open opportunities you may be pursuing by 31 March 2026".

Read it slowly and notice who the subject is. The departing partner "is encouraged to engage" with the retained partner. The customer turns up at the end, in the smooth-transition clause, as an object. That is the IBM deal described nine months in advance, in English, in a channel document no IT manager ever receives. We do not see a dark manoeuvre there —it is perfectly legal and, frankly, the sensible option—; we see an information asymmetry: the decision that most constrains your platform is taken and documented somewhere you are not.

And it is worth not confusing this with that. In August we wrote about Azure VMware Solution dropping the included licence: there, what changes is who pays for the licence. Here, what changes is who is allowed to operate it. Two different moves, on different dates, and neither of them appears in the contract you signed.

Seven dates, and who each one belongs to

Lined up, the public dates affecting a hosted VMware cloud are these. The third column is the one almost nobody spells out: which clock each date belongs to.

Seven dates. Not one of them is in your hosting contract, and four of them are not even yours: they belong to a commercial relationship between your provider and Broadcom to which you are not a party.

Two days

Look at the 31 March and 2 April 2027 rows. The first is the last day a non-renewed partner may serve you VMware. The second is the day vSphere 7 runs out of technical guidance, the last thread of support it had left since general support ended on 2 October 2025. Two days apart.

We did this arithmetic ourselves by crossing two separately published calendars; nobody states it and it is not a master plan, it is a coincidence. The practical effect is measurable: if your environment sits on the vSphere 7 branch and a departing partner hosts it, in the same week you lose the only two things holding that environment up —who may operate it and who may answer a technical question about it—. The more important of the two, the product's general support, went on 2 October 2025: a little over a year ago.

"VCF 7" does not exist in Broadcom's documentation

Here is a detail that does not add up, and we would rather be the ones to say it. 11:11's chief executive talks about customers on "versions 7 and 8 of VCF". VMware Cloud Foundation's public release-notes tree in Broadcom TechDocs runs 4.5, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 with their point releases, then jumps to 9.0 and 9.1. There is no VCF 6, 7 or 8 branch. This is not the journalist's error: it is the numbering the vendor speaks in, and it circulates widely enough that customers use it too.

The circle can be closed with the article itself: it says VMware ends support for "VCF 8" next year, and the only 2027 date that fits is vSphere 8's end of general support, 11 October. So "VCF 8" is, in practice, the vSphere 8 generation. Being decipherable does not make it harmless, and this is the part that lands on you: if you ask your provider and the answer is "you are on 8", that answer is no use, because you do not know whether they mean vSphere, VCF, or the number they put on their own commercial offer. Without the product name and the branch number you cannot go to the lifecycle table and look up the date, and the date is the only thing we are after.

From thousands to nineteen

The January report gives the scale. In the United States, out of thousands of providers, Broadcom kept nineteen. In Europe, hundreds of service providers were left out, and the white-label model —the one where you contract with a local company that is, underneath, reselling somebody else's VMware cloud— was withdrawn in the European Economic Area. Kristian Liivak, founder and CTO of Estonia's WaveCom AS, with fifteen years of VMware investment behind him, put it like this: a "bulldozer named Broadcom" has "finally rolled over the remaining EU cloud service providers, terminating almost all VMware partner contracts".

We do not have the list of nineteen, and we do not know how many of the European hundreds are Spanish: we found no public list and we are not going to invent one. What can be stated is that white label was precisely the case in which the customer has the least information available, because the name on the invoice is not the name on the Broadcom contract. If you are hosted in a VMware cloud and the logo on your panel is not a vendor's, that question is for today.

Why a book of contracts gets sold instead of handed back

Here is the knot, and it is purely contractual. "Sources tell The Register that soon-to-be-former VMware partners often have a contractual obligation to provide a Virtzilla-powered cloud beyond the March 2027 cutoff." That is from yesterday's article, and it has to be read with its label attached: these are unnamed sources at a single outlet, not a figure published by anyone. If it holds, it describes a partner obliged to deliver a service it will no longer be entitled to deliver; and there are only three ways out of that crossing: the customer leaves early, the provider defaults, or the contract changes owner. The third is the least bad for everyone, and it is the one IBM has just taken.

The outcome for the customer, even when everything is done properly, is an email saying their platform is now run by another company, with another console, another incident procedure, another phone number and, quite probably, another migration proposal on the table. None of that is a failure. All of it is unplanned work, which in a small IT department is the most expensive currency there is.

Four questions that fit in one email

This is not a ten-point checklist. It is four sentences you can send your provider today, and each answer can be checked:

The fourth is the one almost nobody sends, and the only one you can answer yourself without waiting for anybody: mount the backup somewhere else and boot a machine from it. It is the same reason we keep insisting the backup should live outside the platform that generates it. If the only route to restoring it runs through your provider's console, the inventory of your data is held by them.

When this is not your problem

Now the part that does not suit us commercially. If your hosting contract expires before March 2027 and you were not going to renew anyway, this does not affect you. If your provider is among those Broadcom retained, it does not either: you have a partner who will still be allowed to, and the only sensible move is asking them to put that in writing. And if your environment runs on vSphere 8, you have general product support until October 2027, which in this industry is an eternity.

Migrating out of fear, in six weeks and with no rollback plan, goes considerably worse than renewing for a year and doing it properly. We have watched it happen. That is why we once wrote when NOT to migrate from VMware to Proxmox, and we still stand behind every line. A channel news item does not change your architecture; it changes what you know about your provider's calendar.

What is still open

Two things remain open, and both touch European companies. The first is the IBM cloud customers who, per the outlet itself, are not going to 11:11: nobody has said how many they are or where they end up. The second is that this concentration is in court. CISPE —the trade body for cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe— argues Broadcom has improperly concentrated the market for VMware cloud providers, and is pursuing an antitrust case in EU courts.

Litigation is not a continuity plan and can take years. We mention it because it is worth knowing it exists, not because it helps you decide anything this quarter. What does help this quarter is having written the seven dates on one sheet with the name of their owner beside each; four of them belong to somebody you have never spoken to. Broadcom reorganising its channel is not under your control. Recording a single date in the service file is.

We do not sell VMware licences or Proxmox licences, and we are not resellers of any platform. That is why we can write this: we have no book of business to place.

Sources and method (verified 9 October 2026): IBM's sale of contracts to 11:11 Systems, the "hundreds" figure (given by 11:11, not IBM), Brett Diamond's statements —"versions 7 and 8 of VCF", "ripe for migration", "The customers we manage are very large multinationals and Fortune 5000s who want to stay on VMware"—, the 40-50 points of presence for its VMware cloud, the eighth acquisition, VMware ending support for "VCF 8" next year, IBM's silence on the question about customers not moving to 11:11, the line attributed to unnamed sources about contractual obligations beyond March 2027, and CISPE's antitrust case all come from "IBM offloads 'hundreds' of its cloudy VMware customers", by Simon Sharwood, The Register, 8 Oct 2026 14:01 UTC. The literal text of the non-renewal email, the 31 March 2026 instruction, the FAQ line about customer transition, the nineteen retained US providers out of thousands, the hundreds of affected European providers, the white-label withdrawal in the EEA announced on 31 Oct 2025, and Kristian Liivak's (founder and CTO of WaveCom AS) remarks are in "Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware CSPs with March deadline", by Paul Kunert, The Register, 31 Jan 2026. That signed hosting contracts run to expiry and at the latest to 31 March 2027, and that from April 2027 a non-renewed partner may not deliver VMware services on its own hardware, comes from the trade coverage of that move. vSphere 7 end of general support: 2 October 2025; end of technical guidance: 2 April 2027. vSphere 8 end of general support: 11 October 2027; end of technical guidance: 11 October 2029. The absence of VMware Cloud Foundation branches 6, 7 and 8 was checked against Broadcom TechDocs' public release notes, which run 4.5, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 and jump to 9.0 and 9.1. What we do not know: we found no public list of the nineteen retained US partners nor of the affected European ones, so we cannot say how many operate in Spain; we did not verify the Broadcom quotes against the original channel documents, only against The Register's transcription; the claim about contractual obligations beyond March 2027 rests on anonymous sources at a single outlet and we found it corroborated nowhere else; that IBM was not invited to continue as a Broadcom partner is the outlet's own inference, not a fact confirmed by IBM; and the closeness of 31 March and 2 April 2027 is our own arithmetic over two separately published calendars, not a Broadcom statement. Cover photograph: A view of the server room at The National Archives, The National Archives (UK), CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.