2025 was a wasted year (for enterprise virtualisation)

Welcome to 2026, which will be a make-or-break year for many enterprise virtualisation initiatives. There will be untold technical obstacles but migration is ultimately an economic and operational risk management decision. Although AI is hyped, Virtified is confident that it can be the "accelerator" for modernisation of virtual environments ... and it aligns with where the money will be in 2026 IT budgets.

Virtified has no doubt that the majority of VMware users are unhappy being Broadcom customers. The reasons are well-known and we won’t go into them here.

Unfortunately, most enterprise-scale VMware migrations made minor progress in 2025.

Why?

There is no all-in-one solution for VMware migration. But there are many alternatives for particular environments. As examples:

• Hyperscale IaaS is a popular option, but it won't solve network latency, network reliability challenges or satisfy complex compliance mandates. 


• Software-based alternatives are either unproven or lack sufficient ROI. Some aren't even enterprise-ready.

• Containers aren't the answer for existing monolithic applications. Instead, they are the default infrastructure platform for modern custom applications.

So, the implications for Broadcom customers are:

• Assume that multi-hypervisor environments are going to become the norm, and that you must dismantle your VMware-heavy management tooling (if you wish to reduce your dependence). This will take time and money … and it will not yield significant benefits in 2026 ... but it is essential for longer-term success.


OR

• Accept the situation and move on to other things (i.e., 'suck it up'). Accept VMware Cloud Foundation and its full-stack value proposition. This goes beyond compute and management to storage and network.

This does not mean that resistance is futile. Far from it.

In either case, there are simple ways to reduce the exposure and they should be implemented. One example is in development environments, which in some cases can accrue up to 50% of licence costs. Moreover, development environments are a fertile place to build the next generation of on-premises IT infrastructure, where containers, virtual machines, physical instances and bare metal can coexist.

Although your next renewal won't see any reduction, it will reduce your exposure.

Keep your eyes on the AI prize

Meanwhile, the backlog of other projects continues to increase, and the real prize is artificial intelligence. Addressing the skills gap will be critical, as always, but Virtified is confident that the rewards of AI will be worth the investment. Success will need a DevOps culture, platform engineering capabilities and a cloud-inspired infrastructure.

Regardless of your server virtualisation strategy, Virtified recommends the following:

• Building the capability and capacity for on-premises inference

• Adding agentic AI to accelerate data integration, legacy refactoring and (re)documentation of existing environments

• Prototyping semi-deterministic business solutions. Such projects must not replace systems of record, but they will enable faster, more informed decision-making that delivers greater business value

They will also reduce the dependence on traditional on-premises server virtualisation. If agentic AI can deliver easier data integration in less time then it will allow for the accelerated reduction of legacy environments.

Why is AI the real prize? It enables radical modernisation. 


The bottom line: don't waste 2026.