Sangfor Pushes Workload-Centric Approach To VMware Modernisation In New Whitepaper

Cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure vendor, Sangfor Technologies, has published a whitepaper aimed at organisations navigating VMware modernisation decisions, arguing that simply replacing one hypervisor with another fails to address the broader infrastructure challenges many enterprises now face.

The whitepaper, titled “From VMware Renewal Pressure to Infrastructure Choice”, features research from Gartner and outlines what Sangfor describes as a phased, workload-centric approach to reducing VMware dependency. It draws on findings from Gartner’s 2026 Strategic Roadmap for VMware Modernization, authored by analysts Julia Palmer, Tony Harvey, Vishesh Divya and Mike Cisek.

The publication comes as enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region and globally contend with the ongoing fallout from Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, which has reshaped the licensing, pricing and partner landscape around one of the most widely deployed virtualisation platforms in enterprise IT.

The Broadcom effect

Broadcom completed its US$69 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023. In the years since, the company has overhauled VMware’s licensing model, eliminating perpetual licences and moving exclusively to subscription-based pricing. The product catalogue has been consolidated into bundled suites anchored on VMware Cloud Foundation, and the pricing metric has shifted to per-core licensing with a minimum of 16 cores per CPU socket.

The impact on renewal costs has been significant. Industry reports indicate that many customers have seen renewal quotes arrive at multiples of their prior run rate, with increases ranging from two to 12 times the previous cost. A 2026 Gartner survey of 182 IT leaders and CIOs across North America, EMEA, Asia-Pacific and Latin America found that negative sentiment toward Broadcom’s ownership of VMware had risen from 33 per cent in 2024 to 76 per cent in 2026. According to the same Gartner research, 67 per cent of respondents were actively seeking alternatives and 35 per cent were planning a full migration away from VMware.

Gartner’s strategic planning assumption in the report projects that by 2029, 55 per cent of enterprises will have migrated 100 per cent of their workloads from VMware to alternative infrastructure delivery solutions.

Separate research from CloudBolt in 2026 found that 86 per cent of organisations were actively reducing their VMware footprint, while 88 per cent remained concerned about future pricing.

Beyond lift-and-shift

The Sangfor whitepaper argues that the instinct to respond to VMware cost pressure by finding a drop-in replacement hypervisor misses the point.

Cloud Business Director at Sangfor Technologies, Keith Lee, framed the issue in terms of strategy rather than simple platform substitution.

“Many organisations begin their VMware modernisation journey by evaluating alternative virtualisation platforms, but successful transformation requires a much broader perspective,” Lee explained. “Modernisation should be driven by application requirements, operational outcomes and long-term business strategy, rather than infrastructure replacement alone.”

This echoes Gartner’s own analysis. The 2026 Strategic Roadmap warns that organisations attempting to replicate VMware constructs on a new hypervisor will fail to achieve meaningful cost or operational benefits. The analyst firm identifies six critical gaps in the modernisation process, including a legacy lift-and-shift mindset that recreates technical debt rather than addressing it, VMware ecosystem lock-in across backup, disaster recovery and observability tools, and siloed virtualisation and container platforms that limit portability and consistency.

Gartner’s gap analysis makes the case that application modernisation must progress alongside infrastructure modernisation to avoid costly rework. Moving a legacy application from VMware to a new hypervisor without also addressing the application’s architecture, dependencies and operational model simply transfers the same constraints to a new platform.

What the whitepaper covers

The Sangfor whitepaper is structured around three areas. The first examines why VMware modernisation should begin with workload requirements, application dependencies and business risk rather than with platform selection. The second addresses how organisations can reduce migration risk through phased migration, workload verification and rollback planning. The third looks at how organisations can support existing virtualised workloads while building toward private cloud, hybrid cloud and cloud-native operations.

The whitepaper positions Sangfor’s perspective as an extension of the strategic considerations raised in the Gartner research, applying them to the question of practical execution. It examines how organisations can progressively reduce VMware dependency while maintaining operational continuity, preserving existing infrastructure investments and preparing for future architectural requirements.

This is the central tension that many VMware customers now face. VMware has been the operational foundation for business-critical applications, disaster recovery, backup, storage, networking, security and daily operations across thousands of organisations for more than two decades. It is deeply embedded in operational processes, recovery plans, storage architectures and the skill sets of the administrators who manage it. Pulling it out is not a weekend project.

The migration complexity problem

The difficulty of VMware migration is one reason the market has been slower to shift than the scale of pricing increases might suggest. Industry estimates put the typical timeline for a VMware migration at 18 to 24 months or longer, reflecting the complexity involved in untangling applications, dependencies, recovery strategies, security controls and cost models.

Gartner’s roadmap explicitly addresses this through its recommended approach of rationalising the VMware footprint over time, retaining VMware only for workloads that are genuinely non-portable – those with hardware-specific or OS-specific dependencies – while migrating everything else in a phased manner.

For Australian organisations in particular, the licensing changes have hit hard. Published figures from local analysis indicate that Australian SMBs are seeing VMware quotes in the range of AUD $230 to $290 per core, depending on term length and channel partner. For a typical two-socket, 16-core-per-socket server, that translates to between AUD $7,360 and $9,280 per year in hypervisor licensing for a single host.

Existing perpetual licences continue to operate but receive no further patches, updates or security advisories once support contracts expire. This leaves many organisations deciding between a subscription transition at significantly higher cost and migration off VMware entirely.

Sangfor’s position in the market

Sangfor’s play in the VMware alternatives space centres on its Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platform, which uses the company’s own aSV hypervisor – a Type-1 bare-metal virtualisation engine built on KVM. The company claims 94.8 per cent feature parity with VMware vSphere and positions HCI as a full-stack replacement covering virtualisation, storage, networking, disaster recovery and security.

The Hong Kong-headquartered company, which was founded in 2000, serves more than 100,000 customers globally, including Fortune Global 500 companies, government institutions, universities and healthcare organisations. It operates more than 70 branch offices across Asia-Pacific, EMEA and Latin America with a staff base of more than 8,000 employees.

Sangfor has been recognised as a Representative Vendor in the 2026 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Infrastructure Sovereign Solutions and as a Sample Vendor for VMware alternatives in Gartner’s hyperconverged infrastructure category.

The company is not the only vendor positioning itself to capture VMware migration demand. Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V, Proxmox and several other platforms are all actively competing for organisations reassessing their virtualisation strategies. The competitive dynamics have intensified as Broadcom’s licensing changes have created a window of opportunity that did not exist when VMware’s pricing model was stable and predictable.

A workload-first argument

The whitepaper’s core argument – that modernisation should be driven by workload requirements rather than platform selection – is not unique to Sangfor. It aligns with the direction of Gartner’s own analysis and reflects a growing consensus among infrastructure advisors that the VMware transition is not a like-for-like swap.

“This whitepaper aims to help organisations make those decisions with greater confidence,” Lee remarked.

The distinction matters because the choices organisations make now will shape their infrastructure for years. A lift-and-shift migration that preserves VMware’s operational patterns on a different hypervisor may solve the immediate cost problem but could leave organisations in a similar position of dependency and limited flexibility down the track.

The Gartner research suggests the more durable approach is to evaluate each workload individually, determine whether it should be modernised, migrated or retained and match the infrastructure delivery model to the application’s actual requirements – whether that means private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud or cloud-native operations.

Migration timelines of 18 months or more mean that organisations approaching VMware renewal windows in the next year have limited runway to act. For those that have already renewed under the new terms, the three-year subscription cycle creates a defined planning horizon for the next transition.

The whitepaper is available on Sangfor’s website.

Last Updated on August 13, 2026 by Nick Ross