Businesses running VMware workloads on Microsoft’s Azure cloud have a deadline creeping up fast, and it traces back to decisions Broadcom made after buying VMware.
Microsoft says Azure VMware Solution customers still using VMware Cloud Foundation licenses bundled into their pay-as-you-go deployments need to switch to a bring-your-own-license model by October 31, 2026. Miss that date, and those setups fall out of compliance with Broadcom’s licensing rules unless the customer supplies its own VCF subscription.
This isn’t a sudden change. Microsoft already stopped selling new Azure VMware Solution nodes with bundled VCF subscriptions back in October 2025. Since then, anyone spinning up new capacity has had to buy a portable VCF subscription directly from Broadcom and pair it with their Azure infrastructure separately.
Customers with active reserved instances get a bit more breathing room. Those deployments can keep running on the bundled VCF subscription until the reservation term itself expires, at which point they’ll need to bring their own license too. Any usage beyond what an existing reservation covers already requires the bring-your-own approach.
Microsoft frames the pricing as a wash, saying the bring-your-own-license option costs less on the Azure side, though that figure doesn’t include what customers now pay Broadcom separately for the VCF subscription itself. IDC reported back in 2024 that plenty of VMware customers already saw costs climb after Broadcom reworked its licensing structure around subscriptions and per-core pricing.
Nothing about how Azure VMware Solution actually runs changes here. Microsoft still manages the underlying infrastructure, handles patching and upgrades, and operates the service the same way it always has. The only thing changing is who holds the software license and how they pay for it.
Customers exceeding their Broadcom core entitlement face real consequences too. Microsoft warns that private clouds running over their licensed core count can become noncompliant and risk service suspension, so tracking core allocation across environments now matters more than it used to.
Microsoft is not alone in facing this either. Google Cloud rolled out nearly identical changes to its VMware Engine service on the same timeline, requiring customers to buy VCF licenses directly from Broadcom starting in October 2025, part of a broader restructuring that also ended Broadcom’s sale of perpetual VMware licenses altogether.
