Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has given MSPs an opportunity to rethink how customer workloads are deployed, but StorMagic Channel Chief Scott Mann does not expect most businesses to abandon VMware through a single, sweeping migration.
Instead, Mann sees small and midsize businesses adopting multiple virtualization platforms, repurposing existing hardware and moving individual workloads according to their technical and financial requirements.
“It doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing approach,” Mann told Channel Insider. “It can be a transition that happens over time and save your costs now and save your costs in the future.”
Broadcom changes keep VMware migrations in focus
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023. Since then, changes to licensing, product packaging and partner programs have forced MSPs and their customers to revisit virtualization strategies that may have remained largely unchanged for years.
As Channel Insider previously reported, Broadcom’s approximately $61 billion acquisition reshaped the VMware channel through subscription licensing, product consolidation and multiple partner program reorganizations. Additional changes announced in 2025 affected which service providers could continue selling and renewing VMware services directly.
For MSPs, Mann said, that disruption creates both a customer-management challenge and a consulting opportunity.
“They’re in a tough spot because they’re in the middle of all of this,” Mann said. “They’re delivering the news, but they’re ultimately not doing anything about it. They’re just the messenger of what’s happening in the market.”
Partners that help customers evaluate their options without pushing a predetermined replacement can strengthen their position as trusted advisers, he added.
MSPs can build workload-specific virtualization plans
Mann said many customers mistakenly view their choices as either renewing their existing VMware environments or replacing large amounts of hardware while migrating everything to a new platform. And with hardware volatility and price increases likely to stay, partners need to also weigh how migration will impact budgets.
A more practical approach, he argued, is to examine the infrastructure workload by workload. Some applications may remain on VMware, while others could move to the cloud, Microsoft Hyper-V, Proxmox or another virtualization platform.
“It’s not about where the workload lives. It’s about how the workload lives,” Mann said.
That assessment also gives MSPs an opportunity to differentiate their services. Instead of building an offering around one dominant hypervisor, partners can develop expertise across several platforms and recommend each one for the environments where it performs best.
“You don’t want to be that partner that’s going in and saying, ‘This is the cool vendor this year. No, now it’s this vendor next year,’” Mann said.
StorMagic targets smaller on-premises environments
StorMagic is positioning its SvHCI hyperconverged infrastructure platform for on-premises and edge environments, particularly those running fewer than 50 virtual machines or operating similar infrastructure across multiple locations.
Mann said the platform can help customers reuse existing servers and move workloads gradually rather than absorbing an immediate capital expense for a complete hardware refresh.
“The name of the game right now is affordability,” Mann said. “They want to figure out how they can stretch their dollars and how they can eliminate the CapEx hit that new hardware investment would.”
Mann expects VMware’s market share to decline as refresh and renewal cycles continue, but he does not expect VMware to disappear from customer environments. Instead, he anticipates a fragmented virtualization market in which different vendors lead specific edge, midmarket and high-performance use cases.
“This Broadcom-VMware window isn’t closing,” Mann said. “It’s not closing anytime soon.”