There are moments in IT where the real disruption is not the change you choose, but the change that quietly happens around you. Many VMware customers find themselves in exactly such a moment. On the surface, everything feels familiar. The same hypervisor, the same vendors, the same vocabulary. But underneath that surface, something more fundamental is shifting and Broadcom’s new licensing and product model has turned VMware’s future into a one-way street. A gradual but unmistakable movement toward VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
What makes this moment so tricky is the illusion it creates. Because the names look the same, many organizations convince themselves that staying with VMware means avoiding change. They assume the path ahead is simply the continuation of the path behind. Yet the platform they are moving toward does not behave like the platform they came from. VCF 9 is a different way of running private cloud. A different architecture, operational model, and a different set of dependencies and constraints.
Once you see this clearly, the situation becomes easier to understand. Even if you stay with VMware, you are moving. The absence of physical distance does not mean the absence of migration. What changes is not the location of your workloads, but the world those workloads inhabit.
And that world looks much more like a cloud transition than like a traditional upgrade.
This is the first truth enterprises need to accept: it is still a migration.
The Subtle Shift From Upgrade to Replatforming
VCF 9 carries its own gravity. It reshapes how the environment must be designed, how networking is stitched together, how lifecycle management works, how domains are laid out, how automation behaves and how operations are structured. It forces full-stack adoption, even if your organization only needs part of the stack. And once the platform becomes prescriptive, you must either adopt its assumptions or fight against them.
If this exact level of change were introduced by a hyperscaler, nobody would hesitate to call it a cloud migration. It would come with discovery workshops, architecture reviews, dependency mapping, proof-of-concepts, testing phases, retraining, risk assessments,and new governance. But because the new platform still carries the VMware name, some organizations treat it as a large patch. Which it clearly is not.
This is where many stumble. An upgrade assumes continuity. A migration assumes transformation. VCF 9 sits firmly on the transformation side of that spectrum. Treating it as anything less increases risk, cost and frustration.
In other words, the work is the same work you would do for a cloud move. Only the destination changes.
Complexity You Did Not Ask For
One of the most overlooked consequences of this shift is the gradual increase in complexity. The move to a full-stack VCF world comes with the same architectural side effects you would expect when adopting any complex platform. More components, more integration points, more rules, more interdependencies, more expertise required to keep things stable.
Organizations want simplicity. You pay for it in architecture that becomes harder to evolve, in operations that require more coordination, in outages that take longer to troubleshoot, in people who must maintain increasingly fragile mental maps, and in costs that rise simply because the platform demands it.
And this is where the forced nature of the move becomes visible. You are inheriting complexity because the vendor has decided the portfolio must move in that direction. This is the difference between transformation that serves your strategy and transformation that serves someone else’s.
One Migration You Cannot Avoid, One Migration You Can Choose
At some point, every organization reaches a moment where movement is no longer a matter of preference but of circumstance. The transition to VCF 9 is exactly that kind of moment. Once this becomes clear, the nature of the decision changes. You stop focusing on how to avoid disruption and start asking a more strategic question: If we are investing the time, energy, and attention anyway, where should this effort lead?
VCF 9 is one possible destination. And it may very well be the right choice for some enterprises. But the key is that it should be a choice and not an automatic continuation of the past.
Customers need a model where the effort you invest in migration pays you back in reduced complexity rather than increased dependency.
Nutanix can be an option and a different operating model.
Yes the interesting truth is that both paths require work. Both involve change. Both need planning, testing, and careful execution. The difference lies in what you get once the work is done. One migration leaves you with a platform that is heavier and more prescriptive than the one you had before. The other leaves you with an environment that is lighter, simpler, and easier to operate.
The Real Choice in a Moment of Unwanted Movement
When change arrives from the outside, it rarely feels fair. It interrupts plans, forces attention onto things you didn’t choose, and demands energy you would rather spend somewhere else. Nobody asked for it. Nobody scheduled it. Yet here it is, reshaping the future architecture of your private cloud, whether you feel ready or not.
A different model of infrastructure can offer a way to use this forced moment of movement to your advantage, to turn a vendor-driven transition into an opportunity to simplify, to regain autonomy, and to design an infrastructure model that supports your next ten years rather than constraining them.
You may not have chosen the timing of this transition. But you can choose the shape of the destination. And in many ways, that is the most meaningful form of control an organization can exercise in a moment where the outside world tries to dictate the path ahead.
