Broadcom’s overhaul of VMware licensing has pushed a once-boring infrastructure question back onto IT budget spreadsheets everywhere: where should a VMware Cloud Foundation workload actually live? As of October 14, 2026, four distinct paths have emerged for teams that still depend on VCF but no longer want to run it entirely on their own hardware. OVHcloud sells a flat-rate Public VCF-as-a-Service starting at $399 a month. Amazon runs its own bring-your-own-license model called Amazon EVS. Microsoft offers Azure VMware Solution with node-based billing. Google Cloud VMware Engine rounds things out with per-node, on-demand pricing starting at $9.29 an hour. Each one answers the “run VCF in the cloud” question differently, and the cost gap between the cheapest and most complex option is wide enough to change a migration budget by six figures a year.
This comparison breaks down VMware Cloud Foundation pricing, specs, and migration paths across all four platforms, using only data pulled from official pricing pages and verified industry reporting as of October 2026. No invented numbers, no legacy products presented as current — including correcting a common mistake: VMware Cloud on AWS, the product most articles still default to, stopped taking new customers back in April 2024. The AWS platform that matters now is Amazon EVS.
Why VMware Cloud Foundation Pricing Is Suddenly Back in the News
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023, and the pricing and packaging changes that followed have been reshaping the private cloud market ever since. Perpetual licenses are gone for new purchases. Everything now runs through a subscription, built around VMware Cloud Foundation or VMware vSphere Foundation, and the per-core licensing math — with a 16-core minimum per CPU — has landed hard on customers who built their environments around older, cheaper hardware generations.
The fallout shows up in the survey data. A German outlet, Heise, reported in October 2026 that 90% of VMware customers it surveyed were actively evaluating alternatives to VMware or Broadcom specifically because of licensing costs, and the same report cited a Gartner estimate that VMware’s share of the virtualization market could fall from roughly 70% in 2024 to around 40% by 2029 (Heise). CISPE, the European cloud infrastructure trade group, has alleged licensing cost increases ranging from 800% to 1,500% for some of its members, while other surveys referenced in the same reporting put typical increases closer to 25% to 49%, and some customer accounts described hikes approaching 1,000% depending on the environment.
That price pressure is exactly why the VCF-as-a-service market has gotten crowded. If a company is going to pay subscription pricing for VMware Cloud Foundation no matter what, the next question is simple: does it make more sense to run that subscription on owned hardware, or to rent the whole stack — hardware, hypervisor, and management plane — from a cloud provider that has already absorbed the Broadcom relationship? OVHcloud, AWS, Microsoft, and Google are each betting that a meaningful slice of VMware’s installed base will choose the rental model.
There is also a quieter factor pushing this decision: Broadcom restructured how customers buy support and services around VCF, and the VMware Cloud Service Provider program itself became invite-only in January 2026, according to a 2026 migration guide covering VMware alternatives. That change narrowed the field of smaller regional hosting partners that used to resell VMware capacity, which indirectly strengthens the position of the handful of large-scale VCF-as-a-service offerings — OVHcloud, Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine — that already had the scale and the direct Broadcom relationship to keep operating in this space without needing a reseller agreement.
What Is VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0?
VMware Cloud Foundation is Broadcom’s bundled private-cloud stack: vSphere for compute virtualization, vSAN for software-defined storage, NSX for networking, and a unified management layer (SDDC Manager plus the newer VCF Operations suite) that ties it all together. VCF 9.0 is the version referenced in OVHcloud’s own February 2026 announcement of its public VCF-as-a-Service offering, and it is the baseline that most of the managed and cloud-hosted VCF products discussed in this comparison are built around (OVHcloud).
The practical upshot for anyone comparison-shopping VMware Cloud Foundation hosting is that the software layer is now mostly standardized. What differs from provider to provider is who owns the hardware, who manages the control plane, how licensing is bundled or separated, and how the bill actually gets calculated. That is where OVHcloud, Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine diverge sharply, even though they are all ultimately running the same VCF stack underneath.
Four Ways to Run VCF: OVHcloud, Amazon EVS, Azure, and Google Cloud
It helps to understand what each of these four products actually is before comparing numbers.
- OVHcloud Public VCF-as-a-Service is a fully managed, pack-based offering. OVHcloud owns the hardware, operates the VCF stack, and sells pre-sized starter packs with flat monthly pricing.
- Amazon EVS (Elastic VMware Service) reached general availability on August 5, 2025, and is AWS’s current, AWS-native way to run VMware Cloud Foundation inside a customer’s own Amazon VPC, on EC2 bare-metal hosts (AWS). It replaced the older VMware Cloud on AWS product, which AWS stopped selling to new customers on April 30, 2024.
- Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is Microsoft’s node-based service, offering several pre-configured host types and billed hourly or through one- and three-year reservations.
- Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) is Google’s managed VCF offering, built around a standard three-node private cloud minimum, with a single-node pilot option and on-demand or committed-use pricing.
The naming confusion around AWS is worth dwelling on for a moment, because so many older comparison articles still default to “VMware Cloud on AWS” as the current product. It isn’t. AWS’s own FAQ and GA announcement confirm Amazon EVS as the current path for new VCF deployments on AWS, with Amazon EVS using a bring-your-own-license model where the customer sources its VCF entitlement from Broadcom or an authorized reseller, while AWS bills separately for the underlying EC2 bare-metal hosts and the EVS control plane. Anyone shopping VMware Cloud Foundation pricing on AWS in 2026 should be evaluating Amazon EVS, not its retired predecessor.
VMware Cloud Foundation Platforms Compared: Full Specs Table
The table below lines up the four platforms across the specs that matter most for a migration decision: version support, billing model, licensing, minimum footprint, SLA, hardware, migration tooling, and ideal buyer.
| Spec | OVHcloud Public VCF-aaS | Amazon EVS | Azure VMware Solution | Google Cloud VMware Engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VCF version baseline | VCF 9.0 | VCF 5.2.1 at GA, expanding host support since | Portable VCF subscription (customer-supplied license key) | Managed VCF stack on Google-owned nodes |
| Launch / GA date | First public offer in 2025; VCF 9.0 tier announced Feb. 2026 | Aug. 5, 2025 | Established service, ongoing node-type expansion | Established service, ongoing node-type expansion |
| Billing model | Flat monthly starter packs | EC2 bare-metal host rate + hourly EVS control-plane charge | Hourly pay-as-you-go or 1-yr/3-yr reservations per node | On-demand hourly or 1-yr/3-yr committed-use discounts |
| VCF license model | Included in the managed service | Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) via Broadcom or reseller | Customer supplies a portable VCF subscription/license key | Bundled into Google’s managed pricing |
| Entry price | $399/month (Standard pack) | No single bundled price; EC2 + control-plane + optional storage | No flat published rate; varies by node type, region, term | $9.29/hour on-demand for a ve1-standard-72 node |
| Minimum footprint | Resource-pack based, not a node minimum | Single EC2 bare-metal host to start | Not publicly specified as a fixed node count | 3-node standard minimum; 1-node pilot option available |
| Published SLA | 99.95% | Standard AWS EC2/service SLAs apply | Not disclosed in public pricing material reviewed | Not disclosed in public pricing material reviewed |
| Primary hardware | OVHcloud-owned infrastructure | EC2 bare metal: i4i.metal, i7i.metal-24xl, i7i.metal-48xl | AV36, AV36P, AV48, AV52, AV64 node types | ve1-standard-72 and related node types |
| Migration tooling | Managed migration support from OVHcloud | HCX and standard AWS migration services | HCX supported for workload mobility | HCX supported for workload mobility |
| Management plane | OVHcloud-managed | Customer-managed inside their own VPC | Microsoft-managed infrastructure, customer-managed VMs | Google-managed infrastructure, customer-managed VMs |
| Committed-use discount | Not applicable (flat packs) | Standard EC2 Reserved/Savings Plans apply to host portion | 1-year and 3-year reservation discounts | 1-year and 3-year committed-use discounts |
| Best-fit customer | SMBs and EU-based teams wanting predictable flat billing | AWS-native shops wanting BYOL control and EC2 elasticity | Microsoft-centric enterprises needing Azure ecosystem ties | Teams needing fast pilot deployments and GCP integration |
A few things jump out immediately. OVHcloud is the only one of the four that bundles the VCF license into its price and publishes a flat number. The other three all separate licensing, hardware, and management in ways that make a true apples-to-apples dollar comparison difficult without running a specific workload through each provider’s calculator.
Pricing Breakdown: What Each Platform Actually Costs
Here is what the publicly available pricing pages actually show, with no gap-filled estimates.
| Platform | Entry-Level Price | What’s Included | Scaling Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud Public VCF-aaS (Standard) | $399/month | 16 vCPUs, 64 GB RAM, 1 TB standard storage, up to 16 public IPv4 addresses, up to 5 Gbit/s public bandwidth, 99.95% SLA | Step up to Advanced pack or larger resource tiers |
| OVHcloud Public VCF-aaS (Advanced) | $500/month | Same base resources as Standard, plus Advanced-tier features | Additional packs available for larger workloads |
| Amazon EVS | No single bundled price | EC2 bare-metal host at standard EC2 rates, plus an hourly EVS control-plane charge per host (AWS technical material has cited roughly $0.92/instance-hour as an example control-plane figure), plus optional FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage | Standard EC2 on-demand, Reserved Instance, or Savings Plan pricing on the host portion |
| Azure VMware Solution | No flat published rate | Choice of AV36 (36 cores/576GB), AV36P (36 cores/768GB), AV48 (48 cores/1TB), AV52 (52 cores/1.5TB), or AV64 (64 cores/1TB) nodes; customer supplies a portable VCF license | Hourly pay-as-you-go, or 1-year/3-year reserved pricing per node |
| Google Cloud VMware Engine | $9.29/hour on-demand (ve1-standard-72 node) | Managed VCF private cloud, 3-node standard minimum, single-node pilot option | 1-year and 3-year committed-use discounts off the on-demand rate |
Google Cloud’s own published pricing page lists the ve1-standard-72 node at $9.29 per hour on demand, with lower effective hourly rates available to customers who commit to one- or three-year terms (Google Cloud). That works out to roughly $6,690 a month for a single node running continuously at the on-demand rate, before applying any committed-use discount — and remember that Google’s standard deployment is a three-node private cloud, not a single node, so a baseline GCVE environment starts well above OVHcloud’s $399 flat-rate entry point.
Azure’s public pricing page for Azure VMware Solution does not display a flat per-node dollar figure in its default view; it requires selecting a region and signing in to see the applicable rate for each node type. Amazon EVS is similarly fragmented — AWS bills the EC2 bare-metal host at standard EC2 pricing, then adds a separate hourly charge for the EVS control plane, and optionally layers on FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage and Windows Server licensing if needed. That makes OVHcloud’s $399-a-month Standard pack the only one of the four with a genuinely simple, publicly comparable sticker price — which is precisely the pitch OVHcloud is making to VMware customers rattled by Broadcom’s licensing changes.
OVHcloud Public VCF-as-a-Service Explained
OVHcloud’s pitch is simplicity. Rather than making customers assemble compute, storage, networking, and licensing line items separately, it sells pre-built packs. The Standard pack at $399 a month includes 16 vCPUs, 64 GB of RAM, 1 TB of standard storage, up to 16 public IPv4 addresses, and public bandwidth up to 5 Gbit/s, backed by a 99.95% SLA, per OVHcloud’s own service page. The Advanced pack steps up to $500 a month and adds Advanced-tier features on top of the same base resource envelope.
Because OVHcloud operates the underlying VCF 9.0 infrastructure itself, the VMware license is baked into the monthly price — customers are not separately negotiating a Broadcom subscription or sourcing a license key, which is the single biggest practical difference from the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud approaches. For companies that specifically want to escape the complexity of Broadcom’s post-acquisition licensing terms rather than just move hardware to someone else’s data center, this bundled model is the whole point. OVHcloud is also a European provider, which matters for organizations facing data residency requirements that rule out US hyperscalers for certain workloads.
Amazon EVS Explained
Amazon EVS takes the opposite approach from OVHcloud: instead of bundling everything, it unbundles almost everything. The service reached general availability on August 5, 2025, initially in six AWS regions, running on i4i.metal bare-metal EC2 instances. AWS has since added support for additional bare-metal host types, including i7i.metal-24xl and i7i.metal-48xl, expanding the hardware options available to EVS customers.
The defining feature of Amazon EVS is that it runs inside the customer’s own Amazon VPC, which means the customer retains direct control over networking and the broader AWS environment around the VCF deployment, rather than treating it as an isolated managed black box. The tradeoff is that the customer is also responsible for bringing its own VCF license, sourced directly from Broadcom or an authorized reseller — AWS is not reselling or bundling the VMware subscription. Billing follows the standard AWS pattern: EC2 bare-metal hosts are charged at normal EC2 rates (and qualify for Reserved Instances or Savings Plans like any other EC2 capacity), with an additional hourly charge for the EVS control plane itself, plus optional costs for FSx for NetApp ONTAP storage or Windows Server licensing if those are part of the deployment. This makes Amazon EVS the most flexible of the four platforms for teams already deep in the AWS ecosystem, but also the hardest to reduce to a single comparable monthly number.
Azure VMware Solution Explained
Azure VMware Solution is built around a lineup of pre-configured node types: AV36 (36 cores, 576 GB RAM), AV36P (36 cores, 768 GB RAM), AV48 (48 cores, 1 TB RAM), AV52 (52 cores, 1.5 TB RAM), and AV64 (64 cores, 1 TB RAM), according to Microsoft’s own pricing documentation (Microsoft). Customers choose a node type based on their workload’s compute and memory profile, then pay by the hour, with the option to lock in a one-year or three-year reservation for a lower effective rate.
Like Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution requires the customer to hold a portable VMware Cloud Foundation subscription and license key rather than bundling VMware licensing into Microsoft’s own price — a detail that is easy to miss when comparing headline numbers across providers, but that materially changes the total cost picture. The upside for existing Microsoft shops is deep integration with the rest of Azure: ExpressRoute connectivity, Microsoft Entra ID integration, and a single Microsoft enterprise agreement covering both the cloud consumption and, potentially, other Microsoft licensing. For organizations already standardized on Azure for everything else, that ecosystem fit can outweigh the lack of a simple flat-rate sticker price.
Google Cloud VMware Engine Explained
Google Cloud VMware Engine sits in between OVHcloud’s bundled simplicity and the AWS/Azure unbundled model. Google publishes an actual on-demand hourly rate — $9.29 per hour for a ve1-standard-72 node — rather than hiding pricing behind a region-and-sign-in wall, and it offers one-year and three-year committed-use discounts off that rate for customers willing to commit to a term, according to Google Cloud’s own documentation.
The standard GCVE private cloud requires a minimum of three nodes, which puts a real floor under the monthly bill for a production deployment. Google does offer a single-node private cloud option specifically for pilots and proof-of-concept testing, which is a meaningful advantage for teams that want to validate a VCF migration path on Google Cloud before committing budget to a full three-node cluster. Like Azure and AWS, GCVE’s pricing is a managed infrastructure rate rather than a VMware-license-inclusive price, so customers still need to account for their VCF entitlement separately in the full cost comparison.
GCVE’s node catalog extends beyond the ve1-standard-72 baseline into larger storage- and memory-optimized configurations for customers running database-heavy or storage-heavy VMware workloads, though the $9.29/hour figure remains the clearest publicly posted reference point for budgeting a pilot or small production cluster. Because that rate is published without requiring a sales call or regional sign-in, GCVE is arguably the easiest of the three hyperscaler options to ballpark before engaging Google’s sales team for a committed-use quote.
Benchmark and Adoption Data From Independent Reports
Beyond the pricing pages themselves, several independent reports in 2026 have tried to quantify just how disruptive the Broadcom transition has been for VMware’s customer base. The numbers are striking enough that they are worth presenting on their own.
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| IT leaders actively shrinking their VMware footprint | 86% | CloudBolt research, cited October 2026 |
| Organizations that have completed a full migration away from VMware | 4% | CloudBolt research, cited October 2026 |
| VMware customers evaluating alternatives due to licensing costs | 90% | Heise-reported October 2026 survey |
| Perpetual-license holders not planning to move to VCF subscriptions | 48% | Heise-reported October 2026 survey |
| Organizations considering a multi-hypervisor strategy | 60% | Heise-reported October 2026 survey |
| Gartner-estimated VMware virtualization market share, 2024 | ~70% | Gartner estimate, cited via Heise |
| Gartner-projected VMware virtualization market share, 2029 | ~40% | Gartner estimate, cited via Heise |
| CISPE-alleged licensing cost increases for some members | 800%-1,500% | CISPE complaint, referenced in 2026 migration reporting |
| Typical licensing increases reported in a separate early-2026 survey | 25%-49% | Industry survey referenced in 2026 migration reporting |
The gap between “86% are shrinking their VMware footprint” and “only 4% have completed a full migration” is probably the single most important data point in this entire comparison. It confirms that the shift toward alternatives like OVHcloud’s VCF-as-a-service, Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine is real and broad-based, but also that it is happening slowly, in phases, rather than through wholesale rip-and-replace projects. That pattern matches what the pricing structures above would predict: moving a production VMware Cloud Foundation environment is not something most IT teams can, or want to, do in a single quarter.
Real-World Deployment Patterns
While none of the four providers has published a named customer case study with hard savings numbers for its VCF offering specifically, the survey data above points to consistent, recognizable deployment patterns across the industry in 2026.
- European public-sector and regulated-industry teams facing data residency requirements have gravitated toward OVHcloud’s EU-operated VCF-as-a-Service, since routing regulated workloads to a US hyperscaler is often a non-starter regardless of price.
- AWS-native engineering organizations that already run the bulk of their stack on EC2, with a smaller legacy VMware footprint for specific applications, have used Amazon EVS to keep that VMware workload inside the same VPC and the same AWS billing relationship, rather than standing up a separate VMware-specific vendor relationship.
- Microsoft enterprise agreement customers running Windows Server-heavy VMware environments have leaned on Azure VMware Solution specifically to consolidate billing and identity management under their existing Microsoft contract, even without a flat published node price.
- Teams running proof-of-concept migrations before committing budget have used Google Cloud VMware Engine’s single-node pilot option to validate application compatibility on GCVE before scaling to the standard three-node production minimum.
- Organizations in the 48% group identified in the Heise-reported survey as not planning to move to VCF subscriptions are, by definition, delaying any of these four options and instead extending legacy perpetual-license environments as long as technically possible — itself a real-world pattern, even if it is a holding pattern rather than a migration.
Best Use Cases: Which Platform Fits Which Workload
Given the spec and pricing differences above, here is how the four platforms tend to line up against specific needs.
- Cost-predictable SMB or mid-market deployment: OVHcloud Public VCF-as-a-Service is the clearest fit, given its flat $399/month entry price with the VCF license included and no separate Broadcom negotiation required.
- Existing AWS-heavy environment with a VMware application that cannot be re-platformed: Amazon EVS keeps that workload inside the same VPC, IAM, and billing relationship as the rest of an AWS footprint, at the cost of a more complex, multi-line-item bill.
- Enterprise with a large Microsoft estate and a VMware Cloud Foundation requirement: Azure VMware Solution’s node-type flexibility (AV36 through AV64) and reservation discounts make sense when the buyer already has leverage in a Microsoft enterprise agreement.
- Google Cloud-centric data and analytics shop with a residual VMware tier: Google Cloud VMware Engine’s published hourly rate and single-node pilot option are well suited to teams that want to test before committing to the three-node production floor.
- Regulated workloads subject to EU data residency rules: OVHcloud again has a structural advantage here simply by virtue of being a European-headquartered and -operated provider.
- Short-term disaster-recovery or burst capacity: the hourly, no-long-term-commitment pricing on Amazon EVS and Google Cloud VMware Engine both support spinning up capacity temporarily without a flat-pack minimum term.
Migration Guide: Moving From On-Prem VMware to a Managed VCF Cloud
Regardless of which of the four platforms a team ultimately picks, the migration path looks similar in broad strokes. Here is a practical sequence for moving a VMware Cloud Foundation environment off self-managed hardware.
- 1. Audit the current VCF/vSphere version and licensing status. Confirm whether existing workloads are on a perpetual license, a VMware vSphere Foundation subscription, or a full VCF subscription, since that determines how much of the Broadcom relationship carries forward.
- 2. Inventory compute, memory, and storage per workload. Each of the four target platforms prices around specific node or pack sizes (OVHcloud’s 16 vCPU/64 GB pack, Azure’s AV36-AV64 range, Google’s ve1-standard-72, Amazon EVS’s EC2 bare-metal host types), so right-sizing against those units up front avoids both overpaying and under-provisioning.
- 3. Decide whether licensing should be bundled or separated. OVHcloud includes the VCF license in its flat price; Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution, and Google Cloud VMware Engine all require the customer to separately hold or source a VCF entitlement, which changes both the procurement process and the total cost math.
- 4. Check data residency and compliance requirements. If workloads are subject to EU data protection rules or similar regional mandates, that can rule out US hyperscaler regions outright and point toward a provider like OVHcloud.
- 5. Plan the migration tooling. HCX-based workload mobility is the standard mechanism for moving VMs between an on-prem VCF environment and any of these cloud-hosted targets with minimal downtime; confirm HCX entitlement and version compatibility with the target platform before scheduling cutover windows.
- 6. Pilot before committing to production scale. Google Cloud’s single-node private cloud option exists specifically for this step; on platforms without an explicit pilot tier, consider running a limited pilot pack or the smallest available node type first.
- 7. Model the full bill, not just the headline rate. Factor in control-plane charges (Amazon EVS), reservation terms (Azure, Google Cloud), optional storage add-ons like FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and any committed-use discount eligibility before finalizing a platform choice.
- 8. Re-evaluate the decision against the 86%/4% gap. Given that most organizations are still mid-migration rather than fully moved, plan for a phased cutover across multiple quarters rather than a single big-bang event, and revisit pricing again at renewal time since Broadcom’s terms have continued shifting through 2026.
Pros and Cons Compared
OVHcloud Public VCF-as-a-Service
- Pros: flat, predictable $399/month entry price; VCF license included; published 99.95% SLA; EU data residency by default.
- Cons: resource packs rather than granular node customization; smaller global footprint than the three US hyperscalers; less third-party tooling ecosystem around it compared with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Amazon EVS
- Pros: runs inside the customer’s own VPC for tight integration with existing AWS networking and IAM; benefits from standard EC2 Reserved Instance and Savings Plan discounts; wide EC2 bare-metal host selection.
- Cons: BYOL model means the customer still has to manage a separate Broadcom licensing relationship; billing is split across EC2, control-plane, and optional storage charges, making total cost harder to predict upfront; replaced an older product, so documentation and community knowledge are still catching up.
Azure VMware Solution
- Pros: five node types (AV36 through AV64) to match different compute and memory profiles; strong integration with Azure networking and Microsoft Entra ID; reservation discounts for predictable workloads.
- Cons: no flat published rate visible without signing in and selecting a region; customer must separately hold a portable VCF subscription and license key; minimum cluster sizing is not transparently published.
Google Cloud VMware Engine
- Pros: transparent published hourly rate ($9.29/hour for ve1-standard-72); single-node pilot option for low-risk testing; one- and three-year committed-use discounts.
- Cons: three-node minimum for production deployments raises the effective entry cost well above OVHcloud’s flat pack; VCF licensing still handled separately from the infrastructure rate; fewer node-type options than Azure VMware Solution.
What Analysts and Surveys Are Saying
The clearest signal in the independent data is that this is not a niche grievance — it is a mainstream IT-budget problem. The Heise-reported survey’s finding that 90% of respondents were actively looking at VMware alternatives, paired with the Gartner-cited projection that VMware’s share of the virtualization market could fall from around 70% to around 40% by 2029, describes a genuine structural shift rather than a vocal minority of unhappy customers. That scale of movement is also why VMware’s own channel partners, including OVHcloud, AWS, Microsoft, and Google, have all built or expanded VCF-hosting products in the same 12-to-18-month window: they are responding to demand that already exists, not trying to create a new category from scratch.
At the same time, the 48% of perpetual-license holders who told the same survey they are not planning to move to a VCF subscription, and the 60% considering a multi-hypervisor strategy rather than a full exit, point to an industry that is hedging rather than fleeing outright. A separate 2026 migration guide focused on VMware alternatives like Nutanix, Proxmox, Hyper-V, and OpenStack described this as a phased, risk-managed process for most enterprises rather than a wholesale platform swap, which lines up with CloudBolt’s finding that only 4% of organizations shrinking their VMware footprint have actually completed a full migration. Coverage of the broader Broadcom pricing fallout has characterized the overall pace of customer movement away from VMware as slow relative to the scale of the reported price increases, even as evaluation activity accelerates.
Total Cost of Ownership: Beyond the Sticker Price
Every one of the four platforms in this comparison has a hidden cost dimension that does not show up on the headline pricing page, and it is worth walking through before trusting any single number in isolation.
For OVHcloud, the $399-a-month Standard pack is genuinely close to the all-in price for a workload that fits within 16 vCPUs, 64 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of storage. The main way the bill grows is by stepping up to the $500 Advanced pack or adding further resource packs, both of which are still flat, published numbers. That predictability is the entire value proposition, and it is the reason OVHcloud keeps coming up in Broadcom-licensing-backlash coverage as a go-to alternative for smaller deployments.
Amazon EVS looks cheapest on a per-core basis for teams that already have EC2 Reserved Instances or Savings Plans covering their bare-metal fleet, since the EVS control-plane charge is additive but relatively small next to the underlying compute cost. But the BYOL requirement means the real total cost of ownership also has to include whatever the customer is separately paying Broadcom or a VCF reseller for the license itself — and that is precisely the line item driving the 25%-to-1,500% increases reported across the surveys cited earlier in this piece. A low AWS infrastructure bill does not mean a low total bill if the underlying VCF subscription has gotten dramatically more expensive since the last renewal.
Azure VMware Solution carries the same BYOL licensing exposure as Amazon EVS, layered on top of node-based infrastructure pricing that is not fully visible without signing into the Azure pricing calculator for a specific region. The upside is that reservation-based discounts on the AV36-through-AV64 node range can meaningfully lower the three-year total for a stable, predictable workload, which is a lever AWS and Google Cloud also offer but that matters most to Azure customers precisely because the headline per-node number is otherwise opaque.
Google Cloud VMware Engine is the most transparent of the three hyperscaler options on infrastructure pricing, but its three-node minimum means the realistic production floor is roughly three times the $9.29-an-hour single-node rate, before any VCF licensing cost is added on top. For budgeting purposes, that puts a baseline always-on GCVE cluster in the same general cost neighborhood as a mid-sized Azure VMware Solution or Amazon EVS deployment, once licensing is factored in on all three — even though GCVE’s own pricing page is the easiest of the three to read at a glance.
The Verdict: Which VCF Platform Wins on Data
There is no single winner here, because the four platforms are solving different problems. On pure price transparency and simplicity, OVHcloud’s Public VCF-as-a-Service wins outright: $399 a month, VCF license included, a published 99.95% SLA, and nothing to negotiate separately with Broadcom. For a small-to-mid-size workload, that is the lowest-friction path by a wide margin, and it is the only one of the four where the headline number is the actual number.
For organizations already standardized on a specific hyperscaler, the calculation shifts. Amazon EVS makes the most sense for AWS-native teams that value VPC-level integration over bundled pricing, Azure VMware Solution is the strongest fit for Microsoft enterprise agreement holders who can absorb node-based billing complexity, and Google Cloud VMware Engine’s transparent hourly rate and single-node pilot option make it the easiest of the three hyperscaler offerings to test-drive before a full commitment. The one point every platform shares, though, is that none of them has solved the underlying problem driving this whole market: Broadcom’s licensing terms. All four are ultimately ways to outsource the operational burden of running VCF, not ways to avoid paying for it. Given that only 4% of organizations surveyed have completed a full VMware migration despite 86% actively shrinking their footprint, the realistic 2026 verdict is that most IT teams will end up running a mixed environment — a managed VCF platform for some workloads, alternatives like Nutanix or Proxmox for others — for several more years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is VMware Cloud on AWS still available to new customers?
No. AWS stopped accepting new subscriptions, add-on purchases, and renewals for VMware Cloud on AWS as of April 30, 2024. The current AWS-native option for running VMware Cloud Foundation is Amazon EVS, which reached general availability on August 5, 2025.
What is the cheapest way to run VMware Cloud Foundation in the cloud?
Based on published pricing as of October 2026, OVHcloud’s Public VCF-as-a-Service Standard pack at $399 a month is the lowest, fully transparent entry price among the four platforms compared here, and it is the only one that bundles the VCF license into that price.
Do I still need a separate VMware license if I use Amazon EVS, Azure VMware Solution, or Google Cloud VMware Engine?
Yes, for Amazon EVS and Azure VMware Solution. Both require the customer to bring or hold their own VCF license or subscription, sourced from Broadcom or an authorized reseller, separate from the infrastructure charges. OVHcloud is the exception among the four, since its price includes VCF licensing.
How many nodes do I need for a production Google Cloud VMware Engine deployment?
Google’s standard private cloud requires a minimum of three nodes. A single-node private cloud is available, but Google positions it specifically for pilot and proof-of-concept use rather than production.
Why have VMware licensing prices increased so much since the Broadcom acquisition?
Broadcom moved VMware from perpetual licenses to a subscription-only model built around VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation, with per-core pricing and a 16-core-per-CPU minimum. Customer and trade-group reports, including a CISPE complaint, have described increases ranging from roughly 25% up to 800-1,500% in some cases, depending on the customer’s prior licensing terms and hardware generation.
Is everyone actually migrating away from VMware?
Not yet, at least not completely. A CloudBolt-cited report found that 86% of IT leaders surveyed were actively shrinking their VMware footprint, but only 4% had completed a full migration, suggesting most organizations are pursuing partial or phased moves rather than wholesale platform switches.
Can I migrate VMware workloads between these platforms using HCX?
HCX-based migration tooling is supported across VCF deployments generally, including moving workloads to and from Azure VMware Solution and Google Cloud VMware Engine. Confirm current HCX entitlement and version compatibility directly with each provider before scheduling a production cutover, since supported versions can change between releases.
Which platform is best for a quick pilot before a full migration decision?
Google Cloud VMware Engine’s single-node private cloud option is purpose-built for pilots. OVHcloud’s smallest Standard pack is also low-commitment given its monthly, rather than long-term contract, billing, making it a reasonable low-cost test as well.