Summary
Beginning November 1, 2025, Broadcom is introducing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licensing changes. As a result, Azure VMware Solution will no longer offer an included managed VCF subscription, and customers will need to purchase a portable VCF subscription directly from Broadcom.
At VMware Explore, Broadcom announced changes to the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licensing model, impacting hyperscaler offerings such as Azure VMware Solution from Microsoft and Elastic VMware Service from Amazon.
What’s Changing?
Beginning in the new fiscal year (starting on November 1, 2025), Broadcom is introducing changes to VCF licensing. Across all hyperscaler platforms, there will now be only a single option: bring your own portable VCF license (BYOL). Customers must purchase a portable VCF subscription directly from Broadcom to use with any public cloud provider.
This change enables easier movement between on-premises deployments and public cloud offerings. The license remains the same, giving customers the flexibility to shift as needed.
This change also establishes a unified model for how customers operate VCF across global hyperscaler cloud infrastructure offerings and on-premises deployments.
What the Changes Mean for AVS Customers
The Azure VMware Solution already supports both license modes: BYOL and managed VCF subscriptions.
With the change in place, Azure VMware Solution will no longer offer an included managed VCF subscription, and customers will have to provide their own license purchased from Broadcom directly.
No other action is required. This update affects the licensing experience only, and there are no product changes.
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Why Storage Matters More Than Ever
When licensing models evolve, the efficiency of your underlying infrastructure becomes critical. For AVS customers, storage often drives a large portion of the environment’s footprint. Overprovisioned or inefficient storage doesn’t just waste capacity—it inflates the number of licensed resources you pay for.
This is where storage efficiency becomes your hidden lever against rising expenses—and to achieve it, you can leverage Pure Cloud Block Store™ or the Pure Storage Cloud for Azure VMware Solution(in preview).
Pure Cloud Block Store extends the power of Purity, our storage operating environment, beyond your data center, bringing benefits like efficiency, enterprise-grade security, features, and reliability to the public cloud. Used for disaster recovery and production and dev/test workloads, this solution is most loved for helping customers save on their cloud storage bills, but it requires you to manage and deploy your own storage arrays.
While a customer-managed solution offers ultimate flexibility and control, many of our customers have expressed a strong need for a service that requires less operational overhead and seamless integration into their Azure environment—as a fully managed block storage as a service (STaaS), natively integrated and consumed directly within the Azure Portal and VMware tools. Learn more about Pure Storage Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMware Solution and how it can reduce AVS TCO by up to 40% by eliminating unnecessary compute node expansions.
Prefer to Keep Your Existing License Terms? Act Fast
Microsoft will stop selling AVS with included VCF subscriptions after October 15, 2025.
AVS can be purchased in a pay-as-you-go model or through commitment-based reserved instances. Reserved instances provide significant savings—up to about 50%—when you commit to a fixed term of one, three, or five years. Please note that reserved instances must be purchased through an Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA).
Reserved instance commitments purchased before October 15, 2025, will be honored. This means that if you secure a reserved instance on or before that date, you can continue using your AVS nodes without any licensing changes until the end of your term—giving you the ability to lock in existing license terms for up to the next five years.
For existing pay-as-you-go deployments with an included VCF license, customers can continue operating without any changes through October 31, 2026. Alternatively, you may switch to a reserved instance with license included, but the purchase must be completed before October 15, 2025.
If you are planning to migrate your VMware environment to Azure VMware Solution and wish to utilize the existing managed AVS VCF license model, it is advised to accelerate your migration path before October 2025.
Helpful resources:
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