Common Questions about Third-Party Support for VMware

Third-party support for VMware from global leaders such as Rimini Street effectively replaces Broadcom Support, including General Support and technical guidance. It allows organizations to operate VMware perpetual-licensed software for years to come without transitioning to Broadcom’s cloud subscription program. The advantages for organizations include cost savings, control and the proactive runtime security needed to keep your current perpetual license instances operating optimally for years to come.

Third-party support for VMware is not just for organizations facing end of support for vSphere, rising costs, or pressure to migrate to Broadcom’s subscription-based offerings. An increasing number of IT leaders are adopting a dual-support strategy that combines vendor support with independent third-party expertise. This approach provides an additional layer of operational, security and strategic support, helping organizations strengthen resilience, accelerate issue resolution and gain access to specialized advisory services without sacrificing flexibility.

What does it mean to switch from Broadcom Support to third-party support for VMware?

Switching from Broadcom Support (specifically regarding VMware solutions) to third-party support for VMware means moving away from the vendor’s direct maintenance and update programs in favor of an independent IT service provider. Organizations will no longer submit new VMware support cases through the Broadcom Support Portal, and instead, submit requests to the third-party support partner for support for their perpetual licenses.

Why are more organizations choosing third-party support for VMware instead of staying with Broadcom Support?

Organizations are increasingly leaving Broadcom Support and adopting third-party support for VMware as a result of two Broadcom actions:

1. Broadcom has announced the end of sale and end of support for all VMware perpetual licenses.
2. Broadcom is shifting all VMware perpetual license users to significantly more expensive subscription product bundles, including VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).

A calendar of Broadcom/VMware end-of-support dates for perpetual licenses:

As a result of these changes, Broadcom customers are facing significant annual fee increases, straining IT budgets and impacting their hypervisor roadmap and control. That is why analysts recommend Broadcom customers seek VMware alternatives such as third-party support, virtualization solutions and self-support. Third-party support is a strategic move to buy time while evaluating alternatives and to avoid Broadcom’s price increases, among other benefits.

A proven third-party support provider such as Rimini Street can help keep your VMware environment stable, secure and fully supported without forcing upgrades, migrations or vendor-driven timelines. Third-party support for VMware offers many benefits for large and small organizations alike. It has evolved from a reactive cost-saving measure into a proven strategy for securing operational, financial and architectural independence. By decoupling support from rigid vendor roadmaps, organizations can achieve key business advantages across four core pillars:

Financial & operational stability

• Substantial cost savings: Realize immediate OPEX relief by reducing support fees
• No forced bundling: Avoid having to purchase unwanted and high-cost software suites like VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and vSphere Foundation (VVF). Organizations should have the ability to buy only what they need, when they need it.
• Zero business disruption: Eliminate the massive operational risks, forced re-platforming timelines and team reskilling costs associated with sudden, vendor-driven software migrations.

Lifecycle and investment protection

• Maximize existing assets: Fully protect your current IT infrastructure investments by continuing to run stable, fully paid perpetual VMware licenses.
• Extend useful asset life: Sustain older, stable software versions long past official vendor end-of-support dates, keeping existing systems secure and operational for years to come.
• Total roadmap control: Reclaim complete ownership of your IT virtualization strategy. Decisions to upgrade, migrate, or maintain are dictated by your business priorities, not vendor timelines.

Expert, prompt support 24/7/365

• Named, regional Primary Support Engineer (PSE): With third-party support from Rimini Street, you’ll gain access to a dedicated PSE from a team with an average of 20+ years’ experience who stays familiar with your account and has deep knowledge of VMware systems.
• Guaranteed SLAs for response and resolution: Rimini Street offers a 10-minute guaranteed response SLA for critical cases with 2-hour communication updates and a 4-hour target resolution time SLA for critical cases (resolution can be a solution, work around or action plan).
• 24/7/365 availability: With Rimini Street, you can log a ticket on any day of the year at any time, and an experienced engineer will respond promptly, so you aren’t waiting for days or weeks to resolve your issue.

Proactive advanced hypervisor security

While standard third-party support tends to focus on keeping the lights on, Rimini Street offers a comprehensive, proactive, proven security model tailored to the modern IT virtualization threat landscape.

Instead of relying on vendor patches, Rimini Street, with its market-exclusive Rimini Protect™ Advanced Hypervisor Security, powered by Vali Cyber®, fortifies your IT virtualized environment from the inside out.

Your organization can protect its VMware, Linux and KVM hypervisors with advanced, zero-day security that isolates and resolves threats in real time. This approach keeps your environment stable, compliant and highly secure without the disruption of continuous patching or code upgrades.

Learn more about Rimini Protect™ Advanced Hypervisor Security, powered by Vali Cyber®, through these resources:

• Virtual Infrastructure under Attack: How to Proactively Address Risk webinar
• Staying One Step Ahead of VMware Vulnerabilities with Proactive Protection from Rimini Protect™ blog
• Rimini Protect™ Advanced Hypervisor Security, powered by Vali Cyber® datasheet

Third-party support for VMware can significantly reduce service support costs by 30% to 50% compared to OEM rates. Third-party support providers, such as Rimini Street, deliver these savings and efficiencies through seven key mechanisms:

1. Lower operating costs: Third-party support providers for VMware typically charge less than official Broadcom-backed rates, instantly freeing up IT budget.
2. Redirect funds toward innovation: Organizations typically reallocate cost savings from third-party support to self-fund digital transformation, innovation and growth initiatives.
3. Support for perpetual licenses: While official renewals for older perpetual licenses have been largely discontinued to force OEM subscription compliance, third-party providers can support, and in the case of Rimini Street, secure your existing VMware installations and integrations.
4. Elimination of forced bundling: Organizations are increasingly being forced into expensive, bundled software stacks (like VMware Cloud Foundation) with features organizations may not need or use. With third-party support for VMware, organizations pay only for the maintenance they require.
5. Extended hardware lifecycles: Third-party support allows you to optimize your current server assets and hypervisors longer, avoiding forced OEM platform upgrades and compatibility lock-ins.
6. No migration mandates: Instead of a rushed, high-risk migration to alternative hypervisors or native cloud environments, third-party support provides a stable, low-cost holding pattern so you can thoughtfully map out your long-term IT virtualization and infrastructure roadmap.
7. Buy time and optionality: Third-party support for VMware empowers organizations to buy time and consider options for IT virtualization and infrastructure modernization.

Rimini Street empowers organizations to keep their VMware perpetual licenses supported and protected with strategic Rimini Consult™ advisory services to modernize through hybrid hypervisor, cloud, and containerized environments.

Third-party support for VMware empowers organizations to safely pass on Broadcom’s higher-priced subscription renewals. Third-party support for VMware is an independent service support model, meaning your organization no longer pays Broadcom for Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals. The benefits of third-party support for VMware include budget predictability and significant operational costs savings while receiving ongoing technical assistance for VMware perpetual licenses.

Transitioning away from Broadcom Support and Subscription (SnS) to third-party support for VMware helps organizations continue to operate smoothly while buying time to assess long-term options. This means that:

1. Organizations can bypass forced subscription migrations

Broadcom has officially eliminated new perpetual license sales and phased out renewals for legacy support contracts. Normally, when your current SnS contract expires, you must either purchase an expensive subscription bundle or run your software entirely unsupported. Third-party support for VMware perpetual licenses is available even before the expiration date, to provide enterprise-grade technical support and custom security updates. This means you can keep running your original, paid-for perpetual software indefinitely without signing a new Broadcom subscription and without disruption.

2. Mandatory cost escalation is eliminated

Official renewals under Broadcom’s subscription model frequently double or triple operational expenses (OpEx) due to per-core pricing metrics and rigid software bundling. Third-party providers typically offer service support at a lower cost than standard vendor maintenance costs, often yielding significant, immediate cost savings. Furthermore, you avoid Broadcom’s strict late-renewal penalties and rigid minimum spend requirements.

3. Service support is decoupled from software and hardware upgrades

With official vendor contracts, maintaining active support requires you to continually upgrade to the vendor’s newest software versions. When a version reaches End of General Support (EoGS), official patches cease. Independent support providers decouple these concepts. They offer specialized Level 4 engineering support for your current version (e.g., vSphere 7 or 8) even if the vendor has stopped supporting it. Additionally, organizations can continue to operate their existing hardware for years without being forced to change equipment due to new software requirements.

4. Organizations gain additional time to assess roadmap options

Transitioning away from a foundational hypervisor, such as VMware, cannot happen overnight. Relying on third-party support services for VMware gives your infrastructure team breathing room to evaluate options. You can run your stable, existing infrastructure via perpetual licenses while design teams build, test, and fund alternative migration roadmaps (such as moving to open-source hypervisors, native public clouds, or bare-metal alternatives) without the pressure of an impending vendor renewal deadline.

Third-party support providers such as Rimini Street offer global licensing and advisory services to help organizations navigate the complexities of compliance.

Global license and advisory services, such as those offered through Rimini Street, can offer the following capabilities to remain compliant:

• Lifecycle management for audits: Regulatory frameworks (like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or GDPR) often require strict versioning and patch continuity. Third-party providers offer ongoing assistance and custom workarounds for current and previous stable versions of VMware that the vendor has dropped support for, preventing the need for costly, disruptive upgrades.
• License entitlement guidance and asset preservation: Many third-party providers conduct entitlement captures, preserving formal proof of licenses and fix rights independently of the official vendor’s systems. This creates an audit-ready historical record of what your organization owns and runs.
• Custom environments and interoperability: Third-party support often provides Level 4 troubleshooting for custom environments and complex integrations. If your VMware environment requires highly specific add-ons to meet compliance goals, these engineers can support the interoperability of those add-ons.
• Regulatory updates and guidance: Providers like Rimini Street offer specialized expert guidance to navigate software terms, tax and legal requirements, and evolving regulatory updates without locking organizations into mandatory subscription.

Third-party support services from Rimini Street take a different approach to security and risk mitigation than OEMs. Many OEMs take a reactive approach to code patching. For example, OEMs will issue a patch after vulnerabilities or breaches in the original source code are identified to remediate them. Rather than reactive code patching, third-party support provides proactive runtime risk mitigation.

Rimini Protect™, a suite of proven security services and solutions offered by Rimini Street, secures the VMware environment by offering the following risk mitigation strategies and solutions:

How can we keep our infrastructure secure without the latest VMware version or patches?

Rimini Street provides comprehensive security solutions that go beyond traditional vendor patching, helping protect VMware virtualization and infrastructure environments, including products in Sustaining Support or legacy versions that no longer receive new security updates or patches from the OEM.

Our Rimini Protect™ suite for VMware is the next generation of infrastructure security. Rimini Protect enhances existing security strategies, delivering personalized, proactive solutions that improve overall security posture and help protect against entire categories of vulnerabilities.

Rimini Street keeps VMware clients secure by providing:

• Proactive threat intelligence for risk mitigation with Security and Vulnerability Analysis Reports (SVARs), Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) notices and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) analysis
• Security advisory services that include hardening guidance, security assessments, and dedicated support with guaranteed response times to help organizations stay ahead of emerging threats
• Enhanced security posture, which many existing Rimini Street clients state has improved after transitioning to Rimini Street Support for VMware

Importantly, with Rimini Protect™ you no longer worry about downtime or disruption, as the solutions allow organizations to implement critical security mitigations without the need for risky, operational-disrupting hypervisor patches or full upgrades.

Our expanded capabilities include Rimini Protect™ Advanced Hypervisor Security (AHS), powered by Vali Cyber®. This is an industry-first, purpose-built solution designed to defend against the rising tide of ransomware and malware targeting virtualization platforms. By utilizing advanced AI and machine learning techniques, the solution detects malicious threats in real time based on behavior rather than relying solely on file hashes. This provides proactive, zero-day protection across VMware ESXi and other Linux- or KVM-based hypervisors, defending against devastating “Escape to Host” attacks and mitigating vulnerabilities without altering the underlying operating system.

This runtime security platform, embedded with Rimini Support™ for VMware, continuously monitors process behavior with minimal impact on hypervisor performance. It features automated file rollback to instantly remediate ransomware damage, integrated multi-factor authentication (MFA) to lock down management interfaces, and granular access rules to block lateral movement. Organizations gain full-scale, 24/7/365 infrastructure defense and complete control over their IT virtualization roadmap without forcing costly, disruptive vendor upgrades.

A full-scale third-party support provider for VMware such as Rimini Street offers solutions beyond ‘break-fix’ support. Rimini Street offers a full suite of end-to-end services, including license advisory, advanced hypervisor security, roadmap consulting and overlay support across multiple vendors, and more:

• Rimini Support™ for VMware
• Rimini Protect™ Advanced Hypervisor Security, powered by Vali Cyber
• Rimini Street Global License and Advisory Services
• Rimini Consult™ for roadmap, implementation and IT optimization services
• Rimini Custom™ for multiple vendor and/or hybrid cloud support, security and more

Maximizing the value of VMware perpetual licenses is a measured, strategic move that gives organizations the space to control their strategy and roadmap. By combining optimization, proactive security, third-party support and services, and clear migration planning, IT leaders can preserve the stability of today’s environments while preparing confidently for tomorrow’s platforms.

In the end, the decision is about how to sustain performance, security and cost efficiency throughout every stage of the VMware lifecycle. Strategic IT decisions require more than break-fix support — they demand foresight, independence and unbiased expertise. Rimini Street provides a smarter path forward by delivering expert-led support at a fraction of the cost, freeing up budget to accelerate innovation in AI, automation and cybersecurity.

For proven, effective, end-to-end support, security and services for VMware that keep you in control of your budget and roadmap decisions, contact Rimini Street today.

FAQs

Is third-party support for VMware a viable option for extending the useful life of VMware perpetual licenses?

Third-party support for VMware is a proven option for extending the life of VMware perpetual licenses. Rather than feeling pressure to transition to rigid software bundles, such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), organizations can extend the useful life of their VMware perpetual licenses through ongoing third-party support. Organizations can buy time to evaluate alternatives to Broadcom and avoid significant cost increases, ensure smooth IT infrastructure operations and protect their infrastructure with advanced hypervisor security.

What are the benefits of third-party support for VMware?

Here are just some of the benefits of choosing Rimini Street, the global leader of third-party support for VMware:

• Mission-critical expertise: 24/7/365 support from experienced VMware engineers with guaranteed 10-minute response times for critical issues and guaranteed 4-hour resolution times (Resolution can be a solution, workaround or action plan).
• Operational continuity: Continue running stable VMware environments without disruptive upgrades or forced migrations.
• Built-in security: Proactive hypervisor security, security assessments and hardening guidance help protect VMware infrastructure without requiring OS or code changes.
• Proven track record: Large organizations such as Alcatel-Lucent rely on Rimini Street support for VMware, including during critical infrastructure incidents.
• More choice and control: Support is decoupled from vendor roadmaps, allowing IT leaders to modernize, migrate or remain on VMware according to business needs—not vendor pressure.

See how other global organizations such as Lwart have significantly reduced support costs and received high-quality support with Rimini Street.

What VMware products does Rimini Street support?

Rimini Street offers comprehensive support for the following VMware products:

• vSphere
• ESX and ESXi hypervisor hosts
• vCenter
• vSAN
• NSX
• vRealize Suite
• Aria Operations
• Tanzu
• Site Recovery Manager
• Integrated OpenStack (VIO)
• Workstation
• Horizon
• Workspace One

Don’t see your VMware technology listed here? We provide custom support solutions for additional VMware products through our Rimini Custom™ offering. Get in touch with us for a tailored proposal.

What criteria should be considered when evaluating third-party support providers for VMware?

When evaluating third-party support providers for VMware, you should consider a variety of criteria, including costs, security and risk mitigation capabilities, response and resolution SLAs and expertise.

It’s important to note that not all third-party support providers deliver the same value. VMware infrastructure and virtualized workloads are foundational to your business performance. Downtime is costly, security risks at the hypervisor layer continue to escalate and noncompliance is non-negotiable.

While there may be several third-party support providers for VMware in the market, there are significant differences spanning:

• Global support capabilities at scale
• SLA guarantees across response and resolution times
• Onboarding and archiving services
• Ongoing commitment to continued success such as assigning a client engagement manager
• Breadth of services available beyond third-party support but critical to your organization’s operations. These include security, threat intelligence reports, license and advisory services, professional services, roadmap advisory guidance, performance optimization and custom solutions

Take a look at our Definitive Third-Party Support for VMware Checklist to help your organization understand what other criteria you should look for in an end-to-end third-party support provider.