lifecycle

Bring Your Own Licence Is No Longer Optional

VMware on Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle has moved to BYOL, with deadlines. The nearest one is 31 October. And it quietly changes how you should compare clouds.

If you run VMware on Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud, the way you licence it has already changed. Not at some future point. Dates have passed, and one more is coming up fast.

Licence-included pricing is being retired across the hyperscalers in favour of bring your own licence. You buy a VCF subscription from Broadcom or a reseller and bring it to whichever cloud you're running on. Same software underneath, different purchasing path.

Most of what I've read about this treats it as a commercial footnote, which I think undersells it. There's work to do, there are deadlines, and there's a knock-on effect on how you compare clouds that I find more interesting than the licensing itself.

The date to check first

Azure VMware Solution pay-as-you-go with VCF included ends on 31 October 2026, and a VCF licence key has to be registered before 1 November to keep running. If you're on AVS PayGo and nobody has raised this with you yet, that's a conversation for this week rather than next month.

How we got here, briefly

Google Cloud went first, back in February 2024, agreeing that VCF subscriptions bought from Broadcom could be used on Google Cloud VMware Engine or in your own data centre, with the ability to move between them. Microsoft followed about three months later for Azure VMware Solution. Oracle announced its alignment in January 2026.

For a while this was presented as flexibility. Bring your own licence if you want to. What's happened since is that the alternative has been withdrawn, one platform at a time, and that turns an option into a migration.

Where each platform stands

Azure VMware Solution

Microsoft stopped selling new AVS nodes with included VCF subscriptions after 15 October 2025. From 16 October 2025, new nodes require a portable VCF subscription bought from Broadcom and registered with AVS. The bigger date is 31 October 2026, when AVS PayGo with VCF included ends and customers convert to the BYOL SKUs. You register the subscription separately on each AVS private cloud, through the Azure portal. Worth knowing that Microsoft prices the BYOL option lower than the licence-included one, and that this is a licensing change rather than a product change. AVS still runs as a managed service with Microsoft handling infrastructure and host lifecycle including patching and upgrades. Existing AVS VCF BYOL customers are unaffected.

Google Cloud VMware Engine

The first to move, and the change landed earlier. Customers buying new commitments after 15 October 2025 obtain VCF licences directly from Broadcom and purchase the BYOL version of VMware Engine separately from Google. From 1 November 2025, VMware Engine nodes required portable VCF licences. Google also adjusted regional project quotas at the same time to restrict on-demand usage to existing levels, which is the detail most likely to catch you if your capacity plan assumed you could burst.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

The most recent, and the most clearly staged. BYOL became generally available in March 2026. New SDDCs have required BYOL since 22 March 2026, and Oracle made BYOL the standard operating model from 21 May. Licence-included offerings are being phased out through a defined multi-stage transition. The detail that matters for planning: customers upgrading to newer VCF releases, including VCF 9, must transition their remaining licence-included capacity to BYOL as part of that upgrade. So the licensing change and the version upgrade are the same project whether you wanted them to be or not.

Amazon EVS

AWS sits differently. EVS was built around bring your own licence from the start, so there is no transition to manage. AWS no longer distributes the older VMware Cloud service. I wrote up how EVS actually works separately, including the networking constraints and the licensing mechanics.

The part that is actually interesting

There's a consequence here I haven't seen many people draw out.

When licensing was bundled into each platform's price, comparing clouds meant comparing bundles. The licence sat inside the node cost, with different discounts and different commitment structures on each side, and it was genuinely hard to get a like for like number.

Under BYOL the licence costs the same wherever you run it. Bought once, from Broadcom, at whatever your agreement says.

What that changes

Licence cost stops separating the clouds from each other. What's left is infrastructure pricing, the surrounding services you actually intend to use, egress, region availability, and how good the migration tooling is. A much cleaner comparison than the one we were all making two years ago.

It also cleans up the placement conversation. If you picked Azure partly because of a bundled licensing deal, that reasoning has expired. If you picked it because your identity estate is already there and the integration genuinely matters, nothing has changed.

Practical things to get right

Core counting is now your problem

Under BYOL you manage the number of VCF cores assigned to your cloud environments. That used to sit inside the node price. It isn't difficult work, but it's a new responsibility and it needs a name against it, because nobody notices an under-licensed environment until somebody goes looking.

Check the certified list before you assume portability

Broadcom publishes an official list of Certified Cloud Services eligible for licence portability. The hyperscalers are on it, along with a number of regional and specialist providers. If your provider isn't on that list, portability may not apply, and that's worth establishing early rather than at renewal.

Registration is per environment

On AVS you register the subscription separately on each private cloud. Multiply by however many environments you have across dev, test, production and DR and it turns into a small administrative project rather than one action.

Management pack support has moved too

Broadcom announced end of general support for various VCF Operations management packs, including the ones built for OCVS, AVS and Google Cloud VMware Engine. If your monitoring of a hyperscaler estate leans on one of those, check where it stands. This is the sort of thing that stops working without telling you.

What I would do this month

Work out which platforms you are on and which licensing model each environment currently uses If any AVS environment is on PayGo with VCF included, put the 31 October date in front of whoever owns that budget Confirm you have, or can get, portable VCF subscriptions covering the cores you are running Name an owner for core counting and licence registration, because it is now an ongoing task Check the Broadcom certified list if you use a provider other than the big four Check whether any VCF Operations management pack you rely on is affected by the support changes If a VCF 9 upgrade is planned on OCVS, treat the BYOL transition as part of that project rather than a separate one Revisit any cloud placement decision that was justified on bundled licensing, because that reasoning no longer holds

One last thing

There's been plenty of heat around VMware licensing these past two years and I'm not going to add to it. Whatever you make of the direction, the practical position is the same either way. These are published dates, the mechanics are documented, and the work is manageable as long as you start before the deadline rather than after.

The licensing is the boring half anyway. The placement question sitting underneath it is the one I'd actually spend an afternoon on.

Sources

VCF License Portability: list of certified cloud providers, Broadcom. The authoritative list of eligible destinations.
Azure VMware Solution portable VCF, Broadcom: how registration works per private cloud.
Broadcom VMware licensing changes: what AVS partners need to know, Microsoft: the 15 and 16 October 2025 dates, the 31 October 2026 PayGo end, and the pricing position.
Evolving Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for Broadcom's BYOL model, Oracle: GA timing, the 22 March new-SDDC requirement, and the VCF 9 upgrade condition.
Azure VMware Solution licensing changes set October BYOL deadline: the Google Cloud VMware Engine dates and the quota adjustment.
Oracle follows Broadcom on VMware BYOL model: the management pack support changes across OCVS, AVS and GCVE.

Dates and terms differ by agreement and region, and several of these transitions are still in progress. Confirm your own position with your provider and your Broadcom account team rather than relying on a summary.

Views expressed here are my own.