A guide for MSPs navigating the VMware conversation with confidence
Something shifted in the VMware world when Broadcom completed its acquisition. Licensing costs spiked, support models changed, and customers who had never given a second thought to their virtualization stack were suddenly calling their MSPs asking what it all means.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your customers already know about this. They’ve heard about it from industry press, from peers at conferences, from other vendors evaluating the same opportunity you are. If you’re not the one guiding this conversation, someone else will be, and they won’t necessarily have your customer’s best interests at heart.
The good news? This doesn’t have to be a scary conversation. In fact, if handled well, it’s one of the most valuable conversations you’ll ever have with a customer. It’s a chance to demonstrate expertise, build trust, and deepen a relationship that goes far beyond a support contract.
MSPs who lead the VMware conversation earn long-term customer loyalty. Those who avoid it risk losing accounts to whoever does.
This guide gives you the framing, the talk track, the objection handlers, and the migration story you need to have this conversation with confidence. A VMware conversion conversation can lead to strengthening your relationship with your customer and improving your bottom line.
Why Customers Get Scared (And Why That’s Understandable)
Before we talk about what to say, we need to understand what your customers are feeling. VMware isn’t just software to most organizations, it’s infrastructure. It’s been running quietly in the background for years, maybe decades. It’s trusted. It’s a fixture.
When you tell a customer they need to move off it, here’s what they hear:
- Their entire virtualized environment is at risk
- There will be downtime, data loss, or something catastrophic going wrong
- It’s going to cost a fortune and eat months of IT bandwidth
- The thing that has “always worked” is about to stop working
- The business processes will be disrupted or need replacing
None of that is true. But fear isn’t rational, and your first job isn’t to correct it—it’s to acknowledge it. Customers who feel heard are far more likely to listen to your actual recommendation.
Tip: Start every VMware conversation by validating the customer’s concern. “This is a big change in the market and it makes sense that you have questions. Let’s look at it together.”
What to Say First: The Framing That Defuses Panic
The single most important thing you can do in the opening of this conversation is reframe the problem. Don’t position it as an emergency or an overhaul. Instead, make it about risk, cost, and business continuity.
Here are a few reframes that work:
“We’re not replacing VMware. We’re replacing the risk that VMware now represents.”
“Your licensing costs are already going up. Let’s make sure you’re getting more for your money.”
“This is actually good timing for us to look at your environment strategically. You’re not behind , you’re ahead.”
Notice what these frames have in common: they center the customer’s business outcomes, not your technology stack. They position the change as proactive, not reactive. And they make you the guide in this story, not the vendor trying to sell something.
Come prepared with data. Pull together their current VMware licensing spend and project what Broadcom’s new pricing model means for them over the next three years. Numbers make the abstract concrete, and concrete concerns are ones you can solve.
The Conversation Framework: A Simple 3-Step Talk Track
Once you’ve established the right tone, use this structure to move the conversation forward in a way that feels consultative, not pushy.
Step 1: Diagnose
Before you recommend anything, audit the customer’s environment together. What’s running on VMware? What workloads are mission-critical? What’s dormant or could be rationalized? This step does two things: it gives you the data you need to make a real recommendation, and it makes the customer feel like you’re solving their specific problem, not selling a generic solution.
Ask: “If we could only protect five things in your environment from disruption, what would they be?” This resets the conversation from “everything” to what actually matters.
Step 2: Educate
Walk the customer through what has actually changed with VMware under Broadcom—in plain language, without FUD. Stick to the facts: licensing model changes, elimination of perpetual licenses, changes to support tiers, and the uncertainty around the long-term product roadmap. Explain the cost trajectory they’re on if they do nothing.
Your goal here is informed clarity, not alarm. The customer should leave this step feeling like they understand the situation, not like the sky is falling.
Step 3: Prescribe
Now you can present a recommendation. Frame it as a phased migration path with clear milestones, defined success criteria, and explicit rollback safety nets. Emphasize what doesn’t change: their applications, their data, their day-to-day operations. What changes is the underlying platform—and your job is to make that transition invisible to their business.
Tip: Proposals that show a phased approach close faster. Customers are more comfortable saying yes to a first step than to a complete overhaul.
Handling the Hardest Objections
Even with the best framing, you’ll hit resistance. Here’s how to handle the four most common objections without getting defensive or losing the thread.
“We just renewed our VMware contract.”
This one stings, but it’s not a dead end. Acknowledge the sunk cost, then shift to forward-looking economics. “That’s actually useful context—it gives us a clear timeline. Let’s start planning now so that when that contract expires, we’re not scrambling. The worst outcome is being forced to renew again at even higher rates because we weren’t ready.”
“We don’t have the bandwidth for a migration right now.”
This is an invitation, not an objection. “That’s exactly why you have us. Our job is to do this heavy lifting so your team doesn’t have to. We’ve done this before. You don’t need to find the bandwidth—we bring it.”
“What if something breaks?”
This is where your methodology does the selling for you. Walk them through your migration process: parallel environments, validation checkpoints, staged cutover, rollback capability at every step. If you have reference customers (even anonymous references), now is the time to reference them. “We’ve run this process for similar organizations and here’s what it looked like.”
“Can’t we just wait and see?”
Waiting has a cost, and it’s your job to make that cost visible. “Absolutely, and here’s what waiting looks like: your next renewal comes at the new rate—which for an organization your size is roughly X—and you’re starting the evaluation process under time pressure instead of on your terms. I’d rather we make this decision proactively than reactively.”
Choosing the Right Alternative—and Explaining It Simply
Once a customer is open to exploring alternatives, the next challenge is making the options legible. Most customers don’t want a technology deep-dive—they want to understand what changes and what stays the same.
VMware alternatives fall broadly into three categories: OpenStack-based platforms, Kubernetes-native infrastructure, and managed private cloud platforms. The right fit depends on the customer’s workload profile, their team’s capabilities, and how much operational overhead they’re willing to own.
For most MSP customers, the most important message is this: their applications won’t know the difference. A well-executed migration is one that is non-destructive, where source VMs are never modified, rollback is power-on, and the cutover is in seconds to minutes—all with uptime, performance, and access to their data.
The “no-forklift” message is your best friend. Lead with what doesn’t change before you explain what does.
Platform9’s managed infrastructure layer is particularly well-suited for the MSP model because it handles the operational complexity that would otherwise fall on your team or your customer’s IT staff. Customers get high availability, live migration, dynamic resource rebalancing, and multi-tenancy—included at the base per-core price. MSPs get a platform they can deliver consistently at scale.
Making It Feel Safe: The Migration Story You Tell
Customers don’t buy technology—they buy outcomes and confidence. The way you narrate the migration journey matters as much as the technical plan behind it.
Here are the narrative elements that build confidence:
Reference stories
Even if you can’t name the customer, “we’ve done this before for a manufacturing company of similar size” is enormously reassuring. People don’t want to be first. Help them understand they’re not.
Phased timelines
Show them a timeline that starts small and builds. A pilot workload in month one. Non-critical systems in months two and three. Production cutover in month four, with validation at every step. Big-bang migrations terrify customers. Phased rollouts feel manageable.
Operational continuity
Repeat this message often: their team won’t wake up on day one of the new environment and find everything different. The applications look the same. The workflows are the same. The only thing that changes is what’s running underneath—and that’s your domain, not theirs.
The safety net
Be explicit about rollback capability. “At every stage of this process, if something isn’t right, we can step back. We’re not removing VMware until the new environment is fully validated.” This removes the biggest emotional barrier: the fear of a point of no return.
Turning the Conversation Into a Growth Opportunity
Here’s the part that often gets overlooked: a VMware migration isn’t just a project—it’s an opportunity to create a deeper relationship. Customers who trust you to navigate a high-stakes transition become the stickiest customers you have.
And the conversation naturally opens doors to broader services:
- Disaster recovery and business continuity planning
- Security posture assessment for the new environment
- Monitoring and observability across the modernized stack
- Cloud cost optimization and hybrid cloud strategy
- Long-term infrastructure roadmap and advisory retainers
A customer who came to you with a VMware problem can easily become a customer with a three-year managed infrastructure roadmap—if you play the long game.
The MSP who guides a customer through a hard infrastructure transition doesn’t just keep the account. They earn a level of trust that’s difficult for a competitor to displace.
The practical upshot: Don’t close the VMware conversation with a migration proposal. Close it with a discovery call about where the customer wants to be in 36 months—and what infrastructure they’ll need to get there.
The Bottom Line: Lead This Conversation
Your customers are going to have the VMware conversation one way or another. The only question is whether you’re the one sitting across the table from them when they do.
The MSPs who lead this conversation with empathy, expertise, and a clear migration path will come out of the VMware disruption with stronger customer relationships and more expansive service contracts. The ones who wait for customers to bring it up will find themselves defending against competitors who got there first.
The conversation isn’t complicated. Acknowledge the fear. Reframe the problem. Show them a path. Back it with a proven process. And remind them that this is exactly why they have a managed service partner.
If you’re ready to start having this conversation at scale, Platform9 offers MSP partners the technical platform, the migration tooling, and the enablement resources to do it with confidence. Let’s talk.
Ready to have this conversation with your customers?
- Talk to a Platform9 solutions engineer about our MSP partner program
- Visit our Service Providers page to learn more about our managed infrastructure platform
