Large Multinational Bank

Introduction

The client was a large multinational bank and financial services company, headquartered in the Americas.

The client is a significant user of VMware virtualisation and associated products, across multiple platforms spanning the globe, and has invested millions in VMware technology over the last few years.  It was preparing for a transition to Broadcom subscription licensing from its legacy perpetual VMware licenses at the end of its Enterprise License Agreement in July 2025.

Their Challenges

The client faced a few challenges in preparation for its VMware renewal:

• The bank was using multiple VMware products (see list at the end), across 39 different contract IDs, 17 business units and 10 countries.
• The structure of the business meant there were several business units and stakeholders that needed to be consulted to determine current and future license requirements and support us with deployment questions that needed answering.
• The Software Asset Management (SAM) team, whilst good at their role, did not have sight of everything on the bank’s VMware platforms.
• The bank had no central discovery of VMware products in its environments, meaning we had to rely on deployment of RV Tools and scripts to collect suitable data.
• Many of the VMware products in the bank’s portfolio had been purchased some time ago and had, consequently, been through several different name changes and alignments to bundles.

Their Objectives

The clients’ objectives were:

• To understand their initial VMware license position to ensure compliance with legacy licenses.
• To map their currently deployed estate across to VMware by Broadcom subscription bundles.
• To optimise the VMware estates, where possible, to reduce subscription costs as much as possible for the renewal.

bedigital’s Solution

We implemented a staged approach to support the client:

• Contract and entitlement analysis.
• Effective license position (ELP).
• Legacy license to subscription bundle mapping.
• Optimisation recommendations.

Each stage built towards a final optimised license position and recommended bill of materials for the Broadcom renewal.

How bedigital Delivered

The initial contract and entitlement analysis focused on the data provided by the client from its Broadcom support portal.  It allowed us to quickly unpick the myriad site IDs and country specific licenses and align them to individual contracts.  It enabled us to have a view of what the client was entitled to use before the deployment data was returned to us.

The effective license position focused on several key areas of VMware product usage – vSphere, Aria Suite, NSX, Hybrid Cloud Extender and vSAN.  The client was keen to understand its overall core count by platform and country for vSphere, as well as storage capacity for vSAN.

The product mapping stage took the ELP and translated the client’s product use across to the new license metrics and product bundles, enabling the client to easily see what their bill of materials would look like for a renewal, prior to our optimisation recommendations being enacted.

In the final stage, bedigital looked at two key areas of the client’s VMware usage – the ratio of VMs to hosts across all platforms and the amount of storage allocated to vSAN clusters.  In the first instance, we highlighted the low ratio of VMs to hosts in several areas of the VMware estate and modelled consolidating some clusters to reduce core counts and, therefore, license subscription costs.  In the second instance, we highlighted that under the new vSAN metric, where a customer licenses the product based on storage capacity rather than host processors, the client was only using approximately 30% of the allocated storage across all VMware platforms.  bedigital recommended significantly reducing the allocation of vSAN storage to reduce overall license subscription costs.

Challenges Overcome

There were numerous challenges to overcome to deliver a successful project:

• The client’s organisational structure made it difficult to engage with a limited set of stakeholders who could quickly and easily answer questions arising from the data and make decisions about the progress of the project.
• The client needed to engage with technical stakeholders from multiple countries across a large enterprise, which slowed down data production and interactions and led to some deployment data being provided piecemeal.
• Broadcom were unhelpful and slow in producing an Install Base Report (IBR) for the client’s VMware products, upon request by the client, though bedigital was able to quickly analyse the data, once produced, and incorporate it into the entitlement from the client’s support portal.

Outcomes

• The client was assured of being fully license compliant, significantly increasing confidence going into negotiations with Broadcom over a renewal.
• Proposed bill of materials was reduced in key areas thanks to the client executing optimisations recommended and modelled by bedigital.
• The client’s SAM team were guided in how to effectively manage VMware licensing and provided with the tools to maintain their VMware licensing position after the project ended, once the entitlement was loaded into their new SAM tool of choice.

Benefits

• Strategic oversight of VMware licensing has been implemented across the client’s enterprise off the back of this project.
• Optimised bill of materials for a Broadcom subscription renewal, meaning the renewal was as cost effective as it possibly could be.

Testimonial

“This project was an excellent experience for us, as it has enabled us to take a strategic view of our virtual platforms and get a grip of our VMware estate.  We would not have achieved this without bedigital’s support throughout the engagement.”

The client’s Head of SAM

Conclusion

The project was completed in difficult circumstances to a defined plan and delivered a cost-optimal renewal from VMware legacy perpetual licensing to Broadcom subscription bundles.  The client was left only paying what they absolutely had to for their new subscriptions, ensuring full license usage.

*Sample list of  VMware products in scope  

• vSphere
• Aria Suite
• Aria Operations for Networks
• NSX
• vSAN
•  Hybrid Cloud Extender (HCX)
• Site Recovery Manager
• Tanzu Guardrails
• Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Manager
• vCloud Suite (bundle of several legacy products)