T-Mobile is asking a New York court to force Broadcom to keep supporting its VMware perpetual licenses while the carrier migrates tens of thousands of virtual machines—across roughly 303,140 CPU cores—off the platform.
The numbers are staggering. Over 1,000 applications currently run on those VMs. That’s not a weekend project; that’s a multi-year forklift operation that T-Mobile says is time-consuming and technically challenging. The complaint, filed in August 2025 in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, argues Broadcom was contractually obligated to continue support.
What 303,140 CPU Cores Tells Us About VMware Lock-In
Enterprise virtualization at this scale doesn’t get replaced overnight. T-Mobile is one of the largest mobile carriers in the US—its infrastructure touches billing, network management, customer portals, and internal systems. Those 303,140 cores represent a footprint that took years to build. Broadcom, which acquired VMware in late 2023, has been aggressively pushing customers to convert perpetual licenses to subscriptions, often at significantly higher costs. T-Mobile’s migration isn’t abstract planning; it’s a forced retreat from a platform whose economics under Broadcom no longer work for them.
The Legal Strategy: Buy Time While You Move
T-Mobile isn’t suing to stay on VMware forever. It’s suing to keep the lights on during the migration. The court action, first reported by The Register, seeks a ruling that Broadcom can’t cut off support for existing perpetual licenses just because T-Mobile is walking away. If Broadcom wins the right to terminate support, T-Mobile faces either paying ransom-level subscription fees or accelerating a migration that could destabilize production systems. The outcome of this case could set a precedent for every other large VMware shop watching Broadcom’s playbook.
Broadcom’s response will tell us whether it sees this as a legal nuisance or an existential threat to its subscription conversion strategy. Meanwhile, T-Mobile has already started moving workloads—and it’s not doing it quietly.
Source: T-Mobile moving tens of thousands of virtual machines off VMware amid lawsuit
Domain: arstechnica.com
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