HPE Offers VMware Users a Free Year of Licensing to Switch, Targets Broadcom Price Hikes

What HPE Is Offering

At HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026 on June 15, HPE announced a migration assistance program targeting VMware by Broadcom customers. The deal: new HPE VM Essentials customers who purchase a three-year license receive up to one year of complimentary licensing, covering the overlap period so they are not paying for two hypervisors simultaneously.

HPE is also offering one year of HPE Zerto Advanced Resilience Edition for $1, which covers migration and disaster recovery for up to 25 virtual machines at a time. On top of that, HPE is extending three years of zero-interest financing for HPE CloudOps Software, the bundle that includes HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and Zerto.

All of it is sold exclusively through channel partners. HPE Vice President of North America Channel and Partner Ecosystem Jeremiah Jenson told CRN the program exists specifically to eliminate "financial risk" during migrations. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jenson said.

The Broadcom Price Problem Driving This

The context matters. Broadcom closed its $69 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and moved quickly to restructure licensing. According to CRN, some customers have seen renewal costs increase two to four times versus pre-acquisition pricing.

Broadcom also moved from a per-VM licensing model toward subscription bundles, which forced customers to pay for features they did not previously need. CRN reached out to Broadcom for comment on the price comparison; Broadcom declined.

HPE's VM Essentials is priced per socket rather than per core, which is the VMware by Broadcom model. Jenson told CRN customers can save up to 90% compared to VMware by Broadcom pricing. HPE has an obvious financial interest in promoting that claim. No independent third-party audit of those savings figures was cited in any of the three sources reviewed for this article.

Bigger Picture: HPE Unifying Its Partner Program

The VM Essentials incentives are part of a broader partner-program overhaul announced the same day. According to HPE's press release, the company is unifying the HPE and Juniper Networks partner programs under a single umbrella called HPE Partner Ready Vantage, effective November 1, 2026.

Simon Ewington, HPE's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem, said in the release: "With a unified program across HPE and Juniper, aligned incentives, and expanded partner-led offers, we are making it easier for partners to win more business across networking, cloud, and AI."

HPE says the combined program offers up to 24% margin potential for partners. The channel-only route to market is also expanding beyond VM Essentials to include HPE Private Cloud PC3000, HPE SimpliVity PC1000, and HPE Zerto Software.

HPE is additionally introducing VM Essentials licenses for partners to run in their own IT environments, essentially letting resellers build hands-on familiarity before pitching it to customers.

The Fair Case for Staying With VMware

Not every VMware customer is running for the exits. Broadcom's bundled model, while expensive, does deliver a mature, deeply integrated feature set. VMware's vSphere ecosystem has decades of third-party tooling, enterprise support infrastructure, and certified integrations that newer alternatives have not fully replicated.

For large enterprises whose operations are tightly coupled to VMware APIs, switching hypervisors is not a rip-and-replace weekend project. Migration complexity, retraining costs, and application compatibility testing are real costs that do not disappear just because the licensing math favors HPE. Customers weighing this decision should be skeptical of any vendor's headline savings figure that does not account for total migration cost.

What This Means

HPE is not being purely altruistic here. VM Essentials is a vehicle for pulling enterprise compute and private cloud spend onto HPE hardware. The channel-only model means HPE leans on partners to close deals, which also means the quality of the migration experience will vary by partner.

The complimentary year of licensing is a genuine financial sweetener, but it only applies to customers who commit to a three-year VM Essentials contract. Customers who want flexibility or are unsure about the platform are not the target.

TechRadar covered the one-year free license announcement but its article, as published, was largely incomplete and did not include the Zerto pricing detail, the zero-interest financing terms, or the broader Partner Ready Vantage unification. The CRN and HPE press release sources provided the substantive terms.

Broadcom has not announced any pricing concessions in response, and as of June 17, 2026, no independent customer-adoption numbers for VM Essentials have been published. The real test of whether HPE's incentive package moves the needle is whether enterprise customers, who signed multi-year VMware contracts before Broadcom's price restructuring, have enough licensing flexibility to act on it before those agreements expire.