Key takeaways
- Broadcom's move to subscription bundles has triggered estate reviews across Australia.
- Demand is rising for VCF, NSX and migration skills — and for people who know the alternatives too.
- Short, project-based engagements are common, so contract VMware specialists are in demand.
What changed
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and moved the product line to subscription licensing, bundling much of the portfolio into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and vSphere Foundation. Perpetual licences were discontinued.
For many Australian organisations, that turned a routine renewal into a strategic decision: commit to VCF, consolidate the estate, or move some workloads elsewhere.
Three paths, three skill sets
- Commit and modernise — adopting the full VCF stack needs engineers with VCF, NSX, vSAN and Aria automation experience.
- Consolidate and optimise — reducing core counts and hosts to manage cost needs capacity planning and performance tuning skills.
- Migrate some workloads — moving to public cloud or another hypervisor needs migration specialists who understand both the source and the target.
Many organisations are doing a mix of all three, which is why the most sought-after candidates are VMware experts who also know at least one alternative platform.
Roles in demand
- VMware Cloud Foundation engineers and architects
- NSX network virtualisation specialists
- Migration engineers (HCX, cloud migration tooling)
- Infrastructure automation engineers (PowerCLI, Terraform, Ansible)
- Hybrid cloud architects with VMware and AWS or Azure experience
Hiring tips
Much of this work is time-boxed — an assessment, a migration wave, a VCF rollout — so contract or SOW engagements are common. Decide which path you're on before you brief, because a VCF architect and a migration engineer are rarely the same person.
Our VMware recruitment team can help you scope the roles and find people with hands-on experience on your target platform.
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