Azure VMware Solution: licence-included ends Oct 31

If you moved VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution, or you are costing it as a destination right now, there is a date on Microsoft's own licensing page that belongs in your plan: October 31, 2026. It is not an outage, a migration or a product retirement. It is a compliance deadline attached to how your existing hosts are licensed — and those are the deadlines that get missed, because nothing breaks when you pass them.

What changed, and when

Azure VMware Solution used to be sold with the VMware licence bundled into the node. Microsoft called this license-included. That arrangement ended for new purchases nearly a year ago. From Microsoft's licensing reference:

“As of November 1, 2025, Microsoft no longer includes a VCF license or subscription with new Azure VMware Solution node purchases.”

So every AVS node bought since then is already a bring-your-own-licence node. What is arriving now is the deadline for everything bought before then. There are two dates, and which one binds you depends on how you purchased capacity:

A mixed estate has both dates. If some of your AVS capacity is reserved and some is on demand — which is the normal shape once a deployment has been through one renewal — then you are managing two clocks against two different remedies.

The part worth saying plainly: AVS was never an exit from Broadcom

This is the reason we think the date matters more than its mechanics suggest. In a lot of mid-market planning we see, Azure VMware Solution got onto the shortlist as the option that let you keep vSphere and stop dealing with Broadcom. The first half of that is true. The second half never was.

Azure VMware Solution runs VMware Cloud Foundation, and VCF is a Broadcom product wherever it is hosted. Before November 2025 the Broadcom commercial relationship was wrapped inside a Microsoft invoice, which made it invisible. The licence-included retirement does not create a Broadcom dependency in AVS — it removes the wrapper that was hiding one. After October 31, 2026 the dependency is on your own paperwork, where you can see it.

If AVS is on your shortlist because you want out of your own datacentre without re-platforming workloads, that logic is intact and this change does not weaken it. If AVS is on your shortlist because you want out of Broadcom, this is the change that should send you back to the comparison, with a VCF licence line item priced in. That is a genuinely different total than the one the bundled node price used to imply, and it needs to sit next to the Hyper-V, Nutanix and re-platforming numbers rather than being assumed away.

What to do, in order

1. Establish which licensing model each AVS node is actually on. Do not infer it from when the project started — infer it from the purchase. Nodes bought after November 1, 2025 are already BYOL; older ones may not be.
2. Separate pay-as-you-go capacity from reserved capacity, because they have different deadlines and different remedies. Reserved instances are an exchange, not just a licence purchase.
3. Start the Broadcom conversation early if you are going to need a portable VCF licence. Licence procurement is not a same-week activity, and the current market for VMware licensing is not one where you want to be the customer with six weeks left.
4. Re-run the exit comparison with the licence cost visible. If the numbers still favour AVS with VCF priced explicitly, that is a sound decision made on real figures. If they do not, better to learn that now than after a three-year reservation exchange. That comparison is the first step of a VMware to Azure migration assessment, and it is just as useful when the answer turns out not to be Azure.

Sources

Quotations and both dates are from Microsoft's Portable VCF licensing reference for Azure VMware Solution, read in full on September 10, 2026 (ms.date 2026-08-14). We have quoted Microsoft's own wording for the requirement rather than paraphrasing it, because “must transition… to remain compliant” and “must be migrated” are different obligations and only the first appears on the page.

The 30-second version

Microsoft stopped bundling a VMware Cloud Foundation licence with new Azure VMware Solution nodes on November 1, 2025. Existing licence-included deployments have to move to a portable, customer-held VCF licence — pay-as-you-go by October 31, 2026, and reserved instances by August 30, 2027. Nothing breaks on those dates; you just stop being compliant. And if AVS was chosen as a way around Broadcom, this is the point at which that stops being true on paper as well as in practice.