What was the October 31, 2026 Azure VMware Solution deadline?

Microsoft's own licensing reference states that license-included pay-as-you-go deployments must transition to portable VCF by October 31, 2026 to remain compliant. That date has now passed. If you are still running AVS on pay-as-you-go nodes that were sold with the licence bundled in, without a Broadcom VCF licence of your own applied to those hosts, you are past Microsoft's compliance date. It was not a shutdown date and nothing stopped working — it is a compliance date, which is a different and quieter kind of problem.

What happens to Azure VMware Solution reserved instances?

They have a longer runway. Microsoft states that customers with active reserved instances for VCF license-included hosts must exchange those reservations for VCF BYOL reservations, or move the workloads off Azure VMware Solution, by August 30, 2027. So there are two dates, not one, and which applies to you depends on how you bought the capacity. A mixed estate — some pay-as-you-go, some reserved — has both.

Does moving to Azure VMware Solution avoid Broadcom licensing?

No, and that is the most common misconception we encounter. Azure VMware Solution runs VMware Cloud Foundation, and VCF is a Broadcom product whichever datacentre it sits in. Before November 2025 the Broadcom relationship was hidden inside the Azure node price, which made AVS feel like an escape from Broadcom commercial terms. It never was. If your reason for choosing AVS was to stop negotiating with Broadcom, the licence-included retirement removes the illusion rather than creating the problem.

Is Azure VMware Solution still a reasonable VMware exit destination?

It can be, for the right reason. AVS is a good answer when the goal is to get out of your own datacentre without re-platforming the workloads, and when you value keeping vSphere operational practice intact during a move. It is a poor answer if the goal is to stop paying Broadcom, because it does not do that. Judge it as a hosting and operations decision, priced with your own VCF licence in the model, rather than as a licensing escape.

Blog · 4 min read · September 10, 2026

Azure VMware Solution: licence-included ended Oct 31

Microsoft stopped including a VCF licence with new Azure VMware Solution nodes on November 1, 2025. Licence-included pay-as-you-go deployments had to transition to portable VCF by October 31, 2026, and that date has passed. Reserved instances have until August 30, 2027.

Update — November 5, 2026: the pay-as-you-go deadline has passed. Microsoft’s licensing reference, re-read on November 5 (last updated October 27, 2026), still lists October 31, 2026 against “License-included pay-as-you-go deployments must transition to portable VCF to remain compliant.” Nothing switches off when you pass it, so a missed date shows up in a licensing review rather than an outage. If you have pay-as-you-go hosts that never had a portable VCF licence applied, treat that as an open compliance item and talk to your Broadcom partner now. The reserved-instance date, August 30, 2027, is unchanged, and on Microsoft’s page it applies to reserved instances only.

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 belonged 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:

Date	Who it applies to	What Microsoft requires
October 31, 2026	Licence-included pay-as-you-go deployments	“must transition to portable VCF to remain compliant”
August 30, 2027	Active reserved instances for licence-included hosts	Exchange the reservations for VCF BYOL reservations, or move those workloads off Azure VMware Solution

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

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.
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.
Start the Broadcom conversation now if you still need a portable VCF licence. Licence procurement is not a same-week activity, and pay-as-you-go hosts are already past Microsoft's date.
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.

The trap here is the word “compliant.” Nothing stopped running on November 1, 2026. No VM powered off, no alert fired, and your monitoring will not tell you. You are simply out of compliance on a licensing term, and you find out in a true-up, an audit, or a renewal negotiation where the other side knows before you do. That is the expensive version. Treat this like a certificate expiry that no system warns you about.

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), and re-read on November 5, 2026 (ms.date 2026-10-27). 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.

Questions we get asked

What is portable VCF licensing in Azure VMware Solution?: Portable VCF means you bring your own VMware Cloud Foundation licence, bought from Broadcom, and apply it to Azure VMware Solution hosts — rather than consuming a licence Microsoft bundled into the node price. Microsoft describes the older arrangement as 'license-included'. As of November 1, 2025 Microsoft no longer includes a VCF licence or subscription with new AVS node purchases, so every new deployment is already a bring-your-own-licence deployment. The change is commercial rather than technical: the same hosts run the same workloads, but the licence entitlement now comes from a Broadcom agreement you hold directly.
What was the October 31, 2026 Azure VMware Solution deadline?: Microsoft's own licensing reference states that license-included pay-as-you-go deployments must transition to portable VCF by October 31, 2026 to remain compliant. That date has now passed. If you are still running AVS on pay-as-you-go nodes that were sold with the licence bundled in, without a Broadcom VCF licence of your own applied to those hosts, you are past Microsoft's compliance date. It was not a shutdown date and nothing stopped working — it is a compliance date, which is a different and quieter kind of problem.
What happens to Azure VMware Solution reserved instances?: They have a longer runway. Microsoft states that customers with active reserved instances for VCF license-included hosts must exchange those reservations for VCF BYOL reservations, or move the workloads off Azure VMware Solution, by August 30, 2027. So there are two dates, not one, and which applies to you depends on how you bought the capacity. A mixed estate — some pay-as-you-go, some reserved — has both.
Does moving to Azure VMware Solution avoid Broadcom licensing?: No, and that is the most common misconception we encounter. Azure VMware Solution runs VMware Cloud Foundation, and VCF is a Broadcom product whichever datacentre it sits in. Before November 2025 the Broadcom relationship was hidden inside the Azure node price, which made AVS feel like an escape from Broadcom commercial terms. It never was. If your reason for choosing AVS was to stop negotiating with Broadcom, the licence-included retirement removes the illusion rather than creating the problem.
Is Azure VMware Solution still a reasonable VMware exit destination?: It can be, for the right reason. AVS is a good answer when the goal is to get out of your own datacentre without re-platforming the workloads, and when you value keeping vSphere operational practice intact during a move. It is a poor answer if the goal is to stop paying Broadcom, because it does not do that. Judge it as a hosting and operations decision, priced with your own VCF licence in the model, rather than as a licensing escape.

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VMware Exit & Server Modernization

Written by the team at Pro IT NW · Senior-led Microsoft project consultancy · Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, delivered USA-wide.

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