VMware support after Broadcom: tiers, who answers a case, Extended Support and perpetual licences

VMware support tiers today: the short answer

A VMware subscription comes with one level of support: Broadcom Software Maintenance Essential Support, the one software support offering in Broadcom’s maintenance handbook of 8 June 2026 and the one the VVF and VCF 9.1 FAQs include. VMware’s own levels, Basic, Production and Select Support among them, still listed in VMware’s support matrix of February 2024, gave way to it: in September 2024, after the move to Broadcom’s support portal on 5 May 2024, Broadcom wrote that “all VMware solutions are covered by a single support offering: Broadcom Software Maintenance”. Above it, Broadcom’s knowledge base describes Broadcom Advanced Support, bought with a support account manager or a dedicated or designated support engineer for VCF products. Extended Support, for a version past its end of general support, is a separate purchase offered “in certain cases”.

Broadcom handbook (8 June 2026), VVF and VCF 9.1 FAQs, VMware support matrix (February 2024), VCF blogs (September 2024, July and August 2025) and the KBs named, read on 4 October 2026.

What Essential Support includes

For the subscription or maintenance term, Broadcom’s handbook lists these deliverables: Essential Support, operational assistance, security content updates, version upgrades, product updates such as patches and fixes, any replacement products, documentation and self-service on the support portal. Essential Support itself brings chat, telephone and online access where available, new incidents logged at any time, continuous support for severity 1, portal access at any time and interactive remote diagnostic support.

It requires an active maintenance term, a currently supported version and a supported configuration, and a problem not reported during the term gets no Essential Support. Support is in English; other languages on commercially reasonable efforts during regional business hours.

Initial response targets: Broadcom handbook, sections 2.2.4.1 to 2.2.4.4 (8 June 2026); VMware Production and Basic Support datasheets (July 2023).

You set the initial severity, and Broadcom re-categorises a case that does not fit its definitions. Severity 1 may be logged by chat, telephone or the portal, where available; severities 2 to 4 go through the portal and are worked within regional business hours. Continuous work on a severity 1 case, Broadcom’s “continuous efforts”, must be requested and depends on your designated contact staying available; otherwise work “will stop at the end of your regional business hours” and resume the next business day. As written, the targets equal VMware’s former Production Support for severity 1 and are shorter for severities 2 to 4; they apply to the initial response, not to a fix.

Who answers: Broadcom or an authorised partner

Section 2.1.2 of the handbook says customers may have obtained Broadcom maintenance from authorised partners rather than from Broadcom: partners with their own support infrastructure that team up with Broadcom’s global support centres and “must be certified by Broadcom”. A VMware blog of 3 September 2024 adds that “in certain situations and for some solutions”, support requests are routed to those partners automatically, that customers still create them in the Broadcom Support Portal, and that “Service-level (response) targets are universal and owned by Broadcom.” KB 222311 lists the partners’ support sites, without saying which products each one covers.

A severity 1 case may therefore be answered by Broadcom or by a partner: per KB 216949, where a certified partner supports your products, technical cases go to that partner, and the portal says so when you open My Cases. Find out for each Site ID before an incident; at renewal, our quote checklist shows where to ask.

Advanced Support and the services sold on top

Broadcom’s knowledge base describes a paid layer above Essential Support that the VCF 9.1 FAQ does not mention. KB 150609 says Broadcom Strategic Customer Success “has advanced support offerings, including a Designated Support Engineer (DSE)”, an assigned specialist and technical point of contact for a product family the customer selects, such as VCF Storage or VCF Network. KB 393889 adds: “With the purchase of Broadcom Advanced Support and a Support Account Manager (SAM) or Dedicated/Designated Support Engineer (DTSE/DSE)”, a customer can request planned activity precheck reviews for VCF products. We found no public Broadcom terms for Advanced Support: no response targets, no service description, nothing on whether VVF customers can buy it. Ask your Broadcom account manager or reseller for them in writing.

The services in the VCF 9.1 FAQ are professional services and training. Broadcom’s VCF professional services overview of August 2026 describes the Technical Adoption Manager as “a designated resource” to help optimise an existing VCF private cloud, Extended Expert Team Services as VCF consultants added to your team, and the Jumpstart Workshop as an evaluation of your architecture against VMware standards. Pro Cloud Services and Learning, which covers training and certification, complete the FAQ’s list.

Extended Support: what Broadcom has said

Broadcom’s VCF blog, in a post of 1 August 2025 addressed to SAP customers, says vSphere 8 “will be supported until October 2027, with an optional two-year Extended Support period available for purchase”. Its post of 16 July 2025 gives the earlier model as five years of general support plus, “in certain cases”, two years of Extended Support, and VCF 9 six years plus an optional year, again in certain cases. The dates are in our vSphere 8 guide.

We found no public terms for vSphere 8 Extended Support as of 4 October 2026. Broadcom’s generic Extended Support terms of 17 April 2024 do not name VMware; they require active maintenance or a subscription for the whole term, leave new bug fixes for high-impact problems to Broadcom’s discretion and exclude additional service packs. For vSphere 7, in March 2025, Broadcom sent customers to their representative, reseller or Broadcom Support about availability; Broadcom’s critical advisory VMSA-2026-0006 lists no 7.0 fix, only “Contact Broadcom Support if you have extended support contract”. For vSphere 8, ask in writing which builds are covered, for which dates, whether security patches are included, whether an active subscription is required and which one, and who answers the cases.

Expired perpetual licences: what still works

Broadcom ended the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings in December 2023; its notice of January 2024 said VMware “will continue to offer active support through the duration of your support contract”. After it ends, per KB 429208, the software keeps running: “The expiration of the SnS does not revoke the underlying software entitlement”, hosts and vCenter operate normally and the edition’s features stay unlocked. What ends is the ability to open a support request and the download of new patches, security updates and releases, “restricted to accounts with an active SnS”. The KB also advises against adding ESXi hosts or major upgrades while support has lapsed, as licence conversion needs active SnS.

One exception stays: KB 314603 gives “all customers, including those with expired support contracts” the patches for critical security advisories with a CVSS score of 9.0 or higher on supported versions, which it names as 8.x; we found no Broadcom document that extends this past vSphere 8’s end of general support. Beyond it, Broadcom’s handbook treats applying patches, fixes or upgrades to an unsupported licence entitlement as an infringement of its intellectual property rights and a material breach of contract. Computer Weekly reported on 9 May 2025 that Broadcom had written to perpetual licence holders without a new subscription, demanding that use of updates and patches stop, zero-day security patches excepted, and that third-party support providers had expanded their VMware services. The handbook withholds Essential Support to the extent that you obtained non-Broadcom technical support through a third-party provider. With SnS renewals off sale, Broadcom support returns with a subscription, and the 9.1 FAQs require perpetual holders to switch before upgrading to 9.x.

Opening a case, and the map to draw first

Cases are opened in the Broadcom Support Portal under a Site ID, the identifier in your Electronic Software Delivery email (KB 197283). KB 142884 requires registration with a valid Site ID, with up to 48 hours of processing if access needs approval; a user administrator of the Site ID has 14 days to approve a new user before the request is rejected automatically (KB 142873). The case form’s product drop-down shows the products entitled under the Site ID, so a product missing there is not entitled under it in Broadcom’s records. If a case stalls, the Raise Concern button appears after 12 hours for P1, 24 hours for P2 and 48 hours for P3 and P4, and a support manager follows up in about 24 hours (KB 142527).

Before the next severity 1, draw one line per Site ID: the products and subscriptions it holds and their end dates (our licence expiry guide shows where to read them); who answers a severity 1 case under it, Broadcom or a partner; which colleagues can open a case under it today and stay available for continuous efforts; the version each cluster runs and when its general support ends; and any perpetual licences off support, with the hosts they run on. Close the gaps before an incident, not during one.

What support does not do, and where an SLA partner fits

Essential Support handles cases; it does not do the work in your estate. The handbook excludes the execution of product upgrades, installation, configuration or implementation, and third-party products and their interoperability; training, security advisory, managed security and implementation services are sold separately, unless Broadcom deems such work necessary to resolve a case. Even the Advanced Support precheck review is provided on a “best effort basis”, is “not a commitment to participate during the planned activity”, and leaves the customer “responsible for validating their activity plan”. Design, change windows, monitoring and rollback stay with your team or an SLA partner.

For estates we look after under VMware optimisation, our engineering partner Vixen.UNO provides monitoring, updates and support under an agreed SLA, alongside your Broadcom support, with changes in agreed maintenance windows and a rollback plan; an estate built by someone else starts with a technical assessment of its state.

What we do

Eurokommerz supplies VMware / Broadcom licensing together with our engineering partner Vixen.UNO, with audit, licensing and deployment under one European contract with us, as our software page explains. Under VMware optimisation, the Vixen.UNO team audits the estate, its versions and subscriptions, and draws up an action plan ahead of renewal and end of support, with dates. The first step is a free call; the paid technical assessment, its price fixed before work begins, delivers a report, a TCO and ROI model and that action plan. Modernisation of vSphere, vSAN, NSX and VCF follows in agreed maintenance windows with a rollback plan, then support under an agreed SLA from the same team.

FAQ