Why VMware Migrations to the Public Cloud Fail
Most VMware-to-cloud migrations don’t fail on day one.
They fail six to eighteen months later.
The workloads are up.
The applications run.
The dashboards are green.
And yet, something feels off.
Costs are unpredictable.
Incidents are harder to explain.
Performance tuning turns into guesswork.
Platform teams are blamed for decisions they didn’t make.
This isn’t because VMware is “better” than the cloud.
It’s because VMware was doing work you didn’t realize you’d need to replace.
VMware Didn’t Just Run Your Workloads
VMware wasn’t just virtualization software.
It was an operating model.
Over time, VMware encoded thousands of small decisions on your behalf:
where workloads lived
how contention was resolved
which failures were tolerated
how recovery priorities were enforced
how much risk was acceptable during disruption
Those decisions weren’t documented as “judgment.”
They were embedded in defaults, policies, and platform behavior.
And they worked — especially under stress.
What Changes During a Lift-and-Shift
When enterprises lift VMware workloads into a public cloud, they usually focus on:
compatibility
performance parity
network connectivity
security controls
What they rarely focus on is this:
Who is now allowed to make the decisions VMware used to make?
In the cloud:
placement decisions are abstracted
scaling behavior is probabilistic
contention is resolved by the provider
cost becomes a runtime outcome, not a design input
You didn’t just move execution.
You inherited a new decision authority model.
And in most cases, no one explicitly accepted responsibility for it.
The Failure Doesn’t Show Up Immediately
Early on, things feel easier:
fewer tickets
faster provisioning
less visible friction
That’s because the cloud platform is making decisions for you.
But when something goes wrong — a cost spike, a performance incident, a regional failure — the questions change:
Who decided this workload could scale this way?
Who approved this cost tradeoff?
Who owns the recovery behavior now?
Who can explain why the system behaved like this?
And that’s where migrations start to fail.
The Real Failure Mode: Authority Evaporation
VMware encoded judgment.
The cloud provides execution.
During migration:
VMware’s decision authority disappears
Cloud authority is inherited implicitly
Accountability remains organizational
No one explicitly placed authority.
No one anchored accountability.
So when leadership asks for answers, authority starts moving:
governance tightens controls
platform teams centralize decisions
product teams lose autonomy
velocity drops
shadow systems appear
This back-and-forth isn’t political.
It’s structural.
Why “Better Cloud Architecture” Doesn’t Fix This
Most remediation efforts focus on:
better tagging
stricter budgets
more guardrails
tighter reviews
Those help at the margins.
They don’t address the core problem:
You replaced a platform that made decisions with one that assumes you’ll decide — but never said who.
Until decision authority is explicit, every fix is temporary.
The Question Enterprises Skip
The most important VMware migration question isn’t:
“How do we move the workloads?”
It’s:
“Where does decision authority live after VMware is gone?”
If that answer is unclear, the migration hasn’t failed yet —
it’s just waiting for its first real test.
A Model That Explains This Pattern
I’ve written a longer piece on The CTO Advisor that formalizes this failure mode — and others like it — into a general model called the Decision Authority Placement Model (DAPM) - Pronounced Dap-eem
It explains:
why VMware exits feel harder than expected
why cloud migrations destabilize over time
why governance crackdowns follow incidents
and why enterprises oscillate after failures
You can read the full paper here:
👉 DAPM Post
Why This Matters for Cloud Teams
If you’re on a platform or cloud team, this pattern matters because:
you’ll inherit blame for decisions you didn’t authorize
you’ll be asked to “fix” behavior you don’t control
and you’ll be reorganized after incidents you couldn’t prevent
Naming the problem doesn’t solve it by itself.
But it does let you have the right conversation before the migration “fails” in all the ways that don’t show up in a status report.