For a couple of years the sensible advice on virtualisation licensing has been to wait and see. That was fair enough. There was still a route that let you rent the platform by the hour with the licences folded in, and no obligation to buy the whole suite to get there.
That route is closing. One of the large clouds has said it will stop selling its managed virtualisation service with licences included from the end of October, and existing customers have until August 2027 to move to bring-your-own. Which means going to the vendor, buying the bundle, and bringing it back.
The interesting part isn't the price. It's that the escape hatch was never a strategy, and a lot of people had quietly promoted it to one. "We'll deal with it at renewal" works right up to the renewal where the option you were counting on has come off the menu.
So it's worth asking now, with a year of runway rather than a quarter: if the licensing question were settled tomorrow and the answer were the full bundle at the full price, what would you actually do? Rehost, refactor, or pay it. All three are defensible. Only one of them is quick.
The teams that get hurt here won't be the ones who chose wrong. They'll be the ones who never got round to choosing.