Semiconductor, infrastructure and networking giant Broadcom is finally set to close its long-pending and controversial acquisition of VMware this week, coming in just ahead of the deal’s official expiration date.

The $69 billion acquisition ($61 billion in cash, $8 billion assumption of debt) will close on November 22. This is 22 days after Broadcom had initially wanted to close the acquisition, but four days ahead of the “expiration of their merger agreement.” It’s also 18 months after the deal was first announced.

Broadcom noted in a short statement on the closing that it has garnered “legal merger clearance in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, Israel, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and foreign investment control clearance in all necessary jurisdictions. There is no legal impediment to closing under U.S. merger regulations.”

China’s inclusion on that approval list is significant as that was reported to be the last hurdle from the deal closing. Those reports indicated the Chinese government was holding up the deal due to ongoing geopolitical tension with the United States tied to the U.S. government’s tightening China’s access to semiconductor and network technology.

The smoothing of this potential hurdle comes a week after Chinese President Xi Jinping met with U.S. President Joe Biden for a summit in San Francisco. That visit reportedly included a networking and dinner event with business executives.

Analysts had noted the languishing China approval added a level of uncertainty to the deal.

“The longer this goes on the more painful for the customers and shareholders in the companies,” Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise security and networking research at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral. “They don’t tend to be very transparent about their timelines, so, on the one hand, it’s good that they’ve gotten this far, but, on the other, it’s unfortunate that they’re stuck behind an approval.”

Now that the approvals are all in, Broadcom faces the critical task of integrating VMware and its network customers. That task will be closely watched by VMware customers and industry observers looking to see how Broadcom acts.

Critics of the deal have repeatedly cited the vendor’s historical precedence in how it treated an acquired entity and, more importantly that acquired entity’s customers, as the most worrisome part of the deal. The most dire being its purchase of computer software provider CA Technologies in late 2018, and security vendor Symantec in 2019.

“I think so much of the conversation around the Broadcom acquisition really revolves around how those businesses are treated after the acquisition gets closed,” Alex Demeule, an analyst at Technology Business Research, told SDxCentral before this year’s VMware Explore San Francisco event.

He added that VMware has a “sticky installed base in the virtualization market. I think that’s really what Broadcom is after. Broadcom to me looks like a private-equity company as much as a technology company. They are just really good at buying sticky installed bases and generating free cash flow off of them.”

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan attempted to assuage those concerns during the recent VMware Explore Barcelona event where he briefly took the stage during a keynote address in an attempt to soothe potential concerns from VMware customers.

Tan told attendees he had learned a lot from talking to VMware customers and partners over the past 18 months and stated three “commitments we will make to you, our customers.” These included plans to invest billions of dollars to fund innovation, to fund its partner ecosystem and to make its products easier to work with.

Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware, also used the event to tout the deal’s benefits and how VMware had managed to maintain its network and operational focus through past ownership structures.

“Broadcom’s operating model is when they acquire businesses, they let them operate independently,” Dhawan said. “Our operations, in terms of the strategy that we laid out and the portfolio we deliver and how we serve customers, that will stay on as a mission of VMware regardless of the ownership structure. … We’ve always had a focus on our strategy mission, operated independently and delivered on it under EMC and Dell, and it’s going to be the same with Broadcom.”

Dhawan also highlighted VMware’s need to continue partnering with the broader cloud and network ecosystem in order to grow its business.

“Virtualization is an abstraction and subtraction of hardware, so you can do abstraction of one type of hardware. By definition, there is no existence of VMware if you don’t have a broad hardware ecosystem,” Dhawan said.

The deal’s next big date is December 7, when Broadcom will hold its next earnings call.