Broadcom forced the search for alternatives
The changes after Broadcom's acquisition of VMware — the end of perpetual licenses, forced subscription bundles (VVF/VCF), price hikes reaching hundreds of percent and product discontinuations — turned "moving off VMware" from a theoretical question into a live one. For many IT teams it's no longer "whether", but "to what and when".
A good alternative isn't just lower cost — it's also no vendor lock-in, a mature platform and a real migration path for your existing machines.
Criteria for a good alternative
- Cost and licensing model — predictable, ideally not per-core; include support.
- No vendor lock-in — open formats and the ability to leave without rewriting everything.
- High availability (HA) and storage — clustering, ideally with an HCI option.
- Backup and recovery — native, proven, ideally with verification.
- A migration path from VMware — V2V tooling, disk conversion, minimal downtime.
- Maturity and support — production deployments, a community, an enterprise-support option.
What's actually on the market
| Platform | Model / cost | Open source | HCI / storage | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proxmox VE | Free + optional support | Yes | Built-in Ceph | Most companies — SMB to enterprise |
| Nutanix AHV | Commercial, high | No | Native HCI (strong) | Large enterprises with budget |
| Microsoft Hyper-V / Azure Stack HCI | Windows/Azure licensing | No | S2D / Azure | "Microsoft-first" organisations |
| XCP-ng (Xen) | Free + Vates support | Yes | XOSTOR (maturing) | Xen / open-source advocates |
| Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | Subscription, high | Partly (KubeVirt) | ODF | Organisations heavily in Kubernetes |
| Scale Computing HC3 | Commercial appliance | No | Simple HCI | Edge / smaller environments |
Every one of these can run virtual machines. They differ in their cost model, openness, HCI maturity and how smoothly you can move your existing VMware VMs onto them.
For most companies Proxmox wins
Proxmox VE combines advantages the others usually deliver only partly: it's open source and free (only optional support is paid), it doesn't lock you into a single vendor's ecosystem, and it still has a full set of enterprise features.
- Cost — no license fees; savings of up to 99% versus VCF.
- KVM + LXC — full VMs and lightweight containers from one panel.
- Ceph HCI + HA — distributed storage and automatic failover at no extra cost.
- Proxmox Backup Server — deduplication, encryption, restore verification.
- VMware migration — proven tooling; under 2 min per VM, zero for LB-backed applications.
Honestly — when something else: if all your IT runs on Azure/Microsoft, Hyper-V/Azure Stack can be natural; with a fully container-first strategy OpenShift is tempting; and for very large, homogeneous environments with budget — Nutanix. For the vast majority of other cases, Proxmox offers the best capability-to-cost ratio.
Migration is safe and fast
Moving to Proxmox doesn't require a "big bang". We audit the environment, design the cluster, migrate in batches with testing after every machine, and VMware runs alongside as a fallback until you're fully ready. Production downtime when cutting over stays under 2 minutes per VM. For applications running on two or more VMs behind a load balancer (HAProxy, F5, etc.), downtime is zero — we migrate one VM at a time while the load balancer continuously routes traffic to the remaining available instances.
For details see our articles: VMware vs Proxmox: TCO analysis and the migration process step by step.
See whether Proxmox is your alternative
We'll analyse your VMware environment for free, calculate the savings and propose a migration plan tailored to your requirements.
⚡ Free analysis→ VMware vs Proxmox: TCO analysis