Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

I work for an MSP, mostly with small to medium companies. Licensing costs went up a ton when broadcom acquired vmware. They went up a ton more this year with minimum core counts, current licensing costs are roughly $20k a year minimum. They might hike the price again, even medium businesses that see some value in avoiding an expensive migration want to avoid this uncertainty. Basically they don't want to deal with small and medium sized businesses. I'm sure large businesses are facing price hikes too but I don't have experience with that.

If you are on a perpetual license you can put the management vlan on a network not connected to the internet if it wasn't already and realistically this buys a few years. You will not be able to patch, eventually auditors will not accept that. For the rest not on perpetual licensing, when the licensing expires you will not be able to power on machines, if they reboot they stay off.

About half of clients we are migrating to hyper-v. Most are already running windows servers. There are some differences but hyperv covers the important features and the licensing is basically already included. Beeam makes the virtual to virtual move a lot easier, this is what most of our customers use for backups

For a good chunk they are migrating to azure or another hosted environment. If you don't have a main office with a file server or some more demanding line of business apps this is a pretty easy move.

A few are going to nutanix. Or more of expanding nutanix.

This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden.

HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho.

I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most businesses could easily replace VMware with Proxmox.

I think Proxmox should just launch an Enterprise contract, regardless of the cost, just have one. Because right now I think the main obstacle halting adoption is their lack of any Enterprise SLA.

On a personal level I would love to see KubeVirt, or Openshift with KubeVirt, take over more. It just seems like a genius move to use the already established APIs of kubernetes with a hypervisor runtime.

I'm with a block storage vendor that works with a lot of companies migrating off VMware, and the diversity of KVM-based cloud management platforms we're seeing is fascinating. We have customers moving to OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenStack, HP VME, Oracle Virtualization, and even some homegrown solutions. The common thread is that they're all looking for a storage backend that is not tied to a specific hypervisor and can deliver predictable high performance. The beauty of the KVM ecosystem is the freedom to choose the best tool for the job, and that extends to the storage layer. A good software-defined block storage solution should have the features (data migration, disaster recovery) and capabilities to make the transition away from VMware as smooth as possible.

Mostly bitching to corporate IT to make it possible to use alternative tools and workflows.

Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”.

This is not my experience at one company but multiple good, name brand companies that generally do good engineering and software work.

Seeing a lot of Nutanix especially for VDI/Citrix heavy workloads or typical 3-tier applications. HP VME is also becoming a thing as an almost drop-in and VERY cost effective alternative to VMWare. In telco Openstack is still king AFAIK.

"VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong", 190 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45167239

"Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs", 100 comments (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363

We use Proxmox.

NVidia are pushing hard in the direction of combined accelerators and ARM CPU (i.e. DGX, Thor, Jetson, etc).

Some of the upcoming hardware hits a sweet spot in terms of performance / $ / W. It's hard to ignore.

But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. Which is a big mistake IMO

I use VMWare Workstation a lot for testing and it's a very good workhorse for that. I hope they won't mess that up.

In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.

Jumping into bed with another single vendor.

You dont think enterprise IT does sensible things like have multiple vendors to avoid single points of failure.

I'm seeing a bit of everything: renegotiating (which Broadcom doesn't really do), optimizing and consolidating hosts (to lower costs), public cloud migration (which is why I see the most given my line of work, but may not represent everything), forays into other hypervisors, etc.

Proxmox may come to many an HN visitor's mind (and I use it myself extensively, all my home services run on it), but it actually doesn't have a lot of enterprise features and isn't a drop-in replacement.