[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
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Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?
In certain large industries it feels like there's more urgency to
migrate off of VMware than there is to do genAI stuff. Do others
sense this? If so, what options do you see for folks to keep their
servers but move off of VMware? Is it all RedHat?
Author : jwithington
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-10-19 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
| that_lurker wrote:
| Will be interesting to see if large organizations move to Proxmox
| theossuary wrote:
| I don't think Proxmox is anywhere near ready for that sort of
| shift. It's interesting what a big hole in the market VMWare is
| leaving and nothing quite fills it. OpenStack is the closest,
| but way more complicated than VMWare, and doesn't work at all
| for smaller deployments.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true for larger scale installs but small
| scale VMware installs are probably less easily replaced by
| solutions that are also as well supported and have a path for
| expanding.
|
| Doing a head-on VMware takeout path hasn't been a good
| business strategy for companies that tried it.
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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.
| sgt wrote:
| Proxmox is about to miss their window of opportunity here. They
| are uniquely positioned to take on VMWare, but their outfit
| seems like a fairly tiny and conservative company with zero
| ambition to take on the world, so to speak.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| If they aren't interested in that business, then it isn't
| really a window of opportunity for them. In fact I respect a
| company that chooses to not pursue business opportunities
| that don't fit their goals, and instead focus on being a good
| fit for the market they _are_ in. Growth isn 't the most
| important thing.
| Spivak wrote:
| I've been at multiple companies that wasted millions
| courting large enterprise contacts only to not make a
| single sale. It does make the sales update more exciting
| though--if we just get this one sale...
|
| I can't blame any company for wanting to stay out of that
| market.
| turtletontine wrote:
| It helps that they're not a publicly traded company [A]. If
| you're beholden to stockholders, you're beholden to a
| market demanding growth at all costs. Even if the
| leadership at the moment wants this stable strategy, all
| investor pressure tends toward aggressive moves to the
| contrary.
|
| [A] probably? I couldn't conclusively determine this, and
| I'm not an expert
| conception wrote:
| Xcp-ng seems better positioned with a familiar vmwareish
| experience.
| guerby wrote:
| https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environm...
|
| "Premium" Access to Enterprise repository
| Complete feature-set Support via Customer Portal
| Unlimited support tickets Response time: 2 hours* within
| a business day Remote support (via SSH) Offline
| subscription key activation
| INTPenis wrote:
| >Response time: 2 hours* within a business day
|
| What's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.
| simoncion wrote:
| > I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.
|
| You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise SLAs
| are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, _most_ are not 24 /7.
|
| > What's a business day?
|
| From the FAQ on the page linked to by guerby:
| What are the business days/hours for support? Ticket
| support provided by the Proxmox Enterprise support team is
| available on Austrian business days (CET/CEST timezone) for
| all Basic, Standard, or Premium subscribers, please see all
| details in the Subscription Agreement. For different
| timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers
| who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions
| in your timezone and your local language.
|
| Check out the actual FAQ entry to chase down the links
| embedded in those words that I'm too lazy to try to
| reproduce.
| tw04 wrote:
| > You asked for an Enterprise SLA. Not all Enterprise
| SLAs are 24/7. IM(Professional)E, most are not 24/7.
|
| Any serious enterprise software or hardware company
| absolutely has a 24/7 support option. They all have a
| base option that is not 24/7 for a significantly lower
| price.
|
| There's no way you're replacing VMware in any company of
| any size without 24/7 support.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Formally, yes, they are 24/7. However, getting the expert
| you really need to solve the issue, that can be much
| harder on weekends. Sometimes it only amounts to
| handholding till Monday.
| technion wrote:
| Microsoft seems perfectly capable of advertising 24/7
| support whilst never managing to call back within 24
| hours on business crippling sev1 tickets. Just look at
| how often someone on /r/sysadmin is shocked to find this
| is the norm.
|
| I know thst youre right about the wording turning off
| orgs but I do wonder when the biggest enterprise
| organisation can barely offer it in practice what really
| is the show stopper for business.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| It's not about the support. It's about the blame
| shifting. The CTO has a piece of paper which means he's
| no longer accountable. Gartner says they are good, the
| occasional sales lunches are expensive, and the golf game
| can continue.
| simoncion wrote:
| I can second technion's observations about Microsoft's
| "24/7" support SLA.
|
| Anyway, as the FAQ answer that I quoted mentions, there
| are plenty of qualified Proxmox resellers who offer
| support for folks who are dissatisfied with what is
| offered by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. One reseller
| explicitly advertises 24x7 support [0]. I expect others
| would offer 24x7 support if you asked, but don't see the
| need to advertise it up-front.
|
| [0] <https://www.proxmox.com/en/partners/find-
| partner/all/partner...>
| INTPenis wrote:
| I should have been more clear then, definitely 24/7 SLA
| is what Proxmox needs to break into the enterprise sector
| I have experience with.
|
| It's kind of frustrating because it's such a tiny detail
| that could make them a real contender in this new power
| vacuum.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...definitely [a] 24/7 SLA is what Proxmox needs to
| break into the enterprise sector I have experience with.
|
| Well, their FAQ says: For different
| timezones, contact one of our qualified Proxmox resellers
| who will be able to offer you help with Proxmox solutions
| in your timezone and your local language.
|
| Consulting the list of resellers that that page links to
| finds one that blatantly advertises 24x7 support, and
| it's likely that others will offer it if asked. See [0].
|
| [0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45637767>
| jwithington wrote:
| Yes, I'd think Openshift with Kubevirt would be positioned to
| move in. Lots of Openshift in some of the sectors I've worked
| with so seems like a natural expansion.
|
| I forgot about MSFT's ability to bundle Hyper-V though which
| seems to come up in this thread a lot.
|
| Love the username.
| yuvadam wrote:
| Out of the loop: what's up with VMware?
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Broadcom bought VMware and changed the pricing.
| nikanj wrote:
| Bought out by Broadcom, who realized if you increase prices by
| 10x and lose 75% of customers, you end with more revenue and
| less support costs
| chanandler_bong wrote:
| Hock Tan's only goal is to increase stock value. Period. At
| the expense of anything and everything else, stock value.
| RachelF wrote:
| That's how he gets paid - increasing short term stock
| price.
|
| "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the results" -
| Charlie Munger
| AzN1337c0d3r wrote:
| Bought by Broadcom, now implementing classic strategy of
| leveraging vendor lock-in to milk customers.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| The increase is massive ( I've heard x5 over existing
| contracts in some places )
| maartenh wrote:
| Ah, 5x? At $WORK, the low code tool vendor that is used to
| build the monolith (and that of our sister company) is
| bought by a private equity firm. Our sister company will
| face a 7x increase. Another fun thing is that the license
| is based on a percentage of licensing cost to their
| customers.
|
| Their game is clearly to squeeze very hard for a few years,
| and then deprecate the product. I can't imagine that there
| are companies that are fine with such price hikes.
| amelius wrote:
| Fork?
| dijit wrote:
| Are you under the impression that VMware is free open
| source software?
| belter wrote:
| Broadcom competing with Oracle for most hated company prize:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jfumvw/broadcom_...
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/euro_cloud_body_ecco_...
| leoh wrote:
| Maybe Oracle can buy Broadcom and settle it
| esseph wrote:
| Imagine seeing a 300% or more cost increase for no particular
| reason.
| jack_pp wrote:
| the reason is greed, old as time
| orev wrote:
| I find that regular libvirt/qemu with virt-manager or cockpit
| front-end on RHEL/Alma/Rocky is perfectly fine for plenty of
| situations.
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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.
| basemi wrote:
| A major european bank is about to move everything they got on
| VMware to Hyper-V
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Red Hat is offering OpenShift virtualization, which is Kubernetes
| with Kubevirt. So some people might just use Kubernetes with
| Kubevirt.
|
| There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged
| infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/
|
| Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/
|
| Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
| more_corn wrote:
| Do not ever use openshift
| rilindo wrote:
| Can you explain why I shouldn't use OpenShift?
| breakingcups wrote:
| I know they pulled a mini-Broadcom on us and sharply raised
| all our prices after our first two years of having our
| OpenShift clusters.
| esseph wrote:
| They have a dominant percentage of banking workloads at this
| point.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is damning with faint praise.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I don't really consider OpenShift in the same category. VMWare
| and its enabling software such as vSphere and vCenter are in
| another category than OpenShift to the point that there is a
| symbiotic relationship between VMWare and Dell in the
| corporate/enterprise setting
| pickle-wizard wrote:
| 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.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Same here as well
| opengrass wrote:
| Docker or podman your stuff? There's an image of every OS.
| mmazurki wrote:
| 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.
| cat-whisperer wrote:
| docker is the way!
| esseph wrote:
| This was question at a very very very slow moving org and
| industry I was at until about a year ago.
|
| They went to Nutanix right before the broadcom acquisition and
| never looked back.
|
| They were much happier, and HCI was very nice for k8s nodes.
| NoUseForANick wrote:
| Virtualization is a 20 years old tech. Quit it.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Why?
| linksnapzz wrote:
| Rather a lot older than that.
|
| But, even if you restrict it to 'x86 virtualization', the
| alternative for the current crop of 'enterprise' OS
| environments is ...server sprawl. I'm a big fan of discrete hw
| for some things, but it can be a hard sell for everything.
| chungy wrote:
| The primary alternative to full system VMs is containers (or
| jails, zones... whatever your OS might call them). You don't
| need to go server sprawl or VMs as the only two options.
| kjs3 wrote:
| If you're so ignorant of the space you think virtualization is
| 20 years old, you're too ignorant to make proclamations about
| what anyone else should do.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 3rd party trust is not a joke. Why should they drop what
| they're doing to go and audit a new critical vendor?
| Mave83 wrote:
| croit.io, provides 24*7 enterprise support as a Proxmox Gold
| partner with a follow the sun support team.
| awesomeusername wrote:
| 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
| stoitsev wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| _" 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
| gnopgnip wrote:
| 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.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| 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.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| 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.
| natebc wrote:
| Our 5 year ELA for VMware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. I work
| in Higher ed.
|
| Our Hyper-V environment came online a few months ago. It was
| already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to
| splash out a bit for some higher tier support.
|
| Granted, we have a separate team working on "genAI stuff."
|
| We started converting virtual machines about 3 weeks ago and
| we've gotten through ~500 of about 3500 or so.
|
| Our grant based HPC environment is just moving back to bare
| metal. The VM conversion is just for ad-hoc HPC and then all of
| our general infrastructure. Some of our larger application
| servers (SAP Hana) are possibly staying on VMWare if SAP won't
| support them on Hyper-V.
|
| This summer sucked big time but we'll make it.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| What's next best alternative (regardless of cost)?
| Virtualbox Parallel Hyper-V
|
| Anything else? Which is best?
| Nux wrote:
| Microsoft gaining the most I reckon.
|
| Kind of sad seeing businesses getting screwed by closed source
| proprietary software, then making the same choices all over
| again.
|
| Nutanix also seeing huge demand.
|
| Not everyone is repeating their mistakes, with Proxmox and Xcp-ng
| seeing huge new level of business, as well, which is nice.
|
| I'm part of the Apache CloudStack project and that too is seeing
| unparalleled levels of demand. The KVM hypervisor has sort of
| become the de facto choice, thanks to virt-v2v tool which can
| help migrate VMware guests.
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