The change to VMware licensing following the Broadcom acquisition triggered the largest movement in the virtualisation market in a decade. Bundled subscriptions, minimum core count thresholds and the withdrawal of the smaller editions left many small and mid-sized organisations facing renewal quotes several times their previous budget for exactly the same infrastructure. The question is no longer whether alternatives are worth evaluating, but which one fits and what the transition costs.
Assessment before migration
We do not recommend a platform before examining the environment. That means inventorying virtual machines, comparing allocated resources against actual utilisation, understanding the storage layer, network requirements and every integration with backup, monitoring or orchestration tooling. Those integrations are the most common reason a migration takes longer than the original estimate.
A five-year cost comparison follows, covering licensing, support, hardware and the migration effort itself. Sometimes the conclusion is that renegotiating with VMware remains reasonable, particularly for large estates genuinely using the advanced feature set. For organisations running roughly ten to a hundred hosts, Proxmox or Nutanix almost always come out ahead on the numbers, often by a wide margin.
Carrying out the migration
Proxmox VE runs on KVM and the Linux kernel, with clustering, automatic failover, live migration and replicated storage via Ceph or ZFS. Nutanix offers a more integrated hyperconverged product with broader commercial support at higher cost, though still below current VMware pricing for many configurations. Which fits depends on your team’s Linux depth and on how much you value an integrated management layer.
Migration proceeds in waves. We start with test machines and lower-criticality systems to validate the process and give your team time on the new platform. Virtual machines are converted, drivers and guest agents verified, performance tested under real load, and then cut over. Every wave has a rollback path, and the VMware environment stays operational until the new platform is fully validated.
Containers and Kubernetes
For applications that genuinely benefit from containerisation, we build Kubernetes platforms designed to be maintained by your engineers rather than only by us. That means authentication integrated with your existing directory, network policies, persistent storage that works under failure, GitOps delivery through Argo CD, and monitoring configured from day one rather than added after the first incident.
We are deliberately cautious about Kubernetes adopted for its own sake. It carries a real operational cost, justified by applications split across many services with frequent releases. For three stable monolithic applications, a well-managed set of virtual machines is simpler, cheaper and considerably easier to diagnose at three in the morning.
Who this is for
Requests come mainly from organisations that received a VMware renewal quote and are evaluating alternatives, from companies expanding capacity who do not want licensing cost to scale proportionally, and from engineering teams needing a properly operated container platform.
A distinct category is organisations with data sovereignty requirements that prefer infrastructure running on their own hardware within the EU, on open platforms rather than under single-vendor dependency. For these clients the conversation extends beyond cost into long-term control, and being an EU-based partner subject to EU law rather than to third-country access regimes is part of why they engage us.
Outcomes
Completed migrations typically cut recurring licensing spend substantially while delivering equivalent or better performance, since the underlying hardware is unchanged and the newer hypervisors are efficient. The more durable benefit is structural: your infrastructure is no longer exposed to a unilateral change in one vendor’s commercial model, which is precisely the risk that brought most of these clients to us in the first place.