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

Will be interesting to see if large organizations move to Proxmox

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.

Out of the loop: what's up with VMware?

I find that regular libvirt/qemu with virt-manager or cockpit front-end on RHEL/Alma/Rocky is perfectly fine for plenty of situations.

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.

A major european bank is about to move everything they got on VMware to Hyper-V

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.

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.

Docker or podman your stuff? There's an image of every OS.

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.

docker is the way!

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.

Virtualization is a 20 years old tech. Quit it.

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.

croit.io, provides 24*7 enterprise support as a Proxmox Gold partner with a follow the sun support team.

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'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.

"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

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.

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

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.

What’s next best alternative (regardless of cost)?

  Virtualbox
  Parallel
  Hyper-V

Anything else? Which is best?