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

44•jwithington•2h ago

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?

Comments

that_lurker•2h ago

Will be interesting to see if large organizations move to Proxmox

theossuary•1h ago

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•15m ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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.

guerby•54m ago

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•44m ago

>Response time: 2 hours* within a business day

What's a business day? I wouldn't call that a 24/7 SLA.

simoncion•19m ago

> 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.

yuvadam•1h ago

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

ofrzeta•1h ago

Broadcom bought VMware and changed the pricing.

nikanj•1h ago

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

AzN1337c0d3r•1h ago

Bought by Broadcom, now implementing classic strategy of leveraging vendor lock-in to milk customers.

Agingcoder•8m ago

The increase is massive ( I’ve heard x5 over existing contracts in some places )

belter•27m ago

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_...

esseph•23m ago

Imagine seeing a 300% or more cost increase for no particular reason.

orev•1h ago

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•1h ago

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•1h ago

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

ofrzeta•1h ago

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•32m ago

Do not ever use openshift

rilindo•30m ago

Can you explain why I shouldn't use OpenShift?

esseph•24m ago

They have a dominant percentage of banking workloads at this point.

bombcar•22m ago

This is damning with faint praise.

firesteelrain•9m ago

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•1h ago

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•9m ago

Same here as well

opengrass•1h ago

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

mmazurki•57m ago

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•35m ago

docker is the way!

esseph•25m ago

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•20m ago

Virtualization is a 20 years old tech. Quit it.

b3lvedere•10m ago

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