VMware Alternatives After Broadcom

The realistic VMware alternatives for a mid-market company are Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V (or Azure Local), OpenStack and Proxmox VE. None of them is free to move to: the right one depends on how many VMs you run, what your team already knows and how much downtime you can take. Count your cores under Broadcom's rules first, then price the alternatives against that number, not against last year's invoice.

What changed in VMware licensing under Broadcom?

On 11 December 2023, VMware announced the end of perpetual licenses and of support-and-subscription renewals on them. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) became subscription-only, and many products are now sold only inside those bundles.

The counting changed too. According to Broadcom's own knowledge base, every physical core is licensed, and each CPU counts as at least 16 cores. Broadcom's worked example: two hosts with 8-core CPUs and two with 24-core CPUs come to 80 cores to license. vSAN is licensed separately, per TiB.

That 16-core floor is what catches older plant-floor and back-office servers, where small CPUs used to mean a small bill. Other changes have been messier:

In March 2025, distributor Arrow told partners that a 72-core minimum per order would start on 10 April 2025, with a 20% surcharge for late renewals. The minimum was reported, then reportedly withdrawn, and Broadcom said it "has never announced a price change."
In December 2025, Broadcom withdrew VVF in parts of EMEA. The Register quoted one customer whose annual spend would go from about $130,000 to $1.3 million. VVF remains available elsewhere.
In an October 2024 court filing, AT&T put in evidence an email describing a proposed "+1,050 percent" annual increase. That is one litigant's claim, not an average. We have not found a reliable average price-increase figure, and we would be wary of anyone quoting one.

Are companies actually moving off VMware?

Slowly. CloudBolt surveyed 302 North American IT decision-makers in January 2026: 86% said they were actively reducing their VMware footprint, 88% were worried about future price rises, and only about 2% had moved 75% or more of their workloads. It is a vendor-sponsored survey, but the gap between intent and progress is the useful part.

Gartner, as reported by The Register in September 2025, expects that by 2028 about 35% of today's VMware workloads will run somewhere else. So the likely picture for most companies is not a clean exit but a smaller VMware estate, with the easiest workloads moved to VMware alternatives first.

What are the realistic VMware alternatives?

There are more hypervisors than these four, but these are the ones with a real migration path and support behind them.

Nutanix AHV

Gartner names Nutanix as the most direct alternative. Nutanix reported more than 2,700 VMware migrations in fiscal 2025, and in fiscal 2026 (ended 31 July 2026) it added more than 3,000 new customers, with annual recurring revenue up 16% to $2.55 billion. Its migration tool is Nutanix Move.

Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Local

If you already run Windows Server Datacenter, Hyper-V is the familiar option. Since August 2025, Microsoft has offered a free VM Conversion extension for Windows Admin Center (in public preview) that moves VMs from vCenter to Hyper-V. Azure Local is billed per physical core per month, with a 60-day free trial; as of September 2026, Microsoft lists the Windows Server guest add-on at $23.30 per core per month, and Azure Hybrid Benefit can waive the host fee for Windows Server Datacenter with Software Assurance.

OpenStack

OpenStack is open source and suits organizations that want a private cloud rather than a like-for-like hypervisor swap. The OpenInfra Foundation publishes a VMware-to-OpenStack migration guide. It asks more of whoever runs it, which is one reason to have a hosting provider run it for you.

Proxmox VE

Proxmox VE is open source (AGPLv3) and has had a built-in ESXi import wizard since version 8.2 in April 2024; the current release is 9.x. Paid support subscriptions are available; check current pricing on proxmox.com. It is a sensible choice for smaller clusters with a team comfortable on Linux.

Option	Migration tooling	Licensing model	Fits best when
Nutanix AHV	Nutanix Move	Commercial subscription	You want the closest like-for-like replacement
Hyper-V / Azure Local	Windows Admin Center VM Conversion (preview)	Windows Server licensing; Azure Local per core per month	You are already a Windows Server Datacenter shop
OpenStack	OpenInfra migration guide	Open source; pay for people or a provider	You want a private cloud, ideally run by a provider
Proxmox VE	Built-in ESXi import wizard	Open source; optional paid support	Smaller clusters and a Linux-comfortable team

How long does a VMware migration take, and what does it cost?

Longer than the renewal date usually allows, if you do it yourself at scale. Gartner, as reported in January 2025, puts migration projects at 18 to 48 months and $300 to $3,000 per VM with outside help. That estimate was modeled on an organization with more than 2,000 VMs, so it describes a large estate rather than a typical mid-market one. The per-VM range is still a fair warning about how much of the cost is labor.

Whichever of the VMware alternatives you pick, the cost is rarely the hypervisor. It is the discovery work: which applications talk to which, which licenses are tied to host hardware, which appliance nobody has logged into since 2019. In Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud report, understanding application dependencies was the top migration challenge, cited by 54% of respondents.

It does not have to be a long, risky project. Liberty Center One, the Royal Oak data center we work with, says it has performed thousands of successful migrations, and publishes one number worth knowing: for one client facing rapidly escalating VMware costs, the move to its OpenStack cloud eliminated $181,400 in VMware expenses. The details are on our results page. Its migrations run with unlimited test migrations before the final cutover, so the switch happens only once it has already worked.

What does this mean for manufacturers and local governments?

Both tend to run many small, steady servers: plant scheduling, quality systems, permitting, utility billing. Those workloads are exactly the ones a 16-core-per-CPU minimum makes expensive, and they rarely need the elasticity of a hyperscaler either.

That makes them good candidates for VMware alternatives, but they also share a low tolerance for downtime. A line that stops or a clerk's office that cannot take payments costs more than the licensing difference, so a migration plan should include tested rollback and failover before any cutover weekend, not after.

How should you choose a VMware alternative?

Work in this order:

Count your cores the way Broadcom does. Use the 16-core-per-CPU rule and add vSAN capacity. That gives you the real renewal number to compare against.
Inventory VMs and dependencies. List what talks to what, and which software is licensed to specific hardware.
Sort workloads into three groups: easy to move, hard to move, and not worth moving before the next renewal.
Price two or three alternatives side by side, including labor, support and any hosting, not just license fees.
Pilot with something that matters but won't stop the business, and test failback before you plan the big cutover.

If you would rather not run the exit yourself, Liberty Center One, a data center in Royal Oak, Michigan, moves VMware workloads onto its own OpenStack cloud (running the KVM hypervisor) and costs that against staying put, side by side first. We introduce companies to Liberty Center One, and it pays us if an engagement goes ahead; you pay us nothing. More on how that works is on our infrastructure page.

VMware alternatives after Broadcom: what's realistic