Best European Alternatives to VMware
Looking for a European alternative to VMware? Broadcom's repricing after acquiring VMware pushed an enormous number of European organisations into evaluating a migration for the first time in a decade — and made the licensing cost, not the technology, the deciding factor.
These European hypervisors and cloud platforms are what migration teams actually shortlist, and every one of them runs on infrastructure you control.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
7 European Alternatives to VMware
Proxmox VE
Open-source KVM and LXC virtualisation with built-in clustering
XCP-ng
Open-source Xen hypervisor with Xen Orchestra management
OpenNebula
Open-source cloud and edge virtualisation platform
SUSE Virtualization
Hyperconverged infrastructure built on Kubernetes and KubeVirt
Canonical OpenStack
Fully supported OpenStack private cloud
Virtuozzo
Hyperconverged platform aimed at service providers
StorPool
High-performance distributed storage for virtualised workloads
Key takeaways
- Perpetual licences for vSphere and Cloud Foundation stopped being sold on 13 December 2023, three weeks after Broadcom closed the $69 billion acquisition.
- Broadcom did not raise every price: Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro became free for personal use in May 2024 and free for commercial use by November 2024.
- AT&T sued Broadcom in August 2024, alleging refused perpetual licence renewals and a support price rise of 1,050 per cent.
- A European cloud industry association filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission in March 2026, and that investigation was still open in May 2026.
- Proxmox VE ships every feature to every user and charges only for support, which is the structural opposite of what the VMware licence became.
Why people leave VMware
Every other page in this directory argues that you should consider leaving. This one describes people who were shown the door. Broadcom Inc. closed its acquisition of VMware on 22 November 2023 for $69 billion, and on 13 December 2023 perpetual licences for vSphere and Cloud Foundation stopped being sold. Customers who had bought software outright discovered that the arrangement they were on had been withdrawn rather than renegotiated.
What followed is on the public record rather than in forum posts. In February 2024 the End-User Computing business was sold to KKR and became Omnissa. In August 2024 AT&T sued Broadcom, alleging breach of contract over refused perpetual licence renewals and a support price increase of 1,050 per cent.
In March 2026 a European cloud industry association filed a formal complaint with the European Commission alleging that Broadcom's licensing of VMware to cloud service providers breaches EU competition rules, and as of May 2026 that investigation is live, with Broadcom contesting which of its internal documents must be disclosed.
And in June 2026 the sovereignty claim itself came under attack from the same quarter. The objection was specific: VMware Cloud Foundation is closed-source software from a US-controlled publisher, reachable by export controls, sanctions regimes and the CLOUD Act, with no source-code escrow, and it carries a compliance reporting mechanism on a 180-day cycle whose failure degrades or blocks the management plane. Whatever else that is, it is not a description of infrastructure you control.
- The licence you bought stopped being sold A perpetual vSphere licence was an asset on a balance sheet with a support contract beside it. Since 13 December 2023 it is a subscription, which converts a depreciating asset into an operating cost that renews on somebody else's terms. For an organisation that deliberately bought outright to avoid exactly that exposure, this is not a price change. It is the removal of the option they paid extra for.
- A management plane that can be switched off The complaint raised against VMware Cloud Foundation in June 2026 named a mechanism rather than a grievance: compliance reporting required every 180 days, with degradation or blocking of the management plane if it is not provided. Reasonable people disagree about whether that is ordinary licence enforcement or something else. Nobody disagrees that a hypervisor whose control plane depends on the vendor's continued satisfaction is a different kind of dependency from one that does not.
- Your partner may not be there next year The partner programme changes hit European resellers and service providers hard, and for many mid-sized organisations the relationship that made VMware workable was not with VMware at all but with a local partner who knew the estate. When that partner loses its authorisation, the support model quietly stops existing while the licence continues to be billed.
- Most of the shortlist is open source, and that is the actual point Five of the seven options on this page publish their source under AGPL, GPL or Apache licences. The two that do not — Virtuozzo, whose platform is proprietary above the open OpenVZ kernel technology, and StorPool — are the two ranked last here, and the gap is deliberate. That is not a philosophical preference. After being told that a perpetual licence no longer exists, the question a CTO asks is what stops this happening again, and the only answer that survives scrutiny is that the code cannot be withdrawn from you.
What you have to replace, not just match
Work out which VMware you are running, because the seven options here answer four different products and a shortlist that ignores the distinction will waste a quarter.
If you run vSphere and vCenter on your own hardware for internal workloads, that is the common case, and Proxmox VE, XCP-ng and SUSE Virtualization are the shortlist.
If you run vCloud Director as a service provider selling tenancy to customers, your problem is multi-tenancy and billing, and OpenNebula and Virtuozzo are built for it. If you run vSAN and the storage is what you resent paying for, StorPool replaces that layer without touching the hypervisor. And if what you actually wanted was a private cloud with an API rather than a hypervisor with a console, Canonical OpenStack is a different architecture and should be evaluated as one.
Take the inventory first: hosts, sockets, cores, guest operating systems, the storage layer, the backup product and whatever is plugged into the vCenter API. The last of those is where migrations run late.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Proxmox VE | Vienna, Austria | Free with no feature limits / support subscriptions from about €115 per CPU per year | EU (Austria) |
| #2 | XCP-ng | Grenoble, France | Free / Vates support from about €950 per host per year | EU (France) |
| #3 | OpenNebula | Madrid, Spain | Free Community Edition / Enterprise subscription on request | EU (Spain) |
| #4 | SUSE Virtualization | Nuremberg, Germany | Free (Harvester open source) / SUSE subscription pricing on request | EU (Germany) |
| #5 | Canonical OpenStack | London, United Kingdom | Free self-supported / Ubuntu Pro from about $75 per node per year / managed pricing on request | United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #6 | Virtuozzo | Schaffhausen, Switzerland | Subscription per node, quoted on request | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #7 | StorPool | Sofia, Bulgaria | Subscription per usable TB, quoted on request | EU (Bulgaria) |
How each alternative compares to VMware
- Which law reaches it. EU (Austria). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, where VMware is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: On-premise vSphere estates that want the same job done without the edition ladder
Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH has worked from Vienna since 2005, and the product is AGPLv3 with no feature gating of any kind. There is no Standard versus Enterprise Plus, no capability withheld until you reach a tier, and no bundle that forces you to buy four products to get the one you wanted. Support subscriptions start from about €115 per CPU per year and buy exactly that: support, and an enterprise update repository.
Against VMware since December 2023, that structure is the argument. The complaint from most departing customers is not that vSphere got worse but that the terms were rewritten without them. A platform where the software is complete and free and the subscription is only for help is the structural answer to that complaint rather than a cheaper version of the same relationship.
It is also the most realistic destination for a conventional estate. Clustering, high availability, live migration, software-defined storage and backup are in the box, and there is an import route aimed specifically at ESXi. What it does not have is an NSX equivalent, and the automation around balancing a very large cluster under load is less refined than DRS.
What Proxmox VE does better than VMware
- Every feature available to every user, where VMware's capabilities are distributed across editions and bundles
- AGPLv3, so the licence cannot be withdrawn the way perpetual licensing was on 13 December 2023
- Austrian company under EU law, against a Delaware corporation reachable by export controls and the CLOUD Act
- Support from about €115 per CPU per year, and the cluster keeps running if the subscription lapses
- A direct import path from ESXi, so the first migration is a documented procedure rather than an experiment
Where Proxmox VE is a step down from VMware
- No equivalent of NSX for organisations whose network segmentation lives there
- Cluster balancing automation is less sophisticated than DRS on very large estates
- A much shorter hardware and software certification matrix than vSphere
- Fewer engineers arrive knowing it, so there is a training cost VMware does not carry
Standout against VMware. It is the only platform here that ships complete to everybody and sells nothing but help, which is precisely the arrangement Broadcom withdrew.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, where VMware is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Teams who liked the ESXi and vCenter split and want a European vendor behind it
XCP-ng comes from Vates SAS in Grenoble and is a Xen-based platform with Xen Orchestra as a separate management layer. That separation is not cosmetic: it mirrors the ESXi and vCenter architecture that VMware administrators have organised their operations around for fifteen years, where the hypervisors are lean and the management plane is a distinct thing that can be rebuilt, moved or run outside the cluster it manages.
It is open source under GPLv2 and free to run, with Vates support from about €950 per host per year. Per-host pricing is a different shape from what VMware licensing became, and for organisations running fewer, larger hosts it works out in a direction they will find agreeable. The company is French, which for public-sector buyers in France and Belgium matters in ways a spreadsheet does not capture.
It is second rather than first because the community and the ecosystem are smaller than Proxmox's, and the Xen hypervisor has a narrower hardware compatibility story than KVM. There is a documented virtual-to-virtual conversion route from VMware, and it is a route rather than a wizard.
What XCP-ng does better than VMware
- A distinct management plane, matching the ESXi and vCenter split VMware teams already work with
- Open source under GPLv2, so the terms cannot be rewritten out from under you
- Priced per host rather than by the shape VMware licensing took, which favours fewer, larger machines
- French company with French commercial support, against a Delaware corporation and a changing partner programme
- A documented virtual-to-virtual migration route from VMware rather than an improvised one
Where XCP-ng is a step down from VMware
- A smaller community and ecosystem than Proxmox, so fewer answers when something is unusual
- Xen has a narrower hardware compatibility record than KVM on recent server platforms
- Advanced features in Xen Orchestra need the supported build, which is a paid distinction
- No NSX equivalent, and nothing approaching VMware's certification matrix
Standout against VMware. It is the only option here whose architecture deliberately reproduces the separation between hypervisor and manager that VMware administrators already think in.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Spain). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, where VMware is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Service providers replacing vCloud Director under changed partner terms
OpenNebula Systems has worked from Madrid since 2008 under Apache 2.0, and it is aimed at a different customer from the first two entries here. It is a cloud management platform with real multi-tenancy, quotas, self-service portals and federation across sites, which is the vCloud Director shape rather than the vSphere shape.
That constituency is exactly the one at the centre of the European complaint. The March 2026 antitrust filing concerns Broadcom's licensing of VMware to cloud service providers, and the partner programme changes fell hardest on the European hosters and managed service providers whose entire business was built on reselling tenancy. For those companies this is not a cost optimisation; it is whether the business still exists.
It is also multi-hypervisor, running KVM and other backends, and capable of managing existing VMware infrastructure alongside its replacement — which makes a gradual exit possible rather than a cutover. The cost is that it assumes more of you: it is a platform for building a cloud, not an appliance for running twenty virtual machines.
What OpenNebula does better than VMware
- Genuine multi-tenancy with quotas and self-service, which is what vCloud Director customers actually need replaced
- Apache 2.0 licensed, so a hosting business is not exposed to another unilateral change of terms
- Can manage existing VMware alongside its replacement, allowing a phased exit rather than a cutover
- Spanish company under EU law, at the centre of the market the European complaint is about
- Edge and distributed deployments are first-class rather than an afterthought
Where OpenNebula is a step down from VMware
- Overkill for a single-site internal estate of a few dozen virtual machines
- Expects more architectural decisions from you than Proxmox or XCP-ng do
- A smaller commercial support ecosystem than VMware's partner network was before 2024
- Enterprise pricing is quoted rather than published, so it does not answer the transparency complaint
Standout against VMware. It is the only platform here built for the specific customer the European antitrust complaint is about: the provider who was reselling VMware rather than running it.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Open source, where VMware is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Organisations running real Kubernetes that want their VMs on the same control plane
SUSE S.A. has operated from Nuremberg since 1992 and is one of the few European software companies with the scale and the enterprise support machinery a departing VMware customer recognises. Its virtualisation product is hyperconverged infrastructure built on Kubernetes, with Harvester published under Apache 2.0 and SUSE subscriptions quoted on request.
The proposition is specific and it is not for everyone. If your organisation already runs Kubernetes properly — with people who understand operators, CRDs and cluster upgrades — then putting virtual machines under the same control plane removes an entire parallel infrastructure and the team that maintains it. If you do not, this is the wrong door, and it is a considerably harder door than Proxmox.
What SUSE brings that the smaller vendors do not is the shape of the relationship. Long-term support commitments, security response processes, a certification story and a company large enough to sign an enterprise agreement with are what a VMware customer was buying, and they are why this ranks where it does despite the narrower fit.
What SUSE Virtualization does better than VMware
- Virtual machines and containers under one Kubernetes control plane, removing a parallel stack
- A large, listed European company with enterprise support processes VMware customers recognise
- Harvester is Apache 2.0, so the platform layer cannot be withdrawn from you
- German company under EU law, with long-term support commitments in writing
- Fits an organisation that has already invested in Kubernetes skills rather than asking it to learn a second platform
Where SUSE Virtualization is a step down from VMware
- Requires genuine Kubernetes expertise, which is a higher bar than any other option here
- Materially more complex than Proxmox or XCP-ng for a straightforward VM estate
- Enterprise pricing is quoted rather than published
- A younger virtualisation product than the Xen and KVM platforms above it
Standout against VMware. It is the only option here that makes a virtual machine just another workload on the cluster you already run.
- Which law reaches it. United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own data centres.
- Source code. Open source, where VMware is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. UK GDPR.
Best for: Organisations that wanted a private cloud with an API, not a console
Canonical Ltd has been in London since 2004, and its OpenStack distribution is Apache 2.0, free to self-support, with Ubuntu Pro from about $75 per node per year and a managed option priced on request. Per-node pricing is the structural point: it decouples what you pay from how much silicon you put in each machine, which is the opposite direction from where VMware licensing went.
It is also a different product from everything above it. OpenStack is a private cloud with APIs, projects, quotas and a service catalogue, and teams that adopt it are usually not replacing vSphere so much as replacing the reason they had vSphere. If your developers want to request infrastructure through an API rather than a ticket, this is the destination; if your operations team wants a console that looks like vCenter, it is not.
Two honest caveats. OpenStack has a deserved reputation for operational complexity, and Canonical's tooling reduces that without removing it. And Canonical Ltd is a UK company, so since Brexit it sits outside the EU under an adequacy decision — which matters little when the software runs in your own data centres, and matters more if you buy the managed service.
What Canonical OpenStack does better than VMware
- Priced per node, so denser servers do not multiply the bill the way VMware licensing came to
- Apache 2.0, with a free self-supported path that keeps working without a contract
- A real cloud API, so infrastructure can be requested programmatically rather than through a console
- Long-term support commitments and a managed option for organisations without deep platform teams
- The same OpenStack skills are available from many suppliers, so the vendor relationship is replaceable
Where Canonical OpenStack is a step down from VMware
- OpenStack is operationally complex, and the tooling reduces rather than removes that
- Wrong shape entirely for a team that wants a vCenter-like console
- Canonical Ltd is UK-based, outside the EU since Brexit, which matters for the managed offering
- Heavier to stand up than Proxmox for an estate of a few dozen virtual machines
Standout against VMware. It is the only option here whose commercial subscription is counted in nodes, which removes the unit of measurement that caused the argument.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Closed source, as VMware is.
- Independently checked. GDPR-adequate.
Best for: Service providers who need multi-tenancy, billing hooks and provider tooling out of the box
Virtuozzo International GmbH has been in Schaffhausen since 1997, and its platform is aimed squarely at companies that sell infrastructure rather than consume it: hyperconverged nodes, multi-tenancy, provider tooling and the operational features a hosting business needs on day one rather than in year two. Subscriptions are per node, quoted on request.
It earns a place on this page because of who Broadcom's changes affected. European hosters and managed service providers lost partner status, licence terms and in some cases the economics of their own product, and for them a platform whose entire design assumes a tenant hierarchy and a billing system is a shorter path than assembling one on top of a general-purpose hypervisor.
It is sixth because it is the least open option here. The core platform is proprietary, with OpenVZ as the open kernel technology beneath it, and the pricing is quoted rather than published. If your reason for leaving VMware is specifically that you no longer want a closed platform on quoted terms, be honest with yourself about whether this answers it. Swiss jurisdiction does address the other half of the objection.
What Virtuozzo does better than VMware
- Designed for multi-tenant service delivery, where vSphere needed vCloud Director bolted on top
- Swiss company outside both US and EU jurisdiction, with an adequacy decision intact
- Provider tooling and billing integration included rather than built by you
- Per-node subscriptions, which suit a hosting business's unit economics
Where Virtuozzo is a step down from VMware
- The platform is proprietary, so it does not answer the open-source argument the rest of this page makes
- Pricing is quoted rather than published, which is the same opacity being complained about
- Wrong fit for an internal estate with no tenants to separate
- A smaller company and community than the open platforms ranked above it
Standout against VMware. It is the only option here that arrives already knowing what a tenant, a quota and an invoice are.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Bulgaria). VMware is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own infrastructure.
- Source code. Closed source, as VMware is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Estates where the resented line item is storage rather than compute
StorPool Storage has worked from Sofia since 2011, and it is on this page as a deliberate partial answer. It is not a hypervisor and will not replace vSphere. It is distributed block storage on NVMe hardware, sold per usable terabyte, and it targets the workloads where general-purpose software-defined storage runs out of headroom.
That matters because for a good number of VMware customers the specific grievance is vSAN rather than the hypervisor: a storage layer bundled into a larger purchase, priced with it, and difficult to separate from it. Replacing the storage first is a smaller project than replacing the platform, it can be done while vSphere is still running, and it takes a chunk out of the renewal before any virtual machine moves.
It is last on this page because it is not a VMware alternative in the sense that the other six are, and any list that ranked it as one would be misleading. It integrates with the platforms above it, so the sensible pattern is to use it alongside one of them rather than instead of one.
What StorPool does better than VMware
- Separates the storage decision from the hypervisor decision, which VMware's bundling makes difficult
- Priced per usable terabyte, so the cost tracks capacity rather than host configuration
- Bulgarian company under EU law, with no US parent in the chain
- Can be introduced while vSphere is still running, so it is a first step rather than a cutover
Where StorPool is a step down from VMware
- Not a hypervisor, so it replaces no part of vSphere itself
- Proprietary, where five of the seven options here publish their source
- Pricing is quoted rather than published
- Only makes sense in estates where storage performance is genuinely the constraint
Standout against VMware. It is the only entry here that can take a line off the VMware renewal without a single virtual machine being moved.
What actually breaks when you switch
The guests are the work. Disk images convert and hosts rebuild, but VMware Tools has to come out of every virtual machine and the new platform's guest agent has to go in, which means touching each one at least once and reconciling drivers on the older Windows estate. Budget by guest count, not by host count.
Check the backup product before you choose the platform. Backup software is licensed and integrated against vSphere's APIs, and coverage for Proxmox, XCP-ng and OpenStack varies by vendor and edition. Discovering after the migration that your backup vendor does not support the target, or supports it only in a more expensive edition, is the single most common way these projects stall.
And find whatever is calling the vCenter API. Provisioning scripts, CMDB synchronisation, chargeback reporting, patching automation, a monitoring integration somebody configured in 2019. None of it moves, all of it is undocumented, and it surfaces one broken job at a time over the following quarter.
Did Broadcom really put up every VMware price?
No, and this is the claim to drop before you walk into a budget meeting. Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro went the other way: free for personal use from May 2024, and free for commercial use as well by November 2024. Someone in the room will know this, and if your case rests on a blanket statement about price rises it will not survive the correction.
The accurate version is narrower and stronger. The data centre products were restructured: perpetual licences withdrawn on 13 December 2023, the portfolio consolidated into a small number of bundles, and support pricing changed sharply enough for AT&T to allege in court that its own went up by 1,050 per cent.
Make the argument about the change in licensing model and about who now controls the terms, not about the direction of every price on the list.
Can we actually migrate running virtual machines, or is this a rebuild?
It is a migration, and a more mechanical one than most people expect. A virtual machine is a disk image and a configuration, both of which convert. Proxmox VE has an import path aimed directly at ESXi, XCP-ng has a documented virtual-to-virtual route, and OpenNebula and OpenStack both ingest converted images.
What does not convert is the ecosystem around the hypervisor. VMware Tools has to be replaced with the guest agent of the new platform, which usually means touching every guest. Backup products licensed against vSphere may need a different edition or a different product entirely. Monitoring, automation and anything calling the vCenter API needs rewriting.
Plan the guests as a repeatable batch and the surrounding tooling as a separate workstream. Organisations that treat the whole thing as one project consistently underestimate the second half.
What does VMware still do better than everything on this page?
Three things, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time. Distributed Resource Scheduler and the maturity of live migration under load remain ahead of the field; the alternatives all do live migration, but the automation around balancing a large cluster is less refined. NSX has no real equivalent here for organisations that built their network segmentation on it. And the certification matrix is unmatched: whatever your storage array, backup vendor or line-of-business application is, somebody has tested it against vSphere.
There is also the labour market. Every infrastructure engineer you interview knows vCenter, and none of them arrives fluent in Xen Orchestra or OpenNebula. That training cost is real and it lands on the same team doing the migration.
If all three of those matter to you simultaneously, the honest advice is to negotiate rather than migrate, and revisit when one of them stops being true.
Is a support subscription on an open-source platform any different from a VMware licence?
Structurally, yes, and the difference is the whole reason this category exists. Proxmox VE ships complete and unrestricted whether or not you pay; the subscription, from about €115 per CPU per year, buys support and an enterprise update repository. XCP-ng is free and Vates support starts from about €950 per host per year. Canonical's OpenStack is free to self-support with Ubuntu Pro from about $75 per node per year.
In each case the software keeps running if you stop paying. You lose support and, in some cases, a curated update channel. You do not lose the ability to power on a virtual machine, and no compliance report is due every 180 days to keep the management plane responsive.
That is the property to test in procurement. Ask what happens to a running cluster on the day after a subscription lapses, and compare the two answers side by side.
Which one to pick
For most organisations running vSphere on their own hardware, Proxmox VE is the answer and the reason is structural rather than financial: everything ships to everybody, and the subscription buys help rather than permission.
If your team is organised around the separation between hypervisors and a management server, XCP-ng preserves that architecture and puts a French company with published per-host pricing behind it.
If you were selling VMware rather than using it, OpenNebula is the platform built for that shape, and its ability to manage your existing VMware while you leave makes a phased exit possible.
And if the whole estate cannot move at once — which is the usual case — take the storage first with StorPool, or move the development environment to Proxmox and leave production until the backup vendor question is settled. A partial exit that completes beats a full plan that does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Proxmox VE for most on-premise vSphere estates. XCP-ng if you want a separate management plane and French commercial support. OpenNebula if you are a service provider replacing vCloud Director. SUSE Virtualization if your organisation already runs Kubernetes seriously. Canonical OpenStack if you wanted a private cloud with an API rather than a hypervisor with a console. Virtuozzo for multi-tenant hosting businesses. StorPool if the part you resent is vSAN rather than vSphere.
On 13 December 2023, three weeks after Broadcom completed the acquisition on 22 November 2023. Perpetual licensing ended for products including vSphere and Cloud Foundation, which moved to subscription. For organisations that had bought outright specifically to avoid recurring exposure, the option they had paid a premium for was withdrawn rather than repriced.
That is the figure AT&T put in a lawsuit filed in August 2024, alleging that Broadcom breached contract by refusing to renew perpetual licences and raising its support pricing by that amount. It is an allegation in litigation about one very large customer, not a published rate card, and it should be cited as such. It is also not representative of every account, and quoting it as a universal figure invites a correction you do not need.
A European cloud industry association filed a formal complaint in March 2026 alleging that Broadcom's licensing of VMware products to cloud service providers infringes EU antitrust rules, focused on price increases and bundling. As of May 2026 the matter was still live, with the complainant asking for interim protective measures and Broadcom contesting the disclosure of internal communications. No decision had been issued at the time of writing.
No. The data centre portfolio was restructured and repriced, but the desktop hypervisors moved in the opposite direction: Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro became free for personal use in May 2024 and free for commercial use by November 2024. If you are building a case to leave, base it on the licensing model and on who controls the terms, because a blanket claim about prices is easy to disprove in the room.
Yes, and this is the part that goes better than people fear. Proxmox VE offers a direct import path from ESXi, XCP-ng has a documented virtual-to-virtual conversion route, and the OpenStack and OpenNebula platforms ingest converted disk images. The work is in the guests afterwards: VMware Tools must be replaced with the new platform's guest agent, which means touching each virtual machine at least once.
Check it before anything else, because it decides your shortlist. Backup software is typically licensed and integrated against vSphere's APIs, and support for Proxmox, XCP-ng or OpenStack varies by vendor and by edition. Some products cover several of these natively, some need a different licence, and some do not cover your target at all. An estate that cannot be backed up is not migrated, however many virtual machines have booted.
The question is really about support rather than code quality, and every option here has a commercial answer: Proxmox Server Solutions in Vienna, Vates in Grenoble, OpenNebula Systems in Madrid, SUSE in Nuremberg, Canonical in London. What differs from VMware is that the software keeps working if the contract ends. You lose support and a curated update channel; you do not lose the ability to run the cluster.
For a small estate of a few dozen virtual machines on straightforward storage, a quarter is realistic, with most of the time spent on the guests rather than the hosts. For a large estate with NSX segmentation, a certified storage array, a backup product tied to vSphere APIs and automation calling vCenter, plan a year and treat it as a platform rebuild. The hypervisor swap is the short part of both timelines.
Who worked on this review
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