European Virtualization Platforms
Broadcom's repricing of VMware pushed an enormous number of European organisations into evaluating a migration for the first time in a decade. These platforms — from Austrian Proxmox to French XCP-ng and Spanish OpenNebula — are the alternatives that migration teams actually shortlist, and every one of them can be run entirely on infrastructure you control.
7 European Virtualization Platforms
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
How We Choose European Virtualization Platforms
- Live migration
- High availability clustering
- Backup integration
- Open source or EU vendor
- Migration tooling from vSphere
Frequently Asked Questions
Proxmox VE is the default answer for most organisations. It is Austrian, open source, based on KVM and LXC, and ships clustering, Ceph storage and backup in the base product rather than as separately licensed add-ons. XCP-ng is the stronger choice for teams that prefer a Xen-based hypervisor and want commercial support from Vates in France.
Yes. Proxmox VE ships an ESXi import wizard that pulls VMs directly from a vSphere host, and XCP-ng has V2V tooling through Xen Orchestra. The practical work in a migration is rarely the disk conversion — it is re-doing networking, backup jobs and monitoring integrations.
Proxmox VE, XCP-ng and OpenNebula all run substantial production estates across European hosting providers and public sector organisations, and all three sell commercial support subscriptions. The open-source licence is about control and cost, not about being unsupported.
Proxmox includes Ceph, which covers most clustered storage needs without a separate vendor. Where performance requirements are higher — dense database or VDI workloads — StorPool is the European specialist, and it integrates directly with Proxmox and OpenNebula.
The Complete Guide to European Virtualization Platforms
Why this category suddenly matters
For most of the last fifteen years virtualization was a settled question: you ran vSphere. Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and the subsequent move to subscription bundles changed the economics sharply enough that migration became a board-level topic at organisations that had no intention of moving. The European alternatives were mature well before that happened — what changed is how many teams are now willing to do the work.
Choosing between the open-source platforms
Proxmox VE and XCP-ng are the two realistic starting points for a general-purpose estate. Proxmox is KVM-based, has the larger community, and bundles Ceph and Proxmox Backup Server; it suits teams comfortable with Debian. XCP-ng is Xen-based with a cleaner separation between hypervisor and management plane through Xen Orchestra, and Vates sells support from France. OpenNebula is a different proposition: it is closer to a private-cloud orchestrator than a hypervisor manager, and comes into its own across multiple sites or at the edge.
The parts people forget to budget
A vSphere replacement is not just a hypervisor. Plan for backup (Proxmox Backup Server, or a third party such as Veeam which now supports both Proxmox and XCP-ng), monitoring, and whatever your current estate relies on from the VMware ecosystem — NSX-style networking and vSAN equivalents are the two that most often turn out to need a separate answer.
Looking for a direct swap? See our comparison of European alternatives to VMware.