Leaving VMware after Broadcom: what actually moves to Proxmox — and what breaks

Since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, the same conversation has repeated in client after client: the renewal quote arrived, it was several times last year's, the perpetual licences you'd been renewing are gone, and someone was asked to "look at alternatives." If that is you, here is the honest version — what actually changed, whether you should move at all, and what genuinely breaks when you migrate off vSphere. We run VMware, Proxmox and Hyper-V for clients, so this is not a pitch for one of them.

What actually changed

The headline items, kept precise because half the panic online is based on half-remembered details:

• •Perpetual licences are gone. Broadcom moved VMware to subscription/term licensing only; sales of new perpetual licences ended, and existing perpetual licences still run but no longer receive new support once their contract lapses.
• •The catalogue collapsed into bundles. The long product list was consolidated into a few packages — chiefly VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and the smaller vSphere Foundation (VVF). The standalone and smaller-estate options that survived have kept shifting and vary by region, so confirm what is actually on offer for your size and country rather than trusting a months-old blog post.
• •Pricing is per-core subscription. Licensing is counted per CPU core on a subscription basis, with a per-CPU minimum of 16 cores. A higher floor — a 72-core minimum per order, floated in early 2025 — may or may not apply to your order (reports on how universally it stuck differ), so treat it as one more reason your own quote is the only number that matters; either way the per-core model already pushes small, lightly-used hosts into paying for cores they do not need.
• •The free ESXi hypervisor was discontinued in early 2024. The free tier that many home labs and small shops relied on is no longer something to build on long-term.
• •Renewal shock is real but variable. Reported increases range from meaningful to many-fold depending on the old contract and the new bundle — there is no single multiplier, which is exactly why you need your own numbers, not a headline.

Get your actual renewal quote and your actual core count before believing anything, including this article.

First question: should you move at all?

Migrating a virtualisation platform is not free, and panic is a bad reason to do it. Sometimes the right answer is to renew once — buying a year to plan — or to stay on VMware because the cost of leaving genuinely exceeds the cost of the new licence for your estate. The honest decision comes down to a few things:

• •The real delta. New subscription cost over three years versus migration effort plus the target platform's cost. Only the three-year view is fair; a one-year comparison flatters staying.
• •How deep you are in the VMware ecosystem. A handful of VMs on vSphere is a weekend. Heavy use of NSX, vSAN, SRM, Horizon or vRealize/Aria is a project, because each of those needs a replacement, not just a VM move.
• •Your team's skills. Proxmox rewards Linux fluency; Hyper-V rewards a Windows shop. Migrating onto a platform nobody can operate trades a licensing problem for an outage problem.

If after that the numbers say move, they usually say move decisively — a half-migrated estate straddling two platforms is the worst of both.

The realistic targets

For most small and mid-size estates the shortlist is short:

• •Proxmox VE is the one most VMware refugees land on, and it leads the "VMware alternative" search interest for a reason: open-source, no per-core licence, KVM virtualisation with LXC containers, built-in clustering, and Ceph for hyperconverged storage. It is strongest in Linux-comfortable shops and the EU SMB market. Support is a paid subscription if you want it, but the software itself has no licence tax.
• •Microsoft Hyper-V is the natural home for a Microsoft-centric shop — it is included with Windows Server, integrates with Active Directory and System Center, and pairs with Storage Spaces Direct for HCI. The catch is Windows Server licensing, which is its own cost model to work through.
• •Others — Nutanix (commercial HCI, a like-for-like enterprise replacement at enterprise cost), XCP-ng (open-source Xen), and public-cloud or Azure Stack HCI paths — are real but narrower fits; we reach for them only when a specific requirement points there.

What actually moves, and what breaks

This is the part the "just migrate to Proxmox" posts skip. Moving the VMs is the easy 20%. The other 80% is replacing the platform features around them.

None of this is exotic. All of it is invisible until you try the cutover and a Windows VM boots to a black screen because the VirtIO storage driver was never installed.

How a migration actually goes

The shape that works, every time: inventory the estate honestly (VMs, but also the vSAN/NSX/SRM features you forgot you use); pick the target and rebuild the platform — cluster, storage, networking, backup — as its own project before touching a single production VM; migrate a low-stakes VM first and validate it fully, including a backup and restore; then batch the rest into scheduled downtime windows, converting disks and injecting drivers as you go, with a tested rollback for each. The Windows VirtIO drivers, the backup restore, and the network cutover are where the surprises live — rehearse those, not the easy Linux VMs.

Do not learn what breaks by breaking production. Clone a representative slice to the new platform, run it, and only when that is boring do you schedule the real move.

What we do

We are not reselling anyone's licences, so we will tell you the unglamorous truth: whether to migrate, renew once, or stay. When the numbers say move, we do the server and virtualisation work end to end — target selection, the platform build, disk conversion and driver injection, HA and storage design, backup with a tested restore, and a staged cutover — the same discipline behind our file-server migrations that don't break permissions. Broadcom made the question urgent; the answer is still an engineering decision, and the engineering is the job.