The IT director has the end date of support for the perpetual vSphere licences behind the company’s server-room cluster in the calendar. The partner’s answer is short: there will be no renewal in the current form, only a subscription. The board asks whether this is the right moment to move to VMware alternatives and how much risk such a change carries.
The answer depends less on VMware itself and more on what your company already has: Windows Server licences, Linux skills, hyperconverged hardware, and a team that will run the platform. Changing the hypervisor is also a cybersecurity decision, because the virtualisation layer gives access to many machines at once, and a migration changes the management console, privileged accounts and the source of updates.
What changed in VMware licensing after the Broadcom acquisition?
Broadcom ended the sale of perpetual VMware licences and moved to subscriptions and term licences. It closed the VMware acquisition on 22 November 2023, and in an announcement of 11 December 2023 the VMware by Broadcom division announced the end of sale of perpetual licences and of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings, noting that effective dates would vary.
In its December 2023 announcement the company simplified its portfolio into two primary offers: VMware Cloud Foundation and the new VMware vSphere Foundation, with vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials Plus for smaller deployments. The list of products affected by the new policy includes, among others, vSphere, vSAN, NSX, HCX and Site Recovery Manager. The current line-up and terms have to be checked with Broadcom or a partner, because the announcement describes the situation on that day.
For companies with perpetual licences, two sentences in the announcement’s FAQ matter most. Customers can continue using the perpetual licences they purchased, and support is provided as defined in contractual commitments. SnS for those licences, however, cannot be renewed, so the end of your current support contract becomes a decision date. The announcement also encouraged customers to review their perpetual licences, refresh cycles and renewal dates, and offered to “trade in” perpetual licences for subscriptions. That review is worth doing whether or not you stay with VMware, because the same data is the starting point for comparing alternatives. Licence terms and dates depend on your individual agreements.
Do you have to leave VMware right away?
No, but you have to decide before your current support ends. There are three realistic paths: moving to a VMware subscription, migrating to another platform, or a mixed model in which critical systems stay on VMware and less demanding workloads move to a new hypervisor.
Each path has a cost beyond licences. A subscription keeps familiar tools and procedures. Leaving requires migrating machines, new team skills and rebuilding backup, monitoring and recovery procedures. A mixed model reduces migration risk but leaves two platforms to run and secure for a while.
Base the decision on an inventory, not on a price list. The number of hosts and VMs, application dependencies on VMware features (vSAN, NSX, Site Recovery Manager), software vendors’ requirements on supported hypervisors and support contract dates tell you more than a comparison of offers. The fundamentals of server virtualisation stay the same; what changes is the layer that manages it.
What are the realistic alternatives to VMware?
In an on-premises environment, the three alternatives represent three different models. Proxmox VE is an open platform based on Debian with a support subscription, Hyper-V is a hypervisor built into Windows Server, and Nutanix AHV is a hypervisor built into the Nutanix hyperconverged platform. The general differences between hypervisor types are covered in our hypervisor guide.
A fourth route is platforms that run virtual machines alongside containers. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs on Kubernetes using KubeVirt and has tools for migrating from traditional virtualisation, but after the move VMs are governed by the Kubernetes permission model rather than a virtualisation console. It suits companies that are building a container platform anyway.
What is Proxmox VE and who is it for?
Proxmox VE is an open virtualisation platform based on Debian that combines KVM virtual machines and LXC containers. According to the project FAQ, the code is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3. The platform has built-in clustering, a high-availability manager, ZFS and Ceph support, a firewall and two-factor authentication for administrative accounts.
Open source does not mean the business model is irrelevant. The Proxmox VE Administration Guide, in its version 9.2 of 18 September 2026, names the enterprise repository as the one recommended for production and available to subscription holders. The vendor describes the no-subscription repository as intended for testing and not recommended for production servers, because its packages are not always as heavily tested. Basic, Standard and Premium subscriptions also give access to a customer portal where Proxmox VE developers respond to tickets with guaranteed response times. For a production environment, the subscription decision is in practice a decision about where tested patches come from and who answers a failure report.
Proxmox VE fits companies with Linux skills that want to control the platform without tying themselves to a single hardware vendor. Before choosing it, however, check whether the vendors of your key applications support running them on this platform.
How does Hyper-V in Windows Server compare?
Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor built into Windows Server, available as a server role in all editions of Windows Server 2025. According to Microsoft Learn, Hyper-V is included with Windows Server and needs no separate hypervisor licence, and the Datacenter edition provides unlimited rights to run Windows Server virtual machines.
Features for production environments include failover clustering with Cluster Shared Volumes, live migration, Hyper-V Replica to a secondary site (Microsoft states an RPO as low as 30 seconds) and management through Windows Admin Center, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and PowerShell. On the security side, Microsoft lists Shielded VMs with the Host Guardian Service, Generation 2 VMs with Secure Boot, and virtual TPM. For companies that want to drop an external storage array, Windows Server offers Storage Spaces Direct, which pools the local disks of cluster nodes into a hyperconverged model.
Hyper-V is a natural candidate where Windows servers prevail and the team knows Active Directory and PowerShell. Domain integration simplifies management, but it also means that host security depends on domain security, so Hyper-V hosts should be treated as systems at the highest privilege tier.
What does Nutanix AHV offer?
Nutanix AHV is a hypervisor built into the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) platform. According to the Nutanix product page, AHV is not sold or licensed as a standalone product, and its use is included with the NCI licence. A single console, Nutanix Prism, manages the whole stack, and the virtual network has built-in software-defined firewalls and microsegmentation.
For migration, Nutanix provides the Nutanix Move tool, which according to the vendor moves machines from VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and AWS. That eases the transition, but it does not change the fact that AHV is part of a hyperconverged platform: choosing AHV in practice means choosing the Nutanix architecture for servers and storage. Our guide to hyperconverged infrastructure covers this model in more depth.
Nutanix makes sense for companies that plan to replace hardware together with the hypervisor or already use HCI. With existing, recently purchased servers and storage arrays, this path is a bigger change than moving to Proxmox VE or Hyper-V.
Key points:
- On 11 December 2023 Broadcom ended the sale of perpetual VMware licences and SnS renewals; purchased perpetual licences can still be used.
- Proxmox VE: open source (AGPLv3), production repository with a subscription.
- Hyper-V: a Windows Server role; Datacenter grants unlimited rights to Windows Server VMs.
- Nutanix AHV: part of the NCI licence, not a standalone product.
How do you migrate virtual machines from VMware?
Migration runs in waves: a pilot on a copy of the VM, moving disks and configuration with the tool that suits the platform, a test and a rollback plan. Since the 8.2 development cycle, Proxmox VE has had an import wizard that connects an ESXi host as a source and moves a VM together with most of its configuration. The same documentation notes, however, that the wizard is in tech preview and has been tested with ESXi versions 6.5 through 8.0.
The same documentation lists two limitations worth knowing before you plan maintenance windows. VMs with disks on vSAN cannot be imported directly, so the disks must first be moved to another storage. Importing through vCenter is possible but 5 to 10 times slower than directly from an ESXi host. The wizard is not the only route: the documentation also lists importing OVF and OVA files, including from the command line, and backup on the source with restore on the target, which works best when moving between Proxmox VE instances. On the Nutanix side, Nutanix Move is the migration tool.
Whatever the tool, migration changes the virtual hardware seen by the guest operating system: disk controllers, network adapters, drivers. That is why every migration wave should have a pilot on a copy of the VM, an application start-up checklist and a rollback plan to the old environment until the new one passes its tests.
What security risks does changing the virtualisation platform bring?
The biggest risk lies in the management layer, because compromising a hypervisor or its console gives access to many machines at once. Migration temporarily doubles that layer: two consoles run side by side, with two sets of administrative accounts and usually broader permissions granted for the move. Close that window with a pre-set decommissioning date for the old environment and an account review.
The second change concerns the source of updates. On the new platform you need a hypervisor patching process from day one: in Proxmox VE this means the repository intended for production, in Hyper-V the Windows Server update cycle, in Nutanix platform upgrades from the Prism console. A hypervisor without a known patch source is a gap that does not show up in the application inventory.
The third change is the permission model. The Proxmox VE console has its own users and supports two-factor authentication, domain-joined Hyper-V hosts inherit Active Directory Group Policy settings, and on Kubernetes-based platforms VMs fall under its RBAC model. Before migrating, write down who has administrative rights in vCenter today and recreate them on the new platform deliberately rather than by copying groups. VM backups verified by a restore before the first wave are a precondition, not an extra.
How do you compare Proxmox VE, Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV?
A comparison only makes sense against criteria that come from your inventory. The table sets the three platforms side by side on the points that decide the choice in practice and gives a control question for each criterion.
| Criterion | Proxmox VE | Hyper-V | Nutanix AHV | Control question |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licensing model | Open source (AGPLv3); a subscription gives the enterprise repository and support | Windows Server role; Datacenter with unlimited rights to Windows Server VMs | Part of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure licence | What licences does the company already hold, and until when? |
| Required architecture | 64-bit servers with Intel VT-x or AMD-V, optionally Ceph or ZFS | Servers running Windows Server, failover cluster | Nutanix hyperconverged platform | Does the hypervisor change coincide with a hardware refresh? |
| Migration tool from ESXi | Import wizard (tech preview, ESXi 6.5–8.0) | V2V migration with a tool chosen in the project | Nutanix Move | How many VMs have disks on vSAN? |
| Management | Web interface, REST API, CLI | Windows Admin Center, SCVMM, PowerShell | Nutanix Prism | Who on the team will administer the platform? |
| Platform security | Firewall, two-factor authentication | Shielded VMs, Secure Boot, vTPM | Software-defined firewalls, microsegmentation | What will hypervisor patching look like from day one? |
Each platform wins in a different environment; the answers to the control questions decide. If you cannot answer the control questions, a platform decision is premature.
How do you plan your exit from VMware step by step?
The plan starts with an inventory and ends with decommissioning the old environment, not with migrating the last VM. Step one is a list of hosts, VMs, dependencies on VMware features and support contract dates. Step two is choosing the platform based on the table and on application vendors’ requirements.
Step three is a pilot on a few less critical VMs, with a backup and restore test on the new platform. Step four is migration in waves, starting with the least critical systems, with a rollback plan for each wave. Step five is decommissioning the old environment, removing accounts and reviewing permissions, because a vCenter console left running with active administrative accounts is an extra entry point.
Alongside the technical steps, rewrite your operational documentation: recovery procedures, on-call runbooks and network diagrams were written for VMware and stop matching reality after the migration. The team that will run the new platform should rehearse a VM restore and a failover during the pilot, before doing it for the first time during an incident.
How can nFlo help you migrate from VMware?
As part of its Virtualization Systems Review and Implementation service, nFlo specialises in Microsoft Hyper-V and Proxmox VE. The scope covers a health check of your current environment, right-sizing and host consolidation, and V2V migrations, including from VMware to Proxmox VE or Hyper-V, with workload compatibility testing.
Because compromising a hypervisor or the management layer gives access to many machines at once, nFlo deployments include hypervisor hardening, VM isolation, network microsegmentation and strict control of console access.
Is the end of support for your perpetual VMware licences approaching? Let’s talk about the inventory and the pilot.
What else should you know about VMware alternatives?
Can you keep using perpetual VMware licences after Broadcom’s changes?
Yes. In its announcement of 11 December 2023, VMware by Broadcom confirmed that customers can continue using the perpetual licences they purchased and that support is provided as defined in contractual commitments. What ended was the sale of new perpetual licences and SnS renewals.
Can Proxmox VE be used without a subscription?
Yes, the Proxmox VE code is licensed under AGPLv3. A subscription gives access to the enterprise repository; the vendor describes the no-subscription repository as intended for testing and not recommended for production servers.
Does Hyper-V need a separate licence?
Not as a separate product. According to Microsoft Learn, Hyper-V is a server role in all editions of Windows Server 2025, and the Datacenter edition provides unlimited rights to run Windows Server virtual machines.
Is Nutanix AHV bought separately?
No. According to Nutanix, AHV is not sold or licensed as a standalone product; its use is included with the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) licence.
Can VMs on vSAN be imported into Proxmox VE with the wizard?
Not directly. The Proxmox VE 9.2 documentation, in its 18 September 2026 release, states that disks of VMs on vSAN must first be moved to another storage, and that importing through vCenter is 5 to 10 times slower than from an ESXi host.
