Ask HN: What are people doing to get off of VMware?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Why people are leaving VMware

  • Broadcom acquisition led to drastic pricing increases (reports of 3–10x or more, big jumps in higher ed and SMBs).
  • New licensing models (minimum cores, subscription-only, no power-on after expiry) push out small/medium customers.
  • Perception that Broadcom only wants Global‑2000–scale accounts; others are being “fired.”
  • Complaints of declining quality alongside price hikes (e.g., worse graphics performance).
  • Many see this as classic lock‑in milking and are determined not to repeat that with the next vendor.

Risk, lock‑in, and enterprise requirements

  • Biggest blocker to moving: RISK of breaking legacy apps and long, complex migrations.
  • Enterprise buyers insist on 24/7 support (or at least a paper trail to shift blame), even if actual support quality is mediocre.
  • Proxmox’s support is seen as adequate for many, but the lack of clearly advertised 24/7 SLA from the vendor hurts perception.
  • Corporate security/compliance teams often block new tooling (containers, alt hypervisors) due to vendor‑risk and policy gaps.

Proxmox: strong interest, mixed confidence

  • Popular with SMBs, MSPs, and homelabs; several reports of successful multi‑hundred/1000‑VM migrations and happy customers.
  • Praised for: flexible/cheap hardware, hyper‑converged setups, Ceph, built‑in firewalls, backups (PBS), KVM+containers.
  • Critiques: perceived as “homebrew/SMB,” no obvious 24/7 enterprise SLA, no VMFS‑like clustered filesystem, limited SAN/VMFS story, ARM neglect, some rough edges (networking, disk encryption).
  • Debate whether the company is “missing its window” vs intentionally staying a stable “lifestyle” business.

Hyper‑V, Nutanix, HPE, and other VMware‑style options

  • Many Windows‑heavy shops and universities are moving to Hyper‑V, often already covered by existing Microsoft licenses (Datacenter = unlimited Windows VMs).
  • Nutanix and HPE VME frequently mentioned as major VMware replacements, especially for VDI and classic 3‑tier apps; seen as capable but expensive and still lock‑in.
  • Some organizations report technical issues and are already backing out of Nutanix; others are very satisfied.

KVM, OpenStack, and cloud‑native directions

  • Strong momentum around KVM/libvirt stacks: Proxmox, OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, OpenNebula, HP VME, Harvester, XCP‑ng, DIY KVM+cockpit.
  • Storage vendors see demand for hypervisor‑agnostic block storage to ease VMware exit.
  • Kubernetes‑centric approaches (OpenShift Virtualization/KubeVirt, Talos Linux) appeal where containerization is a strategic goal, but many note they’re not drop‑in VMware replacements and can be pricey/complex.
  • A significant number are bypassing new on‑prem platforms entirely and lifting to AWS/Azure/OVH, especially smaller estates or container‑friendly workloads.

Desktops, small‑scale, and philosophy

  • For local/dev: VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, Parallels, UTM, Incus, Firecracker, and systemd‑nspawn are all discussed.
  • Some argue “virtualization is old tech, move to containers”; others note containers aren’t suitable for all orgs/apps and VMs remain essential.