Our 5 year ELA for VMware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. I work in Higher ed.

Our Hyper-V environment came online a few months ago. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.

Granted, we have a separate team working on "genAI stuff."

We started converting virtual machines about 3 weeks ago and we've gotten through ~500 of about 3500 or so.

Our grant based HPC environment is just moving back to bare metal. The VM conversion is just for ad-hoc HPC and then all of our general infrastructure. Some of our larger application servers (SAP Hana) are possibly staying on VMWare if SAP won't support them on Hyper-V.

This summer sucked big time but we'll make it.

This is a hot topic among some of my nerdier SME friends, and our conclusion is that the major players are HPE and Nutanix. At least from our perspective over here in Sweden.

HPE did a big brain move to support multiple hypervisor backends with their own frontend. The only way to go forward imho.

I'm using Proxmox at my current $dayjob, and we're quite happy with it. I come from a big VMware shop and I think most businesses could easily replace VMware with Proxmox.

I think Proxmox should just launch an Enterprise contract, regardless of the cost, just have one. Because right now I think the main obstacle halting adoption is their lack of any Enterprise SLA.

On a personal level I would love to see KubeVirt, or Openshift with KubeVirt, take over more. It just seems like a genius move to use the already established APIs of kubernetes with a hypervisor runtime.

I work for an MSP, mostly with small to medium companies. Licensing costs went up a ton when broadcom acquired vmware. They went up a ton more this year with minimum core counts, current licensing costs are roughly $20k a year minimum. They might hike the price again, even medium businesses that see some value in avoiding an expensive migration want to avoid this uncertainty. Basically they don't want to deal with small and medium sized businesses. I'm sure large businesses are facing price hikes too but I don't have experience with that.

If you are on a perpetual license you can put the management vlan on a network not connected to the internet if it wasn't already and realistically this buys a few years. You will not be able to patch, eventually auditors will not accept that. For the rest not on perpetual licensing, when the licensing expires you will not be able to power on machines, if they reboot they stay off.

About half of clients we are migrating to hyper-v. Most are already running windows servers. There are some differences but hyperv covers the important features and the licensing is basically already included. Beeam makes the virtual to virtual move a lot easier, this is what most of our customers use for backups

For a good chunk they are migrating to azure or another hosted environment. If you don't have a main office with a file server or some more demanding line of business apps this is a pretty easy move.

A few are going to nutanix. Or more of expanding nutanix.

Broadcom turned up the heat on our pot fast enough that we’re evacuating over to proxmox. I and several others in IT had run it at home for a while, so when Broadcom made the definite losses to continue on VMWare far higher than the likely losses from any migration outage, it became a no-brainer to migrate.

Migrating part of the farm and A/B testing shows good results and we’ll be able to complete it in-place before the next pizzo payment to Broadcom is due.

Thanks for the nudge, Broadcom! As far as I’m concerned, Broadcom and Oracle are tied for first on my “do not voluntarily do business with” list. Equaling Oracle in this way is a feat…

Microsoft gaining the most I reckon.

Kind of sad seeing businesses getting screwed by closed source proprietary software, then making the same choices all over again.

Nutanix also seeing huge demand.

Not everyone is repeating their mistakes, with Proxmox and Xcp-ng seeing huge new level of business, as well, which is nice.

I'm part of the Apache CloudStack project and that too is seeing unparalleled levels of demand. The KVM hypervisor has sort of become the de facto choice, thanks to virt-v2v tool which can help migrate VMware guests.

At PriorCo, I did a slide deck presentation of our options at the time (2023/2024) and pitched essentially three pathways: stay on VMware, move to Apache Cloudstack, or move to Nutanix. The deck was roundly ignored in favor of a lift-and-shift to AWS for remaining infrastructure.

If I were running the migration, my preferred pathway would’ve been to Apache Cloudstack. We had the expertise to pull it off, and it would’ve freed us from vendor partners. Nutanix was really only on the list purely from its technology portfolio; its lack of profitability and shifting towards SaaS for features like cost analysis meant that we’d be moving into a similarly bad situation as VMware at the time (wholly beholden to their business priorities instead of our own), which I didn’t care for.

There’s a lot of options out there, most of which are built atop either KVM/QEMU or OpenStack. Virtuozzo’s offerings impressed me, but the lack of a “comprehensive” product was a turnoff. Oxide was incredibly interesting from a simplicity and integration perspective, but the appetite wasn’t there to try a startup’s product. Microsoft and Oracle were both ruled out due to higher costs and more onerous licensing than VMware/Broadcom, while IBM/OpenShift were ruled out as our private cloud estate was 100% VMs with only ~20% of our internal products capable of containerization support.

The biggest advice I can give is to understand your workload today, and determine options accordingly. Everyone’s pitching K8s and containers, but if your estate is majority VMs, then a lot of those options just aren’t worthwhile.

I'm with a block storage vendor that works with a lot of companies migrating off VMware, and the diversity of KVM-based cloud management platforms we're seeing is fascinating. We have customers moving to OpenNebula, CloudStack, Proxmox, OpenStack, HP VME, Oracle Virtualization, and even some homegrown solutions. The common thread is that they're all looking for a storage backend that is not tied to a specific hypervisor and can deliver predictable high performance. The beauty of the KVM ecosystem is the freedom to choose the best tool for the job, and that extends to the storage layer. A good software-defined block storage solution should have the features (data migration, disaster recovery) and capabilities to make the transition away from VMware as smooth as possible.

Mostly bitching to corporate IT to make it possible to use alternative tools and workflows.

Not kidding, that’s the main blocker. We have the DevOps knowledge on our team to go to containers, prepackaged dev environments, etc. But corporate cyber tends to respond to our requests to discuss cyber policy and escalate via proper channels with “sorry that’s against policy”.

This is not my experience at one company but multiple good, name brand companies that generally do good engineering and software work.

"VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong", 190 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45167239

"Proxmox VE: Import Wizard for Migrating VMware ESXi VMs", 100 comments (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39841363

Non-Profit Liberal Arts Higher Ed here. Trying to move to the Azure Hybrid Cloud as fast as possible. Going to have to eat one more year of 170% price hike in our current VMware contract.

Heard from a peer school on the east coast that had to sign a 600% hike in their most recent contract. Absolutely evil.

Seeing a lot of Nutanix especially for VDI/Citrix heavy workloads or typical 3-tier applications. HP VME is also becoming a thing as an almost drop-in and VERY cost effective alternative to VMWare. In telco Openstack is still king AFAIK.

We use Proxmox.

NVidia are pushing hard in the direction of combined accelerators and ARM CPU (i.e. DGX, Thor, Jetson, etc).

Some of the upcoming hardware hits a sweet spot in terms of performance / $ / W. It's hard to ignore.

But Proxmox is ignoring ARM. Which is a big mistake IMO

Check out libvirtd based stacks, because that's what's supported by upstream Linux.

Some shops here migrate to proxmox as a UI because of certification requirements, but I migrated some of my customers to cockpit dashboard, and some to kubernetes. It's always a matter of scale and provisioning requirements.

Cockpit is my favorite so far because it's easy to setup, but its focus isn't cluster scale, which is what most larger companies need. You have to setup basically two cockpit variants: the webui and lots of cockpit server daemons (aka libvirtd on remote machines). The webui then uses SSH to login to other machines to manage them (e.g. via the known_hosts file on the webui server). [3]

Proxmox is pretty old and Perl, but it's doable. Usually storage clustering is a bit painful because you need something on a filesystem layer like ceph clusters.

There's also openshift but no idea if that is an IBM/RedHat lock-in as well, so the SMEs didn't want that risk.

[1] https://cockpit-project.org/

[2] https://www.proxmox.com/en/

[3] https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-machines.ht...

In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.

We're driving as many apps as possible to containers, and replacing most of our virtual infrastructure with Talos Linux [1] which is a reasonably hardened OS dedicated to Kubernetes hosting. I strongly recommend using the terraform provider to help manage at scale. The docs seem a little sparse for beginners, but if you already know kubernetes concepts, it's pretty easy to pick up. If you know flux style gitups talhelper+sops is far better than naked talosctl. We're also trying to migrate off of IAAS provided kubernetes and migrate to talos within instances. It's an effort to reduce dependency on specific IAAS while also minimizing number of technologies we need to support.

We're driving anything that cannot be containerized to lift and shift to IAAS and forcing the app owners to pay for it out of their budget as motivation to modernize. They have to explain to the board why their spending increased and they are still on legacy.

- [1] - https://www.talos.dev/

Red Hat is offering OpenShift virtualization, which is Kubernetes with Kubevirt. So some people might just use Kubernetes with Kubevirt.

There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/

Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/

Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.

I find that regular libvirt/qemu with virt-manager or cockpit front-end on RHEL/Alma/Rocky is perfectly fine for plenty of situations.

I'm seeing a bit of everything: renegotiating (which Broadcom doesn't really do), optimizing and consolidating hosts (to lower costs), public cloud migration (which is why I see the most given my line of work, but may not represent everything), forays into other hypervisors, etc.

Proxmox may come to many an HN visitor's mind (and I use it myself extensively, all my home services run on it), but it actually doesn't have a lot of enterprise features and isn't a drop-in replacement.

Linux. kvm or lxc.

Hire a couple of sysadmins who know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Most of the time I don't need a full VM and run inside a container via systemd-nspawn. This runs on the existing kernel instance but isolates everything nicely. Mainly use it for complex builds so they don't bork my system.

croit.io, provides 24*7 enterprise support as a Proxmox Gold partner with a follow the sun support team.

Out of the loop: what's up with VMware?

I work for a vendor covering subset of functionality from VMware.

I am seeing Nutanix the most, then Proxmox, Openshift.

For some sub products, Avi is often going to HAproxy, Aria to a combination of Terraform, Datadog (and others)

I use VMWare Workstation a lot for testing and it's a very good workhorse for that. I hope they won't mess that up.

A major european bank is about to move everything they got on VMware to Hyper-V

#1 reason people don't wholesale move off of VMW is 1 word, RISK. Too much risk to move legacy applications of enterprises without a lengthy project to move. This that do and start to, are choosing KVM variants, RH Open shift Virt, or Hyper-V. Promos would be good if it had enterprise support.

Nutanix is just as expensive and also a locked in option.

Hyper-V and Windows Server 2025. It ticks all the boxes, except being BigScaryCorp for some people.

What’s next best alternative (regardless of cost)?

  Virtualbox
  Parallel
  Hyper-V

Jumping into bed with another single vendor.

You dont think enterprise IT does sensible things like have multiple vendors to avoid single points of failure.

A mix of Proxmox and Hyper-V. Also, Apache CloudStack using KVM.

Will be interesting to see if large organizations move to Proxmox

Production: Hyper V Dev: Proxmox

This was question at a very very very slow moving org and industry I was at until about a year ago.

They went to Nutanix right before the broadcom acquisition and never looked back.

They were much happier, and HCI was very nice for k8s nodes.

docker is the way!

Virtualization is a 20 years old tech. Quit it.

I hate virtualization with a passion, because it's just more crap that doesn't work written by people that shouldn't touch computers.

In theory, it's great. In practice, if you need to get "support" from someone else, it's not so great anymore, as all these companies have been discovering.

I would use VM technology if whoever wrote it would provide me with a contract saying that if anyone were to find just one program that would crash their VM (while not crashing a real machine) or miscompute, that I would get a billion dollars.

To answer your question: I was smart enough to never use it in the first place.

Docker or podman your stuff? There's an image of every OS.