The Hidden Costs of VMware Migration Alternatives: An Engineer’s Perspective

Key Takeaways

• Trust matters more than features: Broadcom’s policy chaos has taught us that vendor behavior is as important as technology
• Hidden costs are often larger than license costs: Skills gaps, training, tools, and operational changes add up fast
• Reddit is market intelligence: Real engineer experiences reveal patterns vendors won’t tell you
• No perfect answer exists: Every migration path has trade-offs; match to your context, not marketing
• Ask hard questions: Vendors who get defensive aren’t partners you want

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Introduction: The Broadcom/VMware Reality

I’ve been avoiding writing this article.

After 6 years at VMware, watching what Broadcom has done feels personal. I saw the acquisition coming, watched colleagues worry about their jobs, and felt the shift in culture from “customer-first” to “margin-first” play out in real time. But after spending the last few weeks reading through hundreds of Reddit posts from sysadmins dealing with this mess—people like you, probably—I realized my perspective might help.

This isn’t going to be a vendor pitch dressed up as thought leadership. I’m not here to trash VMware or sell you on any specific alternative. What I want to do is share what I’ve learned, both from the inside and from listening to the community, about the real costs and trade-offs of migration.

Engineers deserve honest analysis, not marketing fluff.

The Trust Tax Nobody Talks About

Here’s a quote from a recent Reddit post that hit me hard:

“Constantly changing the rules will scare away even the most loyal and wealthy customers. Once a customer has migrated, they are unlikely to return because they no longer trust the brand.”

That’s from a thread titled “Friday rant about decision makers at Broadcom,” and it captures something crucial that gets lost in all the technical discussions: this isn’t just about money, it’s about trust. When you’ve built your entire infrastructure on a platform, trained your team on its quirks, documented your processes, and integrated it into every corner of your operations, the vendor relationship is a partnership. What Broadcom has done isn’t just a price increase—it’s a betrayal of that partnership.

The Numbers Everyone’s Talking About

Let’s get the painful facts on the table:

• Price increases: 800-1,500% increases for many customers, with some reporting their renewal going from $160K to $1.6 million—a 900% jump
• Core minimums: 72-core minimum per order (up from 16), pushing VMware out of SMB markets
• Forced bundling: Don’t need NSX or vSAN? Tough—you’re paying for them anyway in VCF
• Partner ecosystem gutted: Reduced from 4,500 VMware Cloud Service Providers globally to just 300+ Premier partners
• Subscription-only: No more perpetual licenses, no more flexibility

But here’s what really gets me: the policy chaos. As that Friday rant put it: “Why release VVF 9 as well? Why increase the number of GiB cores from 100 to 250 in VVF? Why could VVF be offered on a multi-year basis and now it can’t? Why remove all discounts on VVF?” This constant rule-changing is more psychologically damaging than the price increases alone.

The Gaslighting Effect

One Reddit user described being contacted 10 days before renewal with a 50% increase (after a previous 500% increase), only to be told the new policy is “they don’t downgrade from the previous year’s core count”—so paying for cores they weren’t even using.

Another user put it bluntly:

“This is like a mafioso shaking down a shopkeeper for protection money. I swear, if they won’t be reasonable on my next phone call with them, then I will make it my mission — with God as my witness — to break the land speed record for fastest total datacenter migration to Hyper-V or Proxmox or whatever and shutting off ESXi forever. I’m THAT pissed off.”

That’s the mental load nobody accounts for in TCO calculations. The anger. The frustration. The feeling of being trapped. The stress of re-evaluating your entire infrastructure stack while trying to keep the lights on.

The Three Migration Paths

Let me be clear about something: there is no perfect alternative to VMware. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or doesn’t understand the complexity of what you’re facing. What follows is my honest assessment of the three main paths, including the stuff nobody wants to admit.

Path 1: DIY Open Source (Proxmox, KVM, OpenStack)

What it actually is: You’re replacing a commercial hypervisor with community-driven or open-source alternatives. Proxmox is probably the most popular choice for former VMware users—it’s KVM-based, has a decent web UI, and the price is right (free, or about $,1200/CPU/year for enterprise support).

Real pros:

• No licensing costs for basic functionality—Proxmox is open source and free to use
• True platform independence (standard KVM means you’re not locked in)
• Active community and extensive documentation
• Proxmox offers flexibility and functionality with advantages including the ability to adapt and scale according to business needs

Real cons (from the trenches):

One Proxmox user said candidly: “I don’t get how people can work with VMware. We have SO MANY problems with it … and every special bolt has to be paid with piles of money”—but that same user is dealing with a platform that requires more hands-on Linux expertise.

The migration isn’t trivial. For Windows VMs, only IDE or SATA will work out of the box with Proxmox—additional steps are necessary to switch to VirtIO drivers for better performance. That’s an afternoon (or week) of work per VM type.

And here’s the thing nobody wants to say: 3 AM outages hit different when you’re on your own. Yes, Proxmox has enterprise support, but the ecosystem of third-party tools, integration partners, and expertise is a fraction of VMware’s. One forum user planning a 500-VM migration captured the reality: They’re looking at weeks of work to convert VMDKs to qcow2 format, test VirtIO drivers, and validate networking for each workload category.

Hidden TCO factors:

• Staff training time: Budget 2-4 weeks minimum per engineer to get productive
• Lost productivity: Expect 20-30% efficiency drop during the 3-6 month learning curve
• Custom integration development: All those VMware-specific scripts and tools? Rewrite them.
• Internal escalation paths: When something breaks at 2 AM, who do you call? Your phone, to wake up your team.
• Certification costs: VMware certifications range from $125 to $450 per exam, with training courses costing $1,500-$4,000. Now your team needs different certifications—at similar costs but with less established ROI.

Reddit reality check:

One discussion comparing Proxmox and other alternatives noted: “Only with the new price tag for VMware products by Broadcom [did] Proxmox and xcp-ng start to develop further their storage environment to be a real alternative to VMware’s VMFS. At the moment both solutions offer only a BETA solution for block storage with snapshot support”.

That’s honest. The alternatives are improving fast, but they’re not feature-complete replacements yet. If your workloads depend on specific VMware features (looking at you, vSAN dedup and compression in complex configurations), you’ll need to rethink your architecture.

Who this works for:

• Organizations with strong Linux expertise in-house
• Smaller deployments (< 100 VMs) where complexity is manageable
• Dev/test environments where risk tolerance is higher
• Teams willing to be “the vendor” for their infrastructure

Who this doesn’t work for:

• Risk-averse enterprises with limited technical depth
• Anyone needing 24/7 vendor support with SLAs
• Organizations without time to retrain staff
• Environments with complex VMware integrations

Path 2: Commercial VMware Alternatives (Nutanix, Scale Computing, Pextra, etc.)

What it actually is: You’re swapping one commercial platform for another, ideally with better pricing, simpler licensing, and less vendor hostility. Think of it as “VMware without the Broadcom.”

Real pros:

• Professional support and hand-holding during migration
• Enterprise features built-in (proper HA, DR, backup integration)
• Migration services that actually work (usually)
• Vendor accountability when things break

Real cons (nobody admits these):

New lock-in vs. old lock-in. Yes, you’re escaping Broadcom, but are you just trading one proprietary platform for another? This is the question that keeps me up at night. Nutanix runs on KVM (good!), but how portable are your workloads really? What happens if Nutanix gets acquired?

The Friday rant nailed it: “Those who don’t need NSX or other technologies won’t necessarily buy VCF, they’ll simply go elsewhere.” But will “elsewhere” turn into another forced bundle situation in 3-5 years?

Let’s talk specific vendors:

Nutanix: This is probably the closest like-for-like VMware replacement. They’re seeing massive inbound interest, with their own data showing “47% of VMware customers are actively evaluating alternatives” and “27% have already initiated proof-of-concept testing”.

Pros: Mature platform, KVM-based (AHV), 90+ Net Promoter Score showing consistently high customer satisfaction, comprehensive hybrid cloud story. They’ve even got a migration promotion with free licensing to ease the transition.

Cons: Still more expensive than open source alternatives, though generally cheaper than renewed VMware costs. HCI appliance approach means you’re committed to their hardware partners or their software-defined model. And while they’re pushing hard on the “no vendor lock-in” message, they’re still a commercial vendor with their own ecosystem.

Scale Computing: Edge/ROBO focused, simpler than Nutanix, good for distributed deployments. Less proven at large scale.

Pextra: Full disclosure—this is where my bias comes in because I work in this space now. Pextra is newer (less battle-tested) but built on proven KVM foundations with some genuinely differentiated features: AI-powered operations (Pextra Cortex™), native air-gap support for sovereign cloud deployments, and what I’d call “transparently honest” pricing. The platform is designed specifically to avoid the VMware/Broadcom trap—open architecture, no forced bundles, predictable per-node pricing.

But let me apply the same critical lens I’m applying to everyone else: it’s a younger platform. The ecosystem isn’t as mature as Nutanix. The migration tooling is still evolving. And yes, it’s a commercial product, so you’re still dependent on a vendor (though at least one with modern principles baked in).

Others: Microsoft Hyper-V (if you’re all-in on Windows), Red Hat OpenStack/OpenShift (if you’re container-forward), various cloud-hosted options.

Hidden TCO factors:

• New vendor training: Even if the platform is “similar” to VMware, your team needs 4-8 weeks to get productive
• Migration services fees: Professional migration services can add significant costs to your total project budget
• Tool ecosystem replacement: Backup, monitoring, automation—some of it will port, some won’t
• Potential feature gaps: That one VMware-specific feature you rely on? Better have a plan B.
• Risk of another transition: If you pick wrong, you’re doing this again in 3-5 years

Reddit reality check:

Nutanix users are generally happy: “When we did the cost analysis for going with Nutanix AHV, it was far better than VMware and the hypervisor stuff we had in the past”—Bob Fishtrom, Director of IT Services, Mountain View Los Altos High School District.

But migration isn’t trivial: Organizations need to plan for data transfer costs, application dependency mapping, skills development, and disaster recovery testing before decommissioning VMware.

Who this works for:

• Mid-market to enterprise organizations
• Teams wanting vendor support and accountability
• Organizations with budget for professional services
• Anyone needing rapid time-to-value

Who this doesn’t work for:

• Budget-constrained organizations (though often still cheaper than renewed VMware)
• Teams with deep DIY culture who resent vendor dependence
• Anyone burned by the VMware experience who wants maximum control

Path 3: Hybrid Architectures (Multiple hypervisors)

What it actually is: Running VMware for some workloads, Proxmox for others, maybe Hyper-V for Windows stuff, perhaps containers for modern apps. “Best tool for the job” taken to its logical conclusion.

Real pros:

• Optimize each workload category for cost/performance
• Hedge your bets—don’t go all-in on any one vendor
• Gradual migration path (less disruptive)

Real cons (and oh boy, are there cons):

Operational complexity tax. You now need:

• Multiple management platforms
• Training across multiple technologies
• Different backup/DR strategies for each
• Context-switching overhead (“Wait, which cluster is this VM on?”)
• Documentation across different systems
• Security policies maintained in parallel

One engineer planning a 500-VM migration captured this perfectly: they’re evaluating whether the complexity of running NFS storage accessible by both VMware and Proxmox during migration is worth the minimal downtime, or if they should just accept longer downtime for a cleaner cutover.

Reddit reality check:

The general consensus from the Proxmox forums: hybrid works for migrations, but it’s not a long-term strategy for most organizations. Even with improved interoperability, “you can use VMDK directly from NFS in PVE, check if the VM works and then online migrate the disk from vmdk to ceph”—but you’re still maintaining two platforms during that process.

Hidden costs:

• Multiple management platforms (licensing and learning curves)
• Skills multiplication (your team needs to be experts in multiple systems)
• Increased security surface
• Runbook complexity (“Which DR playbook is this again?”)
• Integration challenges between different platforms

Who this works for:

• Large organizations with specialized teams per platform
• Specific use cases (e.g., edge on Proxmox, core on commercial platform)
• Dev/test separate from production
• Gradual migration projects with multi-year timelines

Who this doesn’t work for:

• Small-to-medium teams who need simplicity
• Organizations optimizing for operational efficiency
• Anyone who’s already stressed about their current environment
• Teams without clear workload segmentation

What Actually Matters (From the Trenches)

After reading hundreds of Reddit threads, talking to colleagues, and watching this unfold, I’ve realized the vendor comparison charts miss the most important factors. Here’s what actually matters when you’re making this decision:

Priority 1: Trust and Vendor Behavior

That Friday rant wasn’t just venting—it was a pattern recognition. Look at this sequence:

1. Broadcom releases vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9
2. Then kills multi-year contracts for VVF
3. Then removes all discounts on VVF
4. Then increases included vSAN capacity from 100 GiB to 250 GiB per core (sounds good!)
5. But forces customers to license “from 0” if they need more via add-ons

As the rant asked: “This is not a business model, it’s madness.”

Another customer confirmed: “Yes, Broadcom scrapped the one year contracts and now only permit annual upfront payment on a three year term”. When asked why, one poster wrote: “They are aware that many of you are looking at alternatives, but it is going to take 6-12 months to migrate off, therefore only offering a three year deal means… you need support so you will most likely renew anyway”.

That’s not partnership. That’s hostage-taking.

How to evaluate vendor behavior:

• Track record: How long has this company been around? How have they treated customers during hard times?
• Transparency: Do they publish clear pricing? Or is everything “call for quote”?
• Policy stability: When Broadcom makes changes, they often come with confusion and insufficient communication
• Customer feedback: Spend time on Reddit, not just reading case studies on vendor websites
• Exit strategy: Can you leave if you need to? Or are you locked in?

Priority 2: Skills Transfer & Team Capability

Here’s the truth nobody wants to admit: your team’s VMware expertise is a massive asset, and throwing it away is expensive.

95% of IT decision-makers report the cloud skills gap negatively impacted their team, leading to slower innovation and increased operational costs. Nearly a third of organizations have missed financial objectives due to the critical skills gap.

When you migrate, you’re not just changing technology—you’re asking your team to:

• Unlearn years of muscle memory
• Learn new interfaces, concepts, and troubleshooting approaches
• Rebuild their mental models of how things work
• Potentially restart their certification journey

The hidden costs of retraining:

• 20-30% productivity drop for 3-6 months
• Longer incident response times during learning curve
• Increased error rates (everyone makes mistakes when learning)
• Team morale impact (“Great, now I need to learn something new”)
• Resume risk (“If I learn this niche platform, am I less marketable?”)

Organizations planning migrations need to “evaluate your team’s current VMware expertise and certifications” and “assess additional training that might be required for alternative platforms”.

Questions to ask:

• How similar is the alternative to VMware? (Closer = shorter learning curve)
• What training resources exist? (Official courses, community content, documentation quality)
• How strong is the job market for this skill? (Will your team see it as career investment or risk?)
• Can you hire expertise if needed? (Or are you dependent on internal training?)

Priority 3: Support When It Matters

Let me tell you about 2 AM incidents.

When everything is down, customers are angry, and your manager is calling, you need help now. Not a forum post answer that might come tomorrow. Not a Slack community that’s mostly asleep. You need a phone number, a human, and someone who can escalate to an engineer who knows the product’s source code.

Community support reality check:

Reddit and forums are amazing for:

• Learning best practices
• Troubleshooting common issues during business hours
• Getting architectural advice
• Finding workarounds and scripts

Reddit and forums are terrible for:

• Production outages at 2 AM
• Edge cases specific to your environment
• “We’ll escalate this to engineering” situations
• Contractual SLAs and accountability

One Reddit user noted wryly about Broadcom: “The VAR was practically breaking down in tears on calls with them”. That’s what bad support looks like.

What “enterprise support” actually means (varies wildly):

With VMware (before Broadcom): You had established SLAs, a massive partner ecosystem, TAM programs for large customers, and decades of collective knowledge.

With open source: You’re on your own, or paying for enterprise support that might be comparable.

With commercial alternatives: It depends. Nutanix touts a “90+ Net Promoter Score” and “industry-leading support”. That’s good! But are they answering at 2 AM in your time zone? Do they have the depth of expertise for your specific workload?

Questions to ask any vendor:

1. What’s your actual SLA for Severity 1 incidents? (Not “we try hard”—actual contractual SLAs)
2. Where is your support team located? (Time zones matter at 2 AM)
3. How many tiers before I reach an engineer? (Tier 1 reading scripts is not support)
4. Can I talk to a reference customer about their support experience? (Especially one who’s had a production outage)
5. What’s your escalation path? (If Tier 2 can’t solve it, then what?)

Priority 4: Open Architecture & Future-Proofing

The lesson from the Broadcom acquisition is clear: proprietary lock-in is a business risk.

As one Reddit user put it: “Once a customer has migrated, they are unlikely to return because they no longer trust the brand”. That trust, once broken, doesn’t come back. And the reason it matters is that lock-in removes your optionality.

Standards vs. proprietary APIs:

• KVM (open standard) vs. ESXi (proprietary): KVM means your workloads can potentially run anywhere KVM runs
• Open vSwitch vs. NSX: Standards-based networking is more portable
• Standard QEMU disk formats vs. VMDK: Easier to move between platforms
• REST APIs vs. proprietary management: Automation that can outlive the vendor

Exit strategies matter (yes, plan your breakup before the wedding):

If you’re moving to Nutanix, ask: “How do I migrate off Nutanix if I need to?” If they bristle at the question, red flag. Good vendors will tell you: “Here’s our export tooling, here’s how the data is stored, here’s the process.”

If you’re moving to Pextra (or any newer platform), ask the same question. In Pextra’s case, the answer is: “It’s KVM-based, workloads are portable, you can export to standard formats.” That’s the right answer.

Open source foundations that matter:

• KVM/QEMU hypervisor layer (battle-tested, used by AWS, Google, etc.)
• Standard Linux tools and processes
• Open networking standards (no proprietary network virtualization required)
• Standard storage interfaces (not vendor-specific storage APIs)

Priority 5: AI/Automation—Value vs. Hype

Everyone’s selling “AI-powered” something now. Let me separate the real value from the marketing BS.

AI hype (ignore this):

• “AI will replace your admin team!” (No, it won’t)
• “Our AI understands your infrastructure better than you!” (No, it doesn’t)
• “One-click AI optimization!” (It’s never one click)

Real AI value (pay attention to this):

• Intelligent capacity planning based on actual patterns (not rules you wrote in 2015)
• Anomaly detection that learns your normal vs. raises tickets for your unusual
• Automated remediation of common issues (with human approval)
• Natural language interfaces to complex systems (actually useful for new team members)
• Predictive maintenance that prevents outages (when it works)

Pextra’s Cortex™, for example, is positioned as an AI operations assistant. Does it replace your team? No. Does it reduce the operational burden of managing a complex hypervisor environment? That’s the promise—and it’s worth evaluating, but with skepticism.

Questions to ask about AI features:

1. What specific problems does your AI solve? (Not “improves operations”—specific problems)
2. Can you show me a demo with MY data? (Not canned demos)
3. What’s the learning curve to use this effectively? (Is this another system to learn?)
4. What happens when the AI is wrong? (Because it will be, sometimes)
5. Can I override the AI’s decisions? (You better be able to)

The best AI features are the ones you barely notice—they just make the system easier to operate.

The Reddit Reality Check

Before you make any decision, spend a few hours reading r/sysadmin and r/vmware. Not for entertainment—for market intelligence.

I’ve spent weeks doing this, and here are the patterns I’ve seen:

Theme 1: The Trust Problem

“Constantly changing the rules will scare away even the most loyal and wealthy customers”

This quote appears in variations across dozens of threads. The policy chaos isn’t just frustrating—it’s fundamentally changing how engineers evaluate vendors. Nobody wants to build on a foundation that shifts underneath them.

One user described the portal migration disaster: “licenses and other entitlements are not showing up on the Broadcom website” after the migration, leaving customers unable to activate software or access their own licenses.

That’s not a product problem. That’s a trust problem.

Theme 2: Hidden Costs Discovered Too Late

Migration projects balloon. Every single thread about migration has someone going “Oh, we didn’t think about X.”

One user planning a 500-VM migration to Proxmox initially thought it would be straightforward using ovftool, but then discovered they needed to account for: NFS storage setup, qemu-img conversion time, VirtIO driver installation for Windows VMs, network testing, and online disk migration from NFS to Ceph. What seemed like a weekend project became a multi-month effort.

The skills gap is real: “With 81% of enterprises predicting that they will be multi-cloud by 2024, companies migrating to the cloud face massive skill gaps, high adoption and migration costs, and steep learning curves”.

Budget for:

• 50% more time than you think
• 2X the training costs you estimated
• Unexpected tool replacements
• Consultant/contractor help (because you’ll need it)
• Management overhead (someone has to coordinate all this)

Theme 3: Migration Regrets and Wins

What worked well:

• Starting with dev/test environments (low risk, high learning)
• Pilot programs with non-critical workloads
• Bringing in outside expertise for the first few migrations
• Over-communicating with stakeholders about timeline and risks
• Using automated migration tools like Proxmox’s new import wizard, “introduced in version 8, to enable the migration from VMware ESXi to Proxmox”

What people wish they’d known:

• “For a Windows VM, only IDE or SATA will work out of the box. After the migration, additional steps are necessary to switch to VirtIO”
• The importance of testing everything, not just “it boots”
• How much their backup solution was tied to VMware APIs
• That their monitoring tools had VMware-specific integrations
• The true effort of retraining their team

Timing lessons:

• Don’t migrate during busy season
• Don’t try to do it in parallel with other major projects
• Don’t underestimate how long testing takes
• Don’t skip the pilot phase (seriously, don’t)

Theme 4: The Human Element

This is the part that breaks my heart reading these threads.

“This is like a mafioso shaking down a shopkeeper for protection money. I swear, if they won’t be reasonable on my next phone call with them, then I will make it my mission — with God as my witness — to break the land speed record for fastest total datacenter migration to Hyper-V or Proxmox or whatever and shutting off ESXi forever. I’m THAT pissed off”.

That’s not hyperbole. That’s genuine anger and betrayal. These are engineers who loved VMware, who advocated for it internally, who built their careers on it. And now they feel used.

The mental load is immense:

• Defending decisions to management (“Why didn’t you see this coming?”)
• Managing team stress during transition
• Working longer hours to keep both old and new systems running
• Dealing with user complaints when things break
• Worrying about career implications of specializing in a platform

Career concerns are real:

Engineers are asking: “If I specialize in Proxmox/Nutanix/Platform X, am I limiting my future options?” This isn’t academic—it affects retention and recruitment.

One person on Reddit captured it perfectly: “Sad to see VMware die like this”. It’s not just about technology—it’s mourning the end of something that worked.

Questions to Ask ANY Vendor (Including Pextra)

I’m going to give you my exact framework for evaluating any vendor. I used this when evaluating alternatives, and I use it now when talking to customers considering Pextra. These questions are designed to make vendors uncomfortable—and that’s the point.

Question 1: “How do you avoid creating new lock-in?”

What to listen for:

• Specific technical answers about open standards, not marketing speak
• Discussion of export capabilities and data portability
• Acknowledgment that lock-in is a concern (not dismissal)
• Examples of customers who’ve left and how it went

Red flags:

• “Trust us, we’re different”
• Defensiveness about the question
• Only talking about features, not portability
• “Why would you want to leave?”

How to test it:

• Ask for a demo of the export/migration process
• Request access to their API documentation (is it standard OpenAPI?)
• Talk to customers who’ve run POCs and moved workloads back out
• Check if their architecture is based on open source foundations

Question 2: “What’s your worst migration horror story?”

This is my favorite question because honest vendors will have an answer. They’ve seen things go wrong. The question is: did they learn from it?

What to listen for:

• A specific, detailed story (not hypothetical)
• What went wrong and why
• What they did to fix it
• What they changed in their process/product afterward
• How they made the customer whole

Red flags:

• “We’ve never had a problem” (lying)
• “That was the customer’s fault” (no accountability)
• Vague deflection
• Only success stories

Follow-up questions:

• How often do migrations hit unexpected snags?
• What percentage of your migrations go smoothly vs. require extensive troubleshooting?
• What’s your escalation process when things go sideways?
• Can I talk to a customer who had a difficult migration?

Question 3: “When would you NOT recommend your platform?”

Any vendor who says “we’re perfect for everyone” should be shown the door.

What to listen for:

• Specific use cases where they’re not the best fit
• Competitors they lose to and why
• Technical limitations they acknowledge
• Workload types that are challenging for their platform
• Customer profiles that aren’t ideal

Example good answers:

• “If you need [specific VMware feature X], we don’t have a direct equivalent yet”
• “Organizations under 10 VMs are better off with [simpler solution]”
• “If your team is 100% invested in Microsoft ecosystem, Hyper-V might be easier”
• “Our sweet spot is [specific range]—above that, you’d want [different approach]”

Red flags:

• Can’t think of any scenarios where they’re not perfect
• Only mentions trivial limitations
• Gets defensive
• “We can do everything VMware does, but better and cheaper”

Question 4: “How do you ensure pricing and policy stability?”

This question exists specifically because of Broadcom. Let’s not repeat that mistake.

What to listen for:

• Price protection clauses in contracts
• Policy change notification periods (e.g., “90 days notice before any changes”)
• Historical evidence of stable pricing
• Customer advisory board input into decisions
• Multi-year price locks available

Specific follow-ups:

• “Can you contractually commit to [price X] for [Y years]?”
• “What’s your policy on forced upgrades or EOL of products?”
• “How do you communicate major changes to customers?”
• “What’s your track record? Have you ever done a major surprise change?”

Red flag test: Show them the Friday rant about Broadcom’s VVF chaos and ask: “How would you ensure you don’t do this to your customers?” If they dismiss it or don’t see the problem, walk away.

Question 5: “How do you handle the skills gap transition?”

Because this is where hidden costs live.

What to listen for:

• Specific training programs and schedules
• Certification paths and costs
• Migration services (knowledge transfer, not just tooling)
• Documentation quality (ask to see it)
• Community resources and forums
• Partner ecosystem for consulting help

Concrete questions:

• How long does it take to get an engineer productive on your platform?
• What’s included in your migration services?
• Do you offer on-site training?
• Can you connect me with a customer who’s been through this training?
• What ongoing education do you provide?

Critical paragraph to remember:

I ask these questions of Pextra just as rigorously as I ask them of Nutanix, Proxmox, or anyone else. No vendor gets a pass. Your infrastructure is too important to make decisions based on marketing slides. If a vendor gets defensive when you ask hard questions, that tells you everything you need to know about the relationship you’re signing up for.

Section 4: The Real Migration Costs Nobody Talks About

Let’s get specific about what migration actually costs, beyond the license fees.

Assessment Phase (2-4 weeks, $20K-50K with consultant help)

You can’t migrate what you don’t understand. This means:

• Full VM inventory with dependencies
• Application documentation (or discovering lack thereof)
• Network topology mapping
• Storage capacity and performance analysis
• Licensing audit (so you know what you’re actually using)
• Team skill assessment
• Workload categorization (what’s easy vs. hard to migrate)

Tools like application dependency mapping can help “organizations discover any potential issues or bottlenecks and take steps to mitigate them before initiating a migration”.

Planning Phase (4-8 weeks, mostly internal time)

• Migration wave planning (what moves when)
• Rollback procedures for each wave
• Network design for new platform
• Storage architecture design
• DR/backup strategy redesign
• Testing plan development
• Communication plan (users, management, stakeholders)

Training Phase (Ongoing, but 3-6 months intensive)

With 95% of IT decision-makers reporting that the cloud skills gap negatively impacts their team, you can’t skip this:

• Formal training courses: $1,500-$4,000 per person per certification path
• Certification exams: $125-$450 per exam
• Self-study time: 2-4 hours/week per engineer for 3-6 months
• Lab environment costs: $5K-20K depending on scale
• Lost productivity: 20-30% reduction during learning curve

Execution Phase (3-18 months, highly variable)

• Migration tools and services
• Consultant/contractor time (if needed)
• Parallel infrastructure costs (running both old and new)
• Extended hours/weekend work (if migrating live systems)
• Unexpected issues and their remediation

One migration guide notes: “Migration can take 6–12 months for assessment and several years for planning and execution”.

Post-Migration Phase (6-12 months)

• Performance tuning and optimization
• Fixing issues discovered only in production
• Final documentation updates
• Advanced training on new platform features
• Decommissioning old infrastructure
• Contract/license cleanup

Example Real Cost Breakdown (100-VM environment):

• Licensing: $30K-80K/year (varies wildly by choice)
• Assessment: $30K (consultant help)
• Training: $25K (5 engineers × $5K average)
• Migration services: $50K-150K (depending on complexity)
• Internal time: 500-1000 hours (your team)
• Parallel infrastructure: $20K (running both for 3 months)
• Unexpected issues: $20K-50K (because they always happen)

Total Year 1 cost: $175K-355K, PLUS ongoing license costs

Compare that to the $160K → $1.6M renewal increase from Broadcom. Migration starts making sense, but it’s not free.

What I’d Do If I Were Still a VMware Customer

Let me be totally transparent about my approach, including the parts where I’m probably biased.

Step 1: Stop Panicking, Start Planning (Week 1-2)

Take a breath. You have time, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

First things I’d do:

• Document exactly what my renewal looks like (cost, date, what’s included)
• Inventory what I actually use vs. what I’m paying for
• Read my current contract carefully (what are my actual obligations?)
• Join r/sysadmin and r/vmware if I haven’t already
• Start a migration research document

Step 2: Qualify the Pain (Week 2-3)

Is migration actually worth it for me?

Questions I’d answer:

• What’s my true cost increase from Broadcom? (Be specific)
• Do I need the bundled features they’re forcing me to buy?
• How long until my next renewal?
• What’s my team’s capacity for a migration project?
• What’s the executive support for this?
• What’s my risk tolerance?

If the increase is manageable and migration is risky, maybe I eat it for one renewal cycle and plan better. If it’s untenable, proceed.

Step 3: Build the Short List (Week 3-6)

I’d evaluate:

Open Source (Proxmox):

• Start with a home lab migration
• Test my most complex workload types
• See if my backup/monitoring tools work
• Assess my team’s comfort level

Commercial Options:

• Nutanix (because it’s the most proven VMware alternative)
• Pextra (because I believe in the AI and openness story, but I’d be skeptical)
• Maybe Microsoft if I’m Windows-heavy

Cloud Options:

• AWS with bare metal EC2
• Azure with Arc
• Hybrid models

Step 4: Run Real POCs (Week 6-12)

Not vendor demos. Real POCs with MY workloads:

• Migrate 5-10 representative VMs to each platform
• Test backup/restore
• Test DR
• Measure performance
• Have my team use the management interface for 2 weeks
• Break something and call support
• Try to export the VMs back out

Step 5: Make the Hard Call (Week 12-14)

With real data, I’d evaluate:

• Total cost (not just licensing)
• Team confidence
• Executive support
• Risk level
• Timeline feasibility

And I’d probably pick Nutanix or Pextra, depending on whether I value battle-tested maturity (Nutanix) or modern architecture and pricing transparency (Pextra).

Step 6: Negotiate Like Hell (Week 14-16)

With an alternative in hand:

• Go back to Broadcom with competitive quotes
• See if they’ll negotiate (probably not, but try)
• Negotiate hard with the alternative vendor
• Get everything in writing, especially price locks
• Insist on reasonable exit clauses

Step 7: Execute Methodically (Month 4+)

• Start with dev/test
• Then non-critical production
• Then critical workloads
• Keep extensive notes
• Over-communicate with everyone

Conclusion: Engineer-to-Engineer Advice

There’s No Perfect Answer

Every option has trade-offs. Proxmox is cheap but requires more expertise. Nutanix is proven but more expensive. Pextra is modern but less mature. Cloud is flexible but has its own lock-in risks.

Your context matters more than best practices. What works for a 10-person startup is different from a 1000-person enterprise. What works for a manufacturing company is different from a software company.

The “right” answer depends on:

• Your team’s skills and capacity
• Your budget and cost sensitivity
• Your risk tolerance
• Your timeline pressures
• Your workload characteristics
• Your organizational culture

Match Solution to Actual Requirements, Not Marketing

Build your requirements from your reality:

• What do you actually use today? (Not what you’re licensed for)
• What do you need for the next 3-5 years?
• What’s your team capable of learning?
• What’s your actual risk tolerance? (Be honest)
• What’s your budget really look like?

Ignore the feature comparison checklists. They lie. Focus on:

• Can this platform run my workloads?
• Can my team operate it effectively?
• Will this vendor be a good partner?
• What’s my total cost of ownership?
• What’s my exit strategy?

Build Relationships with Vendors Who Admit Limitations

The best vendor conversation I had during my evaluation was the one where the vendor said “Actually, for your use case, you might be better off with [competitor] because [specific technical reason].”

That’s integrity. That’s a partner, not a salesperson.

Honesty is a differentiator. Long-term partnership matters more than the initial sale. Reference customers are your best resource (talk to them honestly). Trust your gut on vendor culture—if something feels off, it probably is.

Red flags in vendor relationships:

• Won’t admit any weaknesses
• Gets defensive at hard questions
• Rushes you to sign
• Won’t let you talk to customers who’ve had problems
• Makes it hard to get straight pricing

Green flags:

• Answers “when would we not be a good fit?”
• Provides reference customers proactively
• Transparent pricing available publicly
• Clear exit/migration path documented
• Responsive to concerns

Plan for the Next Evolution, Not Just Current Migration

This won’t be your last infrastructure change. Technology evolves, vendors get acquired, your needs change. So:

• Build flexibility into your architecture
• Use open standards where possible
• Document everything (seriously, your future self will thank you)
• Avoid lock-in 2.0 (don’t just trade VMware lock-in for something else)
• Think in terms of portability and optionality

Questions to ask yourself:

• In 5 years, how hard will it be to move off this platform?
• Am I building in optionality or lock-in?
• Are my workloads portable?
• Do I understand how my data is stored?
• Can I export everything if needed?

A Note on Pextra (and My Bias)

Full disclosure: I work with Pextra now, which is why they’re mentioned in this article. But I’ve tried to apply the same critical lens to them as I would to any vendor.

If Pextra isn’t right for your use case, I’d rather you go with the right alternative than make a bad decision because of my article. Seriously.

Evaluate them with the same skepticism you’d apply to anyone else:

• Ask those five hard questions I outlined above
• Run a real POC with your workloads
• Talk to their customers (especially ones who’ve had problems)
• Test their support (break something and call them)
• Check their architecture for lock-in risks

The same applies to Nutanix, Proxmox, anyone. Good vendors appreciate tough questions. Bad vendors get defensive.

Final Thought: The Broadcom Lesson

Let’s be real: this situation sucks.

You didn’t ask for Broadcom to acquire VMware. You didn’t ask for 800-1,500% price increases. You didn’t ask to re-evaluate your entire infrastructure stack while trying to keep the lights on and deal with everything else on your plate.

As one Reddit user put it simply: “Sad to see VMware die like this”.

To everyone dealing with VMware migrations right now: I see you. This is hard, disruptive, stressful work that you didn’t choose. This isn’t just a technology problem—it’s organizational change, team stress, political navigation, budget battles, and personal career concerns all wrapped into one.

It’s okay to:

• Be angry about it
• Take time to make the right decision
• Ask for help (consultants, contractors, vendors)
• Push back on unrealistic timelines from management
• Admit you don’t have all the answers

The lesson from all this: vendor behavior matters as much as technology. The best product in the world means nothing if the vendor treats you like a revenue extraction opportunity rather than a partner.

Look for:

• Transparency in pricing and policies
• Honesty about limitations
• Respect for your constraints
• Partnership mentality
• Long-term thinking

And remember: the goal isn’t perfection. The goal is finding something that works for your team and your organization. Something you can operate effectively. Something with a vendor you can trust.

You’ve got this.

Take your time. Ask hard questions. Trust your instincts. And remember that every other sysadmin dealing with this is probably reading the same Reddit threads you are, feeling the same frustration, and trying to figure out the same problems.

We’re all in this together.

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About the Author

The author spent 6 years at VMware working on enterprise virtualization solutions before the Broadcom acquisition, and now works in the infrastructure automation space helping organizations modernize their private cloud environments. This article was written because, after reading hundreds of Reddit threads from engineers dealing with VMware migrations, the inside perspective might help others navigate these difficult decisions.

Disclaimer: The author currently works with Pextra, a VMware alternative platform. This article strives for objectivity, but readers should consider this potential bias when evaluating recommendations. The opinions expressed are personal and don’t necessarily represent the employer’s official positions.

Feedback

Agree? Disagree? Have your own migration horror story or success story? Find me on Reddit (r/sysadmin) or LinkedIn. I’m always interested in hearing real-world experiences from engineers in the trenches.

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Published: Nov 17, 2025