For more than two decades, VMware was synonymous with enterprise virtualization. ESXi, vCenter, vSphere — these names became part of the vocabulary of any serious infrastructure professional. Companies built entire environments on this platform, trained teams, designed processes, and defined budgets with VMware as a central pillar.

In November 2023, Broadcom completed the acquisition of VMware for approximately $61 billion. And the market was never the same.

What Changed — and Why It Hurts So Much

Broadcom has a well-documented history of acquisitions followed by aggressive portfolio and pricing restructuring. With VMware, it was no different. Within a few months after the deal closed, changes began to appear:

End of perpetual licenses. The historical single-purchase license model was discontinued. Everything moved to mandatory annual subscriptions — regardless of how many years of support the customer still had under contract.

Forced product bundling. Products started to be sold exclusively in bundles. Those who used only basic vSphere are now forced to pay for a bundle that includes features they will never use.

Elimination of smaller partners and channels. Broadcom drastically reduced its partner ecosystem, concentrating distribution in a much smaller number of resellers and eliminating discounts that SMBs and mid-sized companies depended on to make contracts viable.

Price adjustments from 3x to 10x. Customer reports worldwide — confirmed by market analysts, Gartner, and the specialized press — point to renewal increases ranging from 300% to 1,000% over the previous contract. That is not an exaggeration. It is the new reality.

The practical result: companies that had VMware as a predictable and controlled operational cost woke up to a completely different invoice — and the obligation to decide what to do before the next renewal cycle.

The Dilemma for Affected Companies

Faced with this scenario, companies basically have three paths:

1. Pay the new price and absorb the impact. This is the option with the lowest immediate technical risk, but with the highest financial impact. For many organizations, especially in Brazil where the exchange rate amplifies the effect of the dollar-based adjustment, this path simply makes the IT budget unfeasible.

2. Migrate to public cloud. AWS, Azure, and GCP seem like a natural alternative, but they are rarely the answer for mission-critical environments in the medium term. Public cloud costs for compute-intensive, storage-intensive, and database I/O workloads tend to be significantly higher than well-sized on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, latency, LGPD compliance, and connectivity dependence are factors that make public cloud unfeasible as the only solution for many company profiles.

3. Migrate to an alternative virtualization platform. This is where Proxmox VE enters as the protagonist — and this is where the vast majority of well-advised companies are heading.

Why Proxmox VE Is the Most Serious Alternative

Proxmox Virtual Environment is not a novelty. It is an Open Source platform based on Debian Linux, actively developed since 2008, maintained by the Austrian company Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH. In the last two years, however, corporate interest has exploded — precisely because of the Broadcom effect.

What makes Proxmox a real enterprise alternative, and not just an academic option:

Industrial-grade KVM hypervisor

Proxmox uses KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) as its main hypervisor — the same technology that underpins most public clouds in the world, including AWS itself. It is not an inferior substitute. It is mature technology, tested at global scale and with decades of development.

LXC container support

In addition to full VMs, Proxmox natively supports LXC containers, allowing lighter and more efficient workloads on the same cluster — something VMware charges separately for or does not offer with the same integration.

Complete web interface and REST API

Management is done through a native, intuitive, and functional web interface. The REST API allows automation and integration with any infrastructure-as-code tool (Terraform, Ansible). No additional product equivalent to vCenter is needed to manage multiple hosts.

Native High Availability (HA)

Clustering with HA, live migration of VMs between hosts, and automatic failover are included at no additional license cost. In VMware, these features are part of higher licensing tiers.

Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)

The ecosystem includes Proxmox Backup Server — an incremental backup solution with deduplication, integrity verification, and support for immutable backups. This means real protection against ransomware that tries to compromise the backups themselves.

Licensing cost

Proxmox VE can be used without any paid license in production environments — with access to community repositories. For companies that require official support, contractual SLA, and access to enterprise repositories, Proxmox GmbH's support plans cost a fraction of any equivalent VMware license.

What a VMware → Proxmox Migration Involves in Practice

Migrating a production virtualization environment is not trivial. It is a project that requires planning, controlled execution, and rigorous validation at each stage. The main elements of a well-executed process include:

Inventory and mapping of the current environment

Before moving any VM, it is necessary to accurately document the entire environment: number and profile of each virtual machine, dependencies between systems, network requirements, storage configurations, availability SLAs, and acceptable maintenance windows per workload.

Compatibility analysis

Not every VMware configuration has direct equivalence in Proxmox. Features such as VMware Tools, specific paravirtualized drivers, complex chained snapshots, and advanced network configurations (NSX) need to be mapped and planned individually. An experienced professional identifies these points before the migration — not during.

Disk and format conversion

VMs in VMDK (VMware) format need to be converted to Proxmox-compatible formats (qcow2 or raw). Tools like qemu-img and virt-v2v automate much of this process, but require technical knowledge to handle edge cases and legacy operating systems.

Post-migration performance validation

A technically successful migration needs to be validated from a performance standpoint. Disk I/O, network latency, memory consumption, and behavior under load need to be measured and compared with the baselines from the VMware environment. Configuration adjustments in Proxmox — disk controller type, network driver, CPU pinning — make a significant difference.

Coexistence and cutover strategy

In environments with dozens or hundreds of VMs, migration is never a single event. The correct plan provides for gradual migration by system group, operation in hybrid mode VMware + Proxmox during the transition, and a documented rollback plan for each stage.

How Much Can Your Company Save?

The answer depends on the environment profile, but the numbers are usually expressive. Consider a typical conservative scenario:

A company with 3 ESXi hosts and vSphere Standard + vCenter Server Standard licenses paid, before Broadcom's acquisition, around R$ 80,000 to R$ 120,000 per year in support and licensing renewal (values variable by exchange rate and channel).

With Broadcom's new bundling and per-core pricing models, that same environment may be renewing at R$ 300,000 to R$ 600,000 per year — or more, depending on the number of physical cores in the servers.

In contrast, the same environment on Proxmox VE with enterprise support costs, depending on the plan subscribed, from R$ 15,000 to R$ 40,000 per year — and that includes official support from Proxmox GmbH with defined SLA.

The difference is not marginal. It is structural. And it repeats every year.

Why Many Companies Still Haven't Migrated

If the math is so favorable to Proxmox, why are so many companies still paying Broadcom's new tariffs without questioning?

Some common factors:

Fear of the unknown. VMware environments built over years carry an implicit complexity that internal teams know deeply. The idea of migrating to a different platform generates insecurity — especially when there is no trusted technical partner to lead the process.

Lack of time and internal capacity. IT teams already overloaded with day-to-day operations rarely have bandwidth to plan and execute a platform migration while maintaining the production environment.

Misinformation about Proxmox maturity. There is still a mistaken perception that Proxmox is 'for lab' or 'for small businesses'. Those who work with the platform in production know that this perception does not correspond to reality — but it persists in the market.

Pressure of the next renewal cycle. Interestingly, the urgency that should accelerate the decision often paralyzes. The team remains focused on negotiating the current contract instead of planning the exit.

How Nyverra Leads This Process

Nyverra has developed a structured methodology for VMware → Proxmox migrations in mission-critical environments, applied in real projects with different client profiles.

The process begins with a diagnostic consulting — a detailed analysis of the current environment that results in a report with the complete technical mapping and, more importantly, the projected ROI of the migration: how much the client is paying today, how much they would pay on Proxmox, and the cost of the migration project. With these numbers in hand, the decision ceases to be technical and becomes financial — and much simpler.

Execution follows a project plan with phase-based deliverables, documented validations, and clear acceptance criteria. The client monitors each stage and maintains full visibility of progress.

Nyverra does not disappear after the cutover. The managed services model ensures continuous support, monitoring of the Proxmox environment via Zabbix, and incident response capability — with contractual SLA.

The Time to Act Is Before the Next Renewal

If your company uses VMware and the current contract is close to expiration — or if you have already received the renewal proposal with Broadcom's new prices — the time to start the analysis is now.

Not because the decision needs to be rushed. But because a well-done migration requires planning, and planning requires time. Companies that wait until the last month before renewal to start evaluating alternatives invariably make worse decisions — either paying an unjustifiable amount for another year, or executing a rushed migration with unnecessary risks.

Nyverra offers an initial no-obligation diagnostic consulting. In a technical meeting, we analyze your environment profile, identify the main migration attention points, and present an ROI estimate based on your real numbers.

No jargon. No vague promises. With the numbers on the table.

Contact Nyverra and schedule your diagnostic consulting.

Nyverra Tecnologia is an MSP specialized in critical infrastructure, Open Source virtualization, and management of mission-critical environments, headquartered in Senador Canedo, Goiás. We perform VMware → Proxmox migrations with planning, security, and operational continuity guarantee.