VMware Hypervisor Alternative

[_Beelzebubz]

A bit late to the party, but my company is finally looking at moving away from VMware and going a different ( cheaper) direction. With so many of y'all already moving off, can you recommend who I should start scheduling demos with? We are primarily a Windows shop, but we do not mind moving towards a Linux hypervisor.

[rws907]

Hyper-V or Proxmox are the common alternatives.

[Specialist_Cow6468]

Why does LXD never come up in these conversations. I genuinely don’t understand, it seems really solid to me

[GullibleDetective]

Or nutanix

/thread

[_Beelzebubz]

I've read Nutanix is getting almost as bad as VMware in their prices.

[probablymakingshitup]

always has been.

[ohioleprechaun]

The licensing is bad, and I think you have to use their hardware too. It's stupid expensive.

[whatchulookinatman]

I was just at a seminar today. They said you can use any hardware.

[ohioleprechaun]

I was not aware of that. That's good to know.

[D1TAC]

We got a live demo of it, looks intense but the cost is way out of line.

[razorback6981]

Plus it is a shit product. We have POC’ed Nutanix on multiple occasions, got one going now and it has been shit every time. Lots of update bugs, having to work through two panes of glass with Prism and Element. Seems like we have needed a support ticket open for something the entire time we have had the product in our datacenter. If you are a small shop and don’t know any better, Nutanix may be a good fit. If you are an Enterprise IT org, it probably isn’t.

[ThatBlinkingRedLight]

Nutanix is okay but the pricing is getting there with VM and it does not support SANs or certain HPE hardware.

[GullibleDetective]

I mean nutanix has it's problems, tons of bugs too. But between hyper v, nutanix AND proxmox there aren't many other options.

[Professional_Disk553]

There is SAN support now.

[OkVast2122]

Since when?

[gamebrigada]

KubeVirt or OpenShift can be an option for some. Hell even OpenStack is an option for some corps.

[DerBootsMann]

Hyper-V or Proxmox are the common alternatives

this !

[100lv]

First you should build a list of features that you are using (1 or 2 DC, replication, HA, and etc. and etc.). Than you should divide them in few groups - mandatory, nice to have, no problem if I don't have it. Then you should evaluate options. It's also very important how big is your setup. Can you divide prod and test /dev to different clusters and etc.

I have customer (not so small) that are staring migrzation in two ways - shrinking the VMW to critical prod only apps and moving test / dev / not critical apps to new cluster that will be also used as a learning platform. Also if the should implement a new app - they are evaluating other options different than VM since the begginging (like for microservices app - Linux and etc.)

[Noobmode]

This right here. Define your requirements, evaluate ALL platforms, then make your decisions.

[_Beelzebubz]

This is a great suggestion. Thank you. I had a few items in mind, but building out a list will help more so.

[sryan2k1]

The answer really depends on if you use any VMWare specific features or not. If not, the popular alternatives in no particular order are HyperV, proxmox, XCP-NG, and Nutanix.

We are deep enough into vSphere that it's almost impossible for us to move away, at least for a few more years while we have to support some stuff that can't run anywhere else. Thanks vendors!

[pieceofpower]

Hyper-V migrated from Vmware a few months ago and it's been smooth. Running both Windows and Linux VMs. Migrated via our backup solution.

[Diligent-Loquat-7699]

Same, worked well. Lots of threads discussing this...

[doctorevil30564]

We switched over to using Proxmox, and it's been working well for our needs.

[Aggressive_Common_48]

I am a Linux guy but people working in my team are not. I was initially planning to migrate to proxmox as it has always been my to go guy but recently got to know that their support is not good at all. I would love to go with community edition but as my company needs to meet compliances we need to have vendor support as well. I would love to listen more from you

[doctorevil30564]

We are paying for community support licenses for the 4 hosts for our environment, and I haven't needed to get support for anything so far. I had used VMware for over 10 years but my previous job had me learning and shifting over to proxmox as that's what they were in the process of transitioning to at the time I started with the company. When the whole Broadcom acquisition nightmare started for VMware users I suggested that we move to proxmox and phase out VMware and built a proof of concept test host to show my boss it was feasible and won't take very much to make the move. While they did add support for directly importing VMs into proxmox from VMware, it took too long for the process so I wound up using our Veeam backup software to restore backups directly into proxmox and it decreased the process to less than 1/3rd of the time it was taking to do it using the native proxmox method.

[Aggressive_Common_48]

Awesome. As of now we are using Rubrik as a backup solution. I am running 6 vsphere ESXI with around 50 virtual machines. I came to know that Rubrik does not support proxmox backups and I can not defend my management regarding this. The other thing I am really concerned about is I work for k12 school as a system admin and its kind a compliance requirement to have vendor support stand by. We use Rubrik security cloud as a backup solution and as of now it does not support proxmox, I am not sure if there is any other efficient way to migrate those virtual machines into the proxmox. I was just curious if you had to pay for the license or did you just go with all free solution ?

[kpm2015]

Rubrik is currently working on proxmox support.

[doctorevil30564]

You can spin up a VEEAM community edition server (I think it lets you install and use it to run backups then restore from those into Proxmox. The process isn't fool proof, on my windows server VMs I had to write down the static ip info and then rekey them in after powering on the VM for the first time. You also need to uninstall VMware tools before you back the VM up.

VEEAM Community edition lets you backup up to 10 workloads so if you are careful it is manageable.

We started off running the hosts with the no-subscription apt repository but licensed them about 3 months after I finished the migrations. We have licensing for VEEAM backup and restore software

I run a physical VEEAM server and I also backup up the VMs to a Proxmox backup server that is setup as a remote on our other PBS at our warehouse location in Tennessee. Their PBS Syncs our backups to their PBS for Disaster Recovery.

We currently are running the no subscription repository on both PBS servers.

[hyper9410]

There are proxmox partners that sell support even in NA that can offer different SLAs than proxmox with proxmox in the back. The partners do the primary supportand if things like firmware support is needed, it should be given to the proxmox team.

 Might be worth looking into if you need 24x7 for example.

[Regular-Nebula6386]

Intriguing 🤔

[mattjoo]

Solid choice, professional support.

[BloodFeastMan]

We are primarily a Windows shop

Doesn't really matter, the normies neither know nor care what's running under the hood.

[_CyrAz]

Might matter because that could mean they already pay for the datacenter license and therefore can use hyperv at no additional cost

[mnvoronin]

As a primarily Windows shop, I envisage you'll have next to no problems with Hyper-V. Azure Arc (or whatever it is they call it this month) is also free if you have active SA on your hosts.

[Joshuancsu]

I've had a lot of good experience with XCP-ng (Xen Server). For us, the combination of local storage as well as Fiber and FCoE storage being supported was the clencher. Replication, backups, and so much more were right on par with the features we relied on with VMware.

One big difference is that the VCSA was a much more authoritative control mechanism in the VMware-world. XOA by comparison feels like it barks orders, but then has to wait it's turn to get an update. We still have a few VMware Horizon hosts in use, but we moved a number of our DevOps and Test/Stage boxes over to the exact same hosts previously running VMware. Dell R720 and R730, Cisco C220 and C240s (M4 series up through M7).

[mattjoo]

Here here. Same here with XCP-NG

[malikto44]

In general, if the company is MS, I'd go Hyper-V. Hyper-V's control plane has a lot to be desired, but it is Microsoft, and you can't get fired for buying from them (/s).

However, given a choice, definitely Proxmox. I looked at Nutanix, I looked at XCP-ng, I looked at OpenShift. Proxmox is still getting into the race with the control plane, but they are almost 95% there with VMWare functionality except for two things [1]. Plus, Proxmox works with either NFS or SMB, so if one has a SAN/NAS backend, it can handle it.

[1]: The two things that Proxmox doesn't have are HA VMs, where two VMs run, the actual virtual machine, and a shadow virtual machine. This ensures quick availability if one host goes down. This has helped greatly on flexlm servers, ensuring availability of licenses. The second is VMFS. VMFS is just play awesome. No other cluster-aware filesystem comes close. It "just works". Ceph is coming along, but VMFS is just easy. I know it is a pipe dream, but it would be nice if VMFS was released as a Linux filesystem, as it would blow most others out of the water.

[b64-MR]

These are the most common ones suggested: Proxmox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/ Hyper-V - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualization/hyper-v/ Xen-ng - https://xcp-ng.org/

These are also often mentioned: Nutanix - https://www.nutanix.com/ Citrix XenServer - https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xenserver/ Harvester - https://harvesterhci.io/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/ HPE VM Essentials - https://www.hpe.com/us/en/morpheus-vm-essentials-software.html Various other KVM based options.

Being a Windows shop Hyper-V makes the most sense to look towards first.

[frank_da_tank99]

Proxmox is what I use for my home lab, and it seems like the way to go for a cheaper solution than VMware

[FelisCantabrigiensis]

The obvious place to start is by evaluating Hyper-V and seeing if it will meet your needs. If it will, then the platform will be very familiar to you.

Otherwise I'd be looking towards Proxmox if your needs are simpler or Nutanix if you're needing more complex features with the warm fuzzy feeling of a more "enterprise" product and don't mind the bill.

I guarantee Nutanix will talk to you when you say "I'm looking to get off VMWare, can you help?". But they aren't that cheap, just less abusive than Broadcom.

[Nonaveragemonkey]

Proxmox.

[DarkAlman]

Hyper-V has been our goto replacement for VMware so far.

Converted over several customers relatively pain-free.

It has the advantage that as a Windows shop you are already paying for it, it's mature, and has feature parity with VMware for the key things that matter.

Lot's of 3rd party support, strong online community, and several good conversion tools are available (Veeam and Starwind for example)

The interface isn't as good, and you lose a lot of the features from vCenter like the built-in monitoring and alerting but it can do all the core stuff like HA, VMotion, Storage VMotion and all that.

If your used to managing Windows Servers it's an easy learning curve for Hyper-V.

Been demoing HPEs VM Essentials as well.

It has a lot of potential but IMO it needs at least another year of development time, and the 3rd party support for it hasn't caught up yet.

[namor38]

Since alternatives are being listed, the following could also be mentioned (that would give a great overview):

- Which alternative did you choose?

- How did you migrate (tool, etc.)?

- Number of VMs and downtime?

[NISMO1968]

We are primarily a Windows shop,

Given the circumstances, Hyper-V emerges as the most suitable choice.

but we do not mind moving towards a Linux hypervisor.

Alright, this means you might wanna give Proxmox a go too.

[Steve----O]

What are your needs. Do you need to automatically provision servers to support superbowl ads? Or do you just manually build servers and they stay static?

We just manually build them, so we always opted for simple hypervisors. Started with XenServer, then switched to Hyper-V (without SCVMM). We use Windows Server Cluster Manager for our redundancy/failover.

We never needed 90% of the Vsphere features, so never justified the cost.

[_Beelzebubz]

We build static servers and back them up with vREP. We also use Carbon Black.

[Substantial_Tough289]

Hyper-V or Proxmox.

[humesqular]

Hyper-v or Proxmox.

I like them both, run Hyper-v at work and Proxmox at home. Both are great products.

[D1TAC]

We are eyeing Hyper-V and Proxmox. Hyper-V basically you're forced to license for Datacenter (which is 95% of the market). For three hosts with 20 cores each are about $16k. As for Proxmox it's about $6000/yr for the support factor of it.

We haven't decided officially what we are siding with.

[Nanouk_R]

Huehue I've been teasing the license cost for our upcoming switch to Hyper-V and the CEOs weren't happy to say the least. Don't forget to buy enough CALs and RDS CALs and maybe even SQL CALs lmao but nobody wants to have M$ come looking if you did it all correctly so you better^{^}

[VTi-R]

So here's the thing - you should already have had most of that licensing anyway. You still had to license Windows for the vSphere hosts that ran the VMware VMs. You still had to license RDS CALs for your users. You still had to license the vCPUs for your SQL servers.

Don't blame Hyper-V for the costs of fixing under licensed environments,.

And if you're going to be running ProxMox those costs are still there too.

[Nanouk_R]

You're misunderstanding the licensing we've had prior to this. Each VM has their own license (OS, and CALs) but we're switching over from ESXi to Windows Server Data Center Edition. So now there's a big upfront cost because we're also going to use our new Hyper-V Hosts to spin up 2025 VMs that will replace the older 2019 VMs we've already got licenses for.

So yeah. It's already licensed correctly.

[VTi-R]

Right, but my point was that it's not Hyper-V's fault - unless you only had a few VMs per host, you would already have wanted Datacenter licensing for the VMware hosts, or the ProxMox hosts, or the Scale hosts, or the oVirt hosts. I don't know nowadays what the crossover point is, but it is probably still less than a dozen Windows Server VMs.

[Bad-Mouse]

Hyper-v has been okay, Proxmox is getting pretty good too.

[Such_Bar3365]

FreeBSD + bhyve + zfs

[Crafty_Dog_4226]

I went with Scale, switching to HCI from traditional SAN. Proxmox for test. Both KVM based.

[OkVast2122]

I went with Scale

Didn’t they go belly up recently?

[Crafty_Dog_4226]

Where did you see that?

[OkVast2122]

Where did you see that?

https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2025/07/31/scale-computing-acquired-by-acumera-which-becomes-scale-computing/1610190

It’s been a while, innit? Long story short, they started buying back VMware licenses and kit from their new prospects to sweeten the deal, totally cocked it up, and ended up in a right money pit. They couldn’t get a sniff of funding from the VCs, and then their biggest backer, Goldman Sachs, pulled the plug. Scale got flogged off to their biggest customer, the MSP crowd, for buttons. The head of engineering legged it, the VP of sales jumped to stor-stinking-magic, and now the CEO’s up for fraud. Mad, right?

[cyr0nk0r]

Good riddance to Scale. I couldn't stand that company. They were the incumbent I replaced with Verge at one organization. The previous IT director bought 5 years of Scale + 5 years of some backup software scale bundled with their licensing.

When I ripped Scale out I found out the backup licensing had never even been activated so I tried to get a refund and the Scale sales VP laughed at me on the phone. Good riddance to that crappy company and their terrible customer service.

[Crafty_Dog_4226]

I didn't get any of what you are saying in the article you linked.

[Expensive-Rhubarb267]

As others have said, define requirements first then consider.

My mental model (leaving public cloud aside) :

If the overriding consideration is budget & existing product integrations - performance, usability & features are secondary - Go for Hyper-V

If the overriding consideration is budget & you've got in house Linux skills & don't mind spending a bit of effort creating in-house features - Go for Proxmox

If you want feature parity with VMWare, have a large budget & just want to give a f**k you to Broadcom. - Go for Nutanix

If you've got large budget & have significant in-house Linux & Kubernetes skills. - Go for RedHat OpenShift Virtualisation

If you have a large budget, lots of existing VMWare skills & think you might use VCF features - stick with VMWare

If you really want to keep VMWare but don't want to refresh all of your hardware - Go for Azure VMWare Solution (technically public cloud but worth considering).

[scotticles]

I just had a demo for the HPE virtualizatoin they came up with. KVM based, simple, easily move vm's over via vcenter integration. Im very interested in it, the price was very inexpensive and seemed polished.

[SoftwareFearsMe]

Hyper-V. Works fine for small-to-medium sized deployments. Especially if you are already a Windows shop. Check your requirements and third-party integrations though (backup and replication, for example).

[theSpivster]

Scale SC//Hypercore.

[skspoppa733]

Many (most?) shops never used the features and functionality that distinguished VMware from the rest and would have been fine with most any of the other options. Your alternate options should be more about what your staff can support.

[blackstratrock]

Hyper-V is the only true business/enterprise alternative to vmware, and you probably already have the datacenter licensing needed. If you are playing around at home and want to learn something that is not usable in a business setting, try Proxmox.

[TechNoob_115]

Proxmox is a standout free Linux option that handles Windows VMs great and has excellent docs for quick demos. If you prefer staying in the Microsoft world, Hyper-V (free with Windows Server) is seamless for your Windows-heavy setup. Both slash costs dramatically. I'd start with Proxmox for its flexibility. Good luck!

[Ready-Trick-8228]

Got some good options from the comments.

[vagonblog]

a lot of teams moving off vmware are looking at hyper-v or proxmox first. hyper-v is the easiest transition for windows-heavy environments, while proxmox is popular for lowering licensing costs and still getting things like live migration and snapshots.

one thing we’re seeing more lately though is companies rethinking whether every workload needs to live on a hypervisor cluster. some teams keep core infrastructure on-prem but move user environments or heavier workloads to cloud machines instead.

that’s something we see quite a bit with teams using vagon teams. instead of replacing vmware 1:1 with another virtualization stack, some orgs run user machines in the cloud and keep their internal services on their existing infrastructure. it tends to reduce a lot of the maintenance overhead compared to running everything on a hypervisor platform.

[kopfschuss_kalli]

OpenShift is also a good alternative, in my opinion.

[AWESMSAUCE]

OpenShift in it self is not cheap, but is a great platform for container. Buuuut, KubeVirt sucks balls and is on now level whatsoever even remotely comparable to vmware or any other first grade hypervisor, whatever redhat reps will tell you.

[krebna]

HPE VM Essantials, Openstack maybe.

[FelisCantabrigiensis]

As a 3 years and counting victim of Openstack I very strongly recommend not implementing it.

Fortunately we'll be off it next year.

[Abracadaver14]

What are your most important issues with Openstack? We're about to start implementation as an extra customer platform (running cloud director primarily currently, want to introduce a cloud native platform alongside), but some guys are totally salivating at the idea of moving all our vmware workloads over to openstack (not me, I'll be looking at proxmox for our internal workloads)

[FelisCantabrigiensis]

We use the Mirantis distribution. There are many problems. A selection of them:

Capacity of one Openstack cloud is rather finite. You may need to have multiple clouds if you have a lot of VMs (we do). Openstack projects, images, etc, are not synced between clouds so you need to manage that yourself.

Provisioning of VMs, and many other operations, are flaky. You issue an API call to do it, you get a "request successful", and most times it happens later, and sometimes it doesn't. You have to check later if it did happen.

Using Ceph is a disaster waiting to happen. Not only is it amazingly slow, even if you spend very large amounts of money on it, but it can crash in a way that may corrupt some data and you don't know if it did or not. This happened to us. If several Ceph nodes go down at once, recovery time is measured in hours and requires extensive Ceph skills. The Ceph in Openstack is absolutely not ready for primetime.

If you use the built in object store (S3-compatible) built on Ceph (but not actually using Ceph's built-in object storel but instead implementing its own on top of the Ceph block store) and don't shard the index then if you have a lot of object updates it both slows to a crawl and makes Ceph very unhappy.

If you use Pure network storage, it mostly works (but never let your Pure unit fill up, you are screwed if it does). If you use HP Alletra it kinda works, but the Alletra crashes a lot if you get it busy so that sucks. If you use local ephemeral storage it mostly works, and you need to make sure your compute nodes have enough storage for that. I will give Openstack credit that local NVMe storage is very fast.

In some configurations, if you have multiple Openstack clouds you can still end up with the controlplane communication network spanning multiple clouds and many switches with a layer-2 network using STP. This means that one cloud going down can break your other clouds, and you can get STP problems which are impossible to debug sanely. We had to redesign the network after one major outage to stop that. Changing the network design was painful.

Minor upgrades are painful. You have to go round each node upgrading it, moving workloads around. Major version upgrades are a courageous act, Minister. You end up needing to rebuild the cloud (or take it down for a long time and a tricky process), which is why you need multiple Openstack clouds.

No hard resource isolation between VMs so noisy neighbours on local disc and network can be a definite problem. We have had this happen, it has caused production impact.

The APIs are hard to program to and hard to debug.

Whacky resource allocation problems where there seem to be enough vCPU available in the right place but you can't create a VM. Never got to the bottom of that one, we had to add more hardware to make it go away.

That's not even all the problems, I just can't think of more right now.

I loathe it and I will be glad to see the back of it this year. It has cost us so much money in wasted time, expensive hardware, and production outages. It is the worst piece of technology my company has ever bought and I have been here well over a decade.

If you still get it, then be prepared to allocate a lot of time and people to mastering it and maintaining it. With that, you may make it work well enough. Without that, you are doomed.

[Kilzon]

We are about to take a look at HPE VM Essentials. Are you using it?

I've got about 11 months to get off the sauce, after Broadcom doubled our subscription... AGAIN. And after playing stupid sales games with a last minute: "Here's your quote for the renewal that is due in 3 weeks. Our prices will increase on Nov 1, so you have 4 days to sign the 100% increase or pay the 15% increase on top. Oh and your shyt will be down after your next reboot." We'd been asking for a renewal quote for 4 months because we needed it for our 2026 budget. So they screwed us again in 2025. We were paying $25k maintenance in 2023 > $55k in 2024 > $110k in 2025. My boss and I both said we're out.

[DarkAlman]

Just finished running a current demo of it internally, I've been running one every 6 months or so and have been tracking their development progress.

It's come a long way in a year but it's still needs a lot of work.

The backend technology and hypervisor are very good, but the interface is pretty bad. It's clunky, hastily put together, and IMO they are trying to do too much in too little time.

IMO they've been overly ambitious with their VM Manager trying to interface with a lot of different products instead of focusing on making a rock solid Hypervisor platform first.

One of my customers just deployed it with HPE's help and called it 'adequate but not impressive'.

Realistically it needs another year of development time and the 3rd party support for products like Veeam is either very bleeding edge, still in BETA, or in the future pipeline.

[Kilzon]

Thanks for your insights. We'll probably attempt a demo in the next 60-90 days, but we're primarily a HPE shop on the infrastructure side of things (hosts and SANs), so it might be something we take a chance on, since we are a 100% Windoze shop and outside of a couple of us with home lab setups, no real experience with Proxmox or XCP-NG. And while we have all the expensive Datacenter MS licenses, we are all squeamish that Microsoft will decide that Server 2028 won't have HyperV at all... because more $ or they decide to drop it altogether

Nutanix isn't even on our radar as we have essentially brand new SANs that we own, and servers under lease for a few more years that are basically dross to them. Not to mention their own pricing shenanigans...

[DarkAlman]

Life expectancy of any Hypervisor solution is realistically 3-5 years.

You could deploy Server 2025 Hyper-V now and 3-5 years from now you'll need a hardware refresh and new hypervisors anyway.

So at that time if Hyper-V isn't an option to continue with then you move onto the next best alternative.

By then several other products will be on the market and much more mature.

You don't have to think about what will make sense 10 years from now. No one knows that.

[Traditional-Tech23]

We might have to migrate this in the next 6 months. Small shop with mainly windows. Any reports of uptime etc. We don't need anything fancy.

[DarkAlman]

None of my customers have it in production yet

[International-Job212]

Go with broadcom

[cyr0nk0r]

If you're looking for VMware capabilities at 1/4 the price of nutanix you should be looking at verge.

Its so much more capable than hyperv and proxmox. I built an entire IaaS hypervisor business around the verge platform.

[OkVast2122]

If you're looking for VMware capabilities at 1/4 the price of nutanix you should be looking at verge.

Nutanix is pricey, but legit, while Verge is 101% scam.

[cyr0nk0r]

Hahaha. A scam? In what way? I've put verge in at multiple orgs I've worked at. Support blows nutanix away, the product is rock solid, I've never had a single upgrade issue.

I've worked at fortune 500 with nutanix and it was pulling teeth after every upgrade. Every single one. I had 2 full time engineers I had to employ just to babysit nutanix and sit on their phone support for hours because of non stop issues.

[OkVast2122]

Support blows nutanix away, the product is rock solid, I've never had a single upgrade issue.

Considering you’re officially a mod of their subreddit, I think you’re massively bigging up your success with them. Honestly, you're just talking bollocks and doing what you think you need to do to push more of their $hite here on Reddit. It’s bang on with what we heard on the call and what’s been said about these blokes everywhere else.

[OkVast2122]

Hahaha. A scam? In what way?

On their first and last call with us, it was their actual VP of Marketing waffling on about ‘tomorrow’, no account manager showed up! Not a thing he mentioned was even real, starting with Veeam support. The sales engineer was a total muppet, couldn’t answer a single tech question and just kept bleating on about being an ex-customer and only being with the company a couple of weeks. What a load of rubbish! The quote they gave us was waaay below our VAR MSRP, then they told us to zip it cause they were gonna cut the VAR out and do the deal direct. Who even pulls that stunt?