Leaving VMware: A European Migration Guide (2026)

Leaving VMware is a three-way decision: renegotiate and stay, swap the hypervisor on your own hardware, or move workloads to a European cloud provider. Broadcom's licensing changes since December 2023 forced that decision onto most VMware customers, and the right answer depends on how many hosts you run and how much in-house Linux skill you have. This guide covers what changed, how the European options compare, how to protect backups during the move, and a migration plan that keeps production running.

Every product named below is European-headquartered and reviewed in our directory. The EU alternatives to VMware page lists the full set, and our Proxmox vs VMware comparison goes deeper on the most common replacement.

What Changed With Broadcom's VMware Licensing?

Broadcom ended the sale of VMware perpetual licences in December 2023, shortly after closing its acquisition in November 2023, and consolidated the range into two main bundles, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and vSphere Foundation (VVF). Perpetual licences you already own remain valid, but support and updates now require a subscription.

Subscriptions are counted per CPU core, with a minimum of 16 cores per CPU. A small or older server therefore pays for cores it does not have.

One episode caused lasting confusion. On 28 March 2025, The Register reported that distributor Arrow had told partners the minimum would rise to 72 cores per order line from 10 April 2025. heise reported on 10 April that Broadcom had published a revised reseller price list that still allowed purchases from 16 cores. The 72-core minimum is not in force. Treat it as a reported move that was reversed, not as current policy.

The European legal challenge

On 29 July 2025, CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe) asked the EU General Court to annul the European Commission's unconditional clearance of the Broadcom/VMware deal. The Commission had published its clearance summary on 13 May 2025. CISPE cited contract terminations at a few weeks' notice, mandatory multi-year commitments and "drastic cost increases (sometimes exceeding tenfold)". In February 2026, heise reported that CISPE had documented price increases of 800 to 1,500 percent for European cloud providers. Those figures describe CISPE's cloud-provider members, not every enterprise buyer.

What the survey data says

One widely reported survey comes from CloudBolt Software, conducted in January 2026 and published in late February 2026. It covers 302 IT decision-makers at companies with 1,000 or more employees, all in North America, so treat it as directional for Europe rather than as European data. CIO Dive and heise both reported its headline results:

• 86% of respondents are reducing their VMware use, yet only 4% have fully migrated.
• 51% are moving in phased, partial steps rather than in one cutover.
• 59% saw price rises of 25–49%, and 14% saw rises above 100%.
• Migrations typically take 18 to 24 months.

A Gartner forecast cited in coverage of the survey expects VMware's market share to fall from about 70% in 2024 to about 40% by 2029. Most large organisations are reducing VMware gradually, and very few have finished.

Should You Stay, Swap the Hypervisor, or Move to EU Cloud?

Stay and renegotiate if your renewal is too close to test an alternative. Swap the hypervisor if you own reliable hardware and have Linux skills, and move to European IaaS if your hardware is due for replacement anyway. Each path answers a different question, so start with your constraints rather than with a product.

Staying is a legitimate choice. Applications certified only on vSphere, a renewal date that leaves no time to test, or a team with no Linux depth can all justify one more term. Use that term to cut dependencies that do not need VMware. Backup is the obvious candidate, because it can change without touching production.

A hypervisor swap keeps your data centre and changes the software layer. It is the cheapest route on paper, since the European platforms below charge for support rather than for cores. The cost shifts into staff time, testing and retraining.

Moving to a European cloud changes both the platform and the operating model. It suits teams that would rather not run hardware at all. Networking, storage and access control all move to the provider's model, which makes it the largest change. Our best European cloud hosting providers roundup and the cloud hosting category compare the options.

How Do the European Hypervisor Options Compare?

Proxmox VE and XCP-ng are direct hypervisor replacements, while OpenNebula is a cloud management layer that sits above hypervisors and can manage VMware alongside KVM. All three are open source and developed by EU companies with no US parent.

Prices and tiers come from our product listings, checked against each vendor's own pages; confirm current figures before budgeting.

Proxmox VE: the default shortlist pick

Proxmox is free to run in production with every feature enabled, including high availability, Ceph and live migration. Subscriptions add the Enterprise Repository and ticket support. Because pricing follows sockets rather than cores, a dense server costs the same to support as a sparse one.

The trade-offs are documented in our review. Its web interface feels dated next to vSphere, and networking, storage and clustering demand hands-on Linux expertise. Multi-site disaster recovery has no built-in orchestration and needs scripting or third-party tools.

XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra: an appliance-style stack

XCP-ng & Xen Orchestra suits teams who want backup, replication and VMware import in the same console as the hypervisor. Vates publishes a finite price list per host, with no limits on CPU or RAM. In October 2026, Vates announced a €30 million round led by IRIS with Bpifrance, according to tech.eu. Its CEO says the round comes without compromising its independence.

Two cautions apply. Prices are in US dollars only, so euro budgets carry exchange-rate risk. Choosing Xen also means a different tooling world from KVM, and fewer ISV certifications and third-party backup agents than the larger ecosystems.

OpenNebula: when the problem is the estate, not the hypervisor

OpenNebula answers a different question. Its vCenter integration lets you bring existing vSphere clusters under one control plane, add new KVM capacity and shift workloads over months. That makes it a fit for organisations with several sites, internal tenants or Kubernetes plans.

Expect more design work than with a single hypervisor. You need a front-end, storage and network design before production. Enterprise pricing is quote-only, and sources describe the split between Community and Enterprise editions inconsistently, so confirm licence terms in the contract.

How Do You Protect Backups During and After the Migration?

Choose a backup tool that supports both VMware and your destination platform, so one catalogue and one restore procedure survive the move. Backup tools bought for vSphere do not always support the destination hypervisor, which is where gaps appear. The EU alternatives to Veeam page lists the European options.

• Storware (Warsaw) backs up more than 15 hypervisors and container platforms agentlessly, including VMware, Proxmox VE, Nutanix AHV, OpenStack, oVirt and XCP-ng. It also sells backup-as-migration, where a VM backed up on one platform is restored onto another. V2V migration to OpenStack is commercial-only and excluded from the 60-day trial. A free edition covers up to 5 virtual environments and 1 TB of storage-provider backup.
• SEP sesam (Holzkirchen, near Munich) supports ten hypervisors, among them VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox, XCP-ng, KVM/QEMU, OpenNebula and Nutanix AHV. Its depth in SAP HANA, Oracle and tape suits enterprises with databases in tow. SEP had roughly 40 employees at its 2024 buyout, and pricing is quote-only through partners.
• Xopero ONE (Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland) fits the "stay for now" path. Its published virtualisation support names VMware and Hyper-V only; we found no Proxmox, Nutanix AHV, XCP-ng or OpenStack listing. Confirm destination support in writing before relying on it after a hypervisor swap.
• Built-in options. Proxmox ships Proxmox Backup Server, and Xen Orchestra includes agentless backup with immutability. These work well on a single platform but stop at its boundary.
• Acronis (Schaffhausen, Switzerland) bundles backup with endpoint security for MSP-run estates. Our listing names VMware vSphere and Hyper-V among its integrations, so check destination hypervisor support directly.

Microsoft 365 and other SaaS data are a separate problem from VM backup. Keepit (Copenhagen) covers those workloads but does not protect VMs or on-premises servers. The cybersecurity category lists further European backup and security tools.

What Does a VMware Migration Plan Look Like?

A VMware migration runs in eight steps, and the order protects production: inventory and licence timing come before any conversion, and nothing is decommissioned until restores and failover have been tested on the new platform.

1. Inventory the estate

List every host, its CPU sockets and cores, and every VM with its operating system, disk sizes and datastore type. Record which datastores are vSAN, VMFS5, VMFS6 or NFS, because conversion tools treat them differently. Note licence-bound applications, backup agents, monitoring agents and anything that depends on VMware APIs.

2. Map your licence timeline

Write down the renewal date and what it would cost to renew for one year versus three. Perpetual licences keep running without a subscription, but you lose support and updates. The Register's March 2025 report also described a 20% surcharge on late renewals, so check your reseller's current terms before letting a date pass.

3. Choose the target and build a pilot cluster

Pick one platform from the comparison above and build a small cluster on spare or new hardware. Proxmox high availability needs at least three nodes for quorum, and Vates' Pro tier starts at three hosts. Migrate low-risk internal workloads first, then a representative sample of your hardest VMs.

4. Back up before you convert

Back up each VM with a tool that can restore onto both platforms, and test one restore before conversion starts. That backup is your rollback path.

5. Convert the virtual machines

Use the destination platform's own import tooling, which both main options now include:

• Proxmox VE import wizard. Since Proxmox VE 8.2, released on 24 April 2024, an ESXi host can be added as a storage source and its VMs imported from the web interface. Proxmox's documentation says the source VM must be powered off, and that disks on vSAN or encrypted disks cannot be imported. Snapshots on the source slow the import considerably, and importing through vCenter rather than directly from ESXi reduces performance.
• Xen Orchestra V2V. Xen Orchestra's V2V tool supports warm migration: an initial copy runs while the VM keeps working, and only changed blocks move after shutdown. The XCP-ng documentation lists limits. Remove VMware drivers first, raw disks are unsupported, VMFS6 and vSAN sources must be shut down, and disks above 2 TB minus 8 MB need a manual route.
• Manual routes remain available for edge cases on both platforms, including OVF or OVA export and disk-level conversion.

6. Fix guests and dependencies

Replace VMware-specific guest tools and drivers, then reconnect monitoring and backup agents. Check every licence that is tied to hardware identifiers, because a converted VM can present different virtual hardware.

7. Test disaster recovery on the new platform

Restore a VM from the new backup chain, fail over a host, and time both. Proxmox has no built-in multi-site DR orchestration, so script and rehearse that runbook before you rely on it.

8. Migrate in waves, then decommission

Move workloads in batches grouped by dependency, keeping the VMware cluster available for rollback. Retire VMware hosts only once their workloads have run cleanly through a backup cycle and a patch cycle.

How long should you plan for? CloudBolt's North American respondents reported 18 to 24 months for typical migrations. Small estates can move faster, since the slow work is application testing rather than disk copying.

What If You Leave On-Premises for European IaaS?

Moving to a European IaaS provider swaps your hardware and hypervisor for the provider's platform, so the work is closer to a cloud migration than a V2V conversion. The providers differ more than their marketing suggests:

• Hetzner (Germany) offers dedicated servers and cloud instances, with EU locations in Germany and Finland, plus US and Singapore regions. Teams that want to keep running their own hypervisor can install it on rented dedicated servers.
• OVHcloud (France) runs an OpenStack-based public cloud and bare-metal servers. Its hosted private cloud is VMware- or Nutanix-based, so check which one you are quoted; the VMware variant keeps you on Broadcom's software.
• Scaleway (France, an Iliad Group subsidiary) offers instances, Elastic Metal bare-metal servers and managed Kubernetes.
• IONOS (Germany, part of United Internet) offers cloud servers and dedicated servers.
• STACKIT (Germany, Schwarz Group) offers compute, managed Kubernetes and object storage with C5 Type 2 certification.

Ownership matters as much as location. An EU region of a US-owned cloud keeps you within reach of US legal process, as our CLOUD Act guide explains. The EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework guide offers a checklist for scoring providers on jurisdiction, operational control and supply chain.

What Are the Real Risks of Leaving VMware?

Skills, application certification and support depth are the biggest risks, not the conversion itself. Each one is manageable if you budget for it before the pilot.

1. Skills gap. VMware administrators know vCenter, not Linux storage and networking. Proxmox and XCP-ng both reward hands-on Linux expertise, and OpenNebula adds cloud-design work on top. Train before the pilot, not after the first outage.
2. Vendor certification of enterprise applications. Some ERP, database and appliance vendors certify their software only on named hypervisors. Ask each vendor for a written support statement covering KVM or Xen before moving the workload.
3. Support SLAs from smaller vendors. Proxmox lists 11–50 employees and SEP roughly 40. Round-the-clock support is not universal: Vates offers it only at Enterprise with four or more hosts, and Proxmox says its Premium tier moves to 24/7 coverage from 19 October 2026. Map each SLA against your incident requirements.
4. Disaster recovery maturity. VMware's DR orchestration is more mature than the open-source equivalents. Rebuild runbooks and test them, rather than assuming replication alone covers recovery.
5. Currency and pricing exposure. Vates prices in US dollars, and OpenNebula, Storware, SEP sesam and Xopero all quote privately. Get written quotes before committing to a migration budget.

If you are prioritising: a single site with a modest host count and Linux skills should pilot Proxmox or XCP-ng first. Several sites, tenants or a long vCenter tail point to OpenNebula. No appetite for hardware means a European IaaS provider, ideally after backup has already moved to a hypervisor-agnostic tool.

Related Reading

• EU alternatives to VMware: every European hypervisor and cloud option in one place
• Proxmox vs VMware: the head-to-head for the most common replacement
• EU alternatives to Veeam: European backup tools for the post-VMware stack
• The EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, explained: how to score providers beyond data location
• The CLOUD Act explained: why an EU region on a US cloud is not the same as a European provider