Most VMware customers are considering alternatives. Very few have moved
A sponsored survey found 90 per cent of VMware users weighing alternatives, but a separate study puts completed migrations at 4 per cent. Meanwhile the French company behind XCP-ng raised 30 million euro.
A survey published on 6 October found that 90 per cent of VMware customers are considering alternatives because of higher licensing costs, and that 54 per cent cite the end of perpetual licence support as a further reason to look around. The research was carried out by Unisphere Research among 269 people at VMware user organisations between December 2025 and February 2026. It was commissioned by Rimini Street, which sells third-party support for VMware — worth stating plainly, because one of its headline findings is that 66 per cent are using or considering exactly that.
The word doing the work is “considering”. A separate study reported in February, covering 302 North American IT decision-makers at companies with more than 1,000 employees, found that 86 per cent were actively reducing their VMware footprint while only 4 per cent had replaced it completely. Intent is close to universal; departure is not.
The pressure is well documented. Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware on 22 November 2023 and collapsed hundreds of SKUs into a handful of bundles within weeks, ending perpetual licences in favour of subscription and moving pricing to a per-core model with a 16-core-per-CPU floor. The free ESXi edition was withdrawn in February 2024 and restored in April 2025 as ESXi 8.0 Update 3e, but it cannot be joined to vCenter, so it gives an administrator one unmanaged host rather than a managed cluster. vSphere 8, the last perpetually licensable version, reaches end of general support on 11 October 2027.
In Europe the sharper complaint comes from the supply side. Broadcom closed its partner programme to VMware Cloud Service Provider partners on 26 January 2026 and stopped renewing their contracts. CISPE, the European cloud infrastructure trade body, lodged a complaint with the Commission’s competition directorate on 19 March 2026 together with a request for interim measures; its own September report states that no formal investigation has been announced. The same report says members have seen licence costs rise tenfold or more compared with pre-acquisition pricing.
Two European vendors sit directly in that gap, and both are now on this site. XCP-ng, the Xen-based hypervisor from Vates in Grenoble, raised 30 million euro on 6 October from IRIS and Bpifrance Large Venture — its first outside money after a decade of self-funding, with the co-founders explicitly remaining majority shareholders. Proxmox VE comes from a Vienna company that has never raised capital at all and gives away clustering, high availability and live migration under the AGPL, charging only for a tested repository and support. Neither matches vSphere feature for feature. Both give you a managed cluster for nothing, which is more than the incumbent’s free tier does.