Tesco is moving its store servers from VMware to Proxmox
A Tesco job advert puts a VMware-to-Proxmox migration across its store estate at the centre of a new engineering role. Tesco is also suing Broadcom over its VMware licences.
Tesco is replacing VMware with Proxmox VE on the servers that run its shops. A job advert on Tesco’s careers site, for a Head of Software Engineering for its Edge Platform based in Bengaluru, says the role will lead “the migration from VMware to Proxmox” across the edge estate and deliver “a secure, reliable and cost-effective alternative virtualisation platform”. The Register first reported the advert on 26 October.
The edge estate is not a side project. According to the same advert, it is the computing layer in each store that runs checkout, payments, stock management and staff applications, and it has to keep working through connectivity outages across thousands of locations. The role covers migration patterns for different store set-ups, automated hypervisor provisioning, workload migration with rollback, and a central management platform for the fleet. Tesco has not said how many stores or servers are involved. The Register reports, citing unnamed sources, that Tesco’s core datacentre workloads may go to Microsoft’s Hyper-V instead.
The move follows a legal fight. In 2025 Tesco issued proceedings in the English High Court against Broadcom, VMware International and the reseller Computacenter, seeking at least 100 million pounds over perpetual VMware licences it bought in 2021. Tesco says the licences were left without the support it paid for after Broadcom moved VMware to subscription-only bundles. The case is not expected to be heard before late 2027.
Proxmox Server Solutions is a Vienna company that has never taken outside investment. Its hypervisor is free under the AGPL, including clustering, high availability and live migration; customers pay per CPU socket for a tested update repository and support. Until this month that support ran on Austrian business hours, and an analyst quoted by The Register had advised large buyers to find a support partner for that reason. On 19 October Proxmox moved its Premium subscribers to 24/7 vendor support, with Standard to follow in the fourth quarter, and it has opened a North American subsidiary in Kingston, Ontario.
Tesco joins the City of Munich, which said this month that it will finish its own VMware-to-Proxmox migration in 2027. The other European option on this site, XCP-ng from Vates in Grenoble, raised 30 million euro in October.