Golem.de picked up a survey today that matches what I have been seeing with clients for months: many want to leave VMware. According to a Rimini Street survey, 90 percent of VMware customers are looking at alternatives because licensing costs went up.

The numbers

More than 300 VMware customers were surveyed:

  • 90 percent are considering alternatives because of higher licensing costs.
  • 73 percent name cost as the main reason.
  • 54 percent name the end of support for perpetual licenses.
  • 60 percent do not want to drop VMware completely and plan to run several hypervisors side by side.

On price increases, Golem quotes customers who report 100 to 300 percent. One customer mentions up to 1,000 percent. These are individual statements, not averages.

Putting it in context

Rimini Street sells support for VMware customers itself, so the survey comes from a party with a stake in the result. Golem points this out and adds that the figures match other studies. I see it the same way: read the percentages with care, but the direction is right.

The 60 percent hybrid figure is the interesting part. Few companies can switch overnight. Anyone with production VMs does not want downtime.

What it means for small and mid-sized businesses

Large enterprises can negotiate with Broadcom. A company with two or three hosts has no leverage. For small setups, licensing also grows out of proportion to the hardware.

What I have learned from migrations for schools and SMBs:

  • Most environments do not use a feature Proxmox lacks.
  • The exceptions are vSAN and NSX, where a move takes more work.
  • A migration can be done step by step: one test machine first, then the non-critical VMs, production last.

I covered the technical details and the cost comparison in Proxmox vs VMware.

How I run a migration

  1. Take inventory: which VMs run, which licenses are involved, when does the contract end?
  2. Set up Proxmox in parallel and migrate one non-critical VM as a test.
  3. Sort out backups, usually Proxmox Backup Server following the 3-2-1 rule.
  4. Move the VMs in stages, each with a rollback plan.
  5. Train the IT team.

If you only want to know what a move would cost, I can give you an estimate for your environment.

Thinking about leaving VMware?

I am an IT consultant in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and I support small and mid-sized businesses in the Rhine-Neckar region. Write to me through the contact page or by email at kontakt@asadim.de and we can check together whether a move pays off for you.

Source: Golem.de, 7 October 2026, based on a Rimini Street survey.