Customer flight from VMware: what alternatives are available?

Since Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023, licensing costs for many Norwegian businesses have more than doubled. This has triggered a wave of companies looking for alternatives to VMware.

“Every week, I speak to customers asking the same question: What should we do now? Almost none of the companies we meet say they are happy with VMware and want to continue as before,” says Åsmund Berget, CTO at Move.

VMware prices have risen sharply in recent years. For many organisations, this means annual IT costs have increased by millions of NOK. As a result, more and more companies are turning to Move to explore alternative solutions. An estimated 80 percent of Norwegian businesses use one or more VMware solutions.

“Many customers are deeply disappointed by what is happening with VMware right now. For many, the new pricing has come as a major shock. VMware used to be driven by engineering and customer needs. Now it is increasingly driven by spreadsheets,” says Berget.

Nutanix: one of the few viable alternatives to VMware

Under Broadcom, VMware has made significant changes to its pricing model, streamlined its product portfolio, and changed its partner model. Berget highlights three main reasons why organisations are now looking for alternatives:

• Significant price increases
• Reduced customer support and a new partner structure
• Uncertainty around future product development and long-term direction

As CTO at Move, Berget advises customers on technology choices, keeps a close eye on technology trends, and helps determine which solutions Move should prioritise. While interest in VMware alternatives is high, the market is still not fully mature.

“Every week, I speak with companies that want to understand their options beyond VMware. The challenge is that there are still only a limited number of solutions that are fully enterprise-ready for large-scale environments. Nutanix is one of the few viable alternatives to VMware for larger organisations,” says Berget.

Why organisations are considering Nutanix

Move has extensive experience and broad expertise in Nutanix, and we are currently helping many customers transition from VMware to Nutanix. For organisations evaluating alternatives to VMware, this is not just about cost. It is also about control, predictability, and long-term flexibility.

Nutanix offers a more integrated and simplified approach to infrastructure operations:

• A unified management interface through Nutanix Prism, providing a clear and intuitive overview of servers, storage, and networking
• Automated, one-click upgrades across the full platform, including hypervisor, storage, and hardware
• Simpler, more predictable, and more transparent pricing models that can help reduce costs
• True native HCI, built from the ground up as hyperconverged infrastructure
• Local data storage on the node where the virtual machine is running, reducing latency and improving performance for many workloads
• Linear scalability, making it easier to expand both compute and storage capacity as needed
• Hypervisor flexibility, with support for AHV, VMware ESXi, and Microsoft Hyper-V
• Hardware flexibility across a wide range of certified platforms, including Dell, HPE, and Lenovo

Customers are being pushed into larger bundles

One reason behind the sharp price increases is VMware’s portfolio changes. Customers are increasingly required to buy larger and more comprehensive bundles, regardless of their actual needs.

“VMware has become focused on large customers and large deals. Global enterprises benefit from bigger volume discounts and are often better positioned to absorb the changes. If you need the full VMware stack, the price increase may not feel as dramatic. The problem is that around 70 percent of the Norwegian market does not need that. It is like buying a fully equipped SUV with a 700-kilometre range when all you really need is a small city car,” Berget explains.

A growing market for VMware alternatives

Nutanix is one of the few viable alternatives for larger organisations today, but the market is evolving rapidly.

“A lot is happening in this space, and investment levels are high. Many technology companies now see an opportunity to take market share from VMware. It will be interesting to see how the market develops over the coming year,” says Berget.

Companies developing alternatives to VMware include Proxmox (open source) and HPE Morpheus VM Essentials. In addition, the major cloud providers offer their own built-in alternatives, including Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift.

For the largest VMware customers, however, the situation is more complex.

“Many organisations have built extensive integrations around VMware over many years. In practice, that means they remain tied to the platform for a long time, even if they are unhappy with the current direction. That is why we now see many companies launching strategic reviews to reduce their long-term dependency and evaluate alternative vendors,” says Berget.

Want to know more about Nutanix? More info here