Many IT shops are seeing the increase of VMware licensing. Price hikes going from 150% to up to 1000%. On average, the price increase is apparently like 3x which is quite a lot considering that VMware was not cheap even before the price increase. The question is – What’s best steps to keep your spending contained? Are you really going to give up and just pay or are you going to “fight” and use your “weapons” of IT administrator, to find an effective way of migrating from VMware platform? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. In this post we’ll try to show you ways that’s possible.
According to analysts, VMware will start losing market share when it comes to hypervisor technology, starting 2025. There are several reasons for this but the main reason is this incredible price hikes that the vendor is applying (or trying to apply) to its clients.
In fact, several large VMware clients have seen their quotes for 2025 increase quite significantly. The latest in date is a telecommunication giant AT&T that has reported a price hike over 1000%. That resulted a migration plan costing them millions of dollars, but still a lot cheaper than continue to use overpriced VMware technology.
Prior to Broadcom, the costs were already high, if you wanted to run on vSphere Enterprise Plus license. The current average costs went up about 150%, but many organizations and admin reports rather 300-600% increase of licensing costs.
Where to move and tips to save some budget?
For start, you might just want to “clean up” you’re existing VMs, and reduce the size of your existing clusters in case you cannot buy new hardware right now for an alternate hypervisor platform. After that, install alternative hypervisor on those decommissioned VMware nodes. You’ll then probably want to configure the solution, create a cluster etc. At the end you should run two clusters side by side – VMware AND something else (Hyper-V, Proxmox, XCP-NG, ….) and be ready to migrate some non-critical workloads first.
You can absolutely run your non-essential workloads (monitoring software, developers, etc…) on alternate hypervisor, right? This will allow you and decrease your dependency on VMware, resulting an if not decrease in price (as there was a price increase), but at least the increase might not be that significative. You got the idea. You’ll still pay, but less than what they announced you as you will license less hardware with VMware.
First Option – Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 2025
I hope you are not Hyper-V hater as Hyper-V has been around for a long time and many admins has possibly played out with a test environment or non-essential production systems or have multi-hypervisor environment already. If that’s the case, it’s already 50% of work done!
Microsoft kept improving this technology over years and their business model is actually standing on Hyper-V in Azure.
NOTE: that Hyper-V is paid solution too so perhaps compare the costs before you move.
It has been also long time that Microsoft support Linux guest OS. In terms of Linux guest OS support, Hyper-V supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, Oracle Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Linux integration services are included in the Linux kernel and updated for new releases. Hyper-V also supports FreeBSD with FreeBSD Integration Services built into FreeBSD 10.0 and later.
Current virtual hardware supports massive VMs
- VM supports up to 1,792 Virtual Processors
- 48 Terabytes of RAM
I don’t think many modern workloads needs all this ever, but perhaps some Oracle DBs yes.
New features coming with Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V in 2025
If you planning to test Hyper-V or give it a shot now, it’s good to know that Microsoft is preparing new release of Windows Server 2025.
There are new features that were announced and some of them can be already tested in the Windows Server 2025 preview that you can download from Microsoft or you can test it in Azure.
- Windows Server vNext delivers 90% more IOPS on NVMe SSDs.
- NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) support.
- Storage Replica 3x performance improvement.
- Thin Provisioned storage.
- Stretched Clustering support for Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).
- New ReFS native deduplication and compression, optimized for hot-data such as virtual machines.
- Licensing – Microsoft plans to have Windows Server 2025 on both perpetual-license and pay-as-you-go subscription bases via Azure Arc.
Any changes concerning Installation options?
In fact, Microsoft keeps things simple here and provides two installation options since many years:
- Server Core – Optimized, smaller installation that includes the core components of Windows Server and supports all server roles but does not include a local graphical user interface (GUI). It is used for “headless” deployments which are managed remotely through Windows Admin Center, PowerShell, or other server management tools.
- Server with Desktop Experience – This is the complete installation and includes a full GUI for customers who prefer this option. (At the same time, it might be a good option to install Veeam backup on this host, to help out with migrations, but we’ll talk about it later in this post).
If you want, you can download and test the eval and when you complete your evaluation, you can convert your evaluation versions to retail.
Management of Hyper-V
Two ways:
- Windows Admin Center (WAC), web-based, is the way to go.
- Server Manager – traditional built-in management tool which got some improvements.
Migrate with Veeam (if you’re already using Veeam Backup)
It is a wizard driven process, but you’ll probably want to start with other tasks before.
Step1: uninstall VMware Tools from each VMware VM.
Step2: re-run your Veeam Backup (will be incremental only)
Step3: Go to the Veeam Backup console > Backups > Disk > Right-click VM > Instant recovery > Microsoft Hyper-V > Select Hyper-V host > Select the restore point (by default, the latest is selected) > Add your remaining VMs to the job > Select the location for those VMs and network to connect to. Veeam will create the VM on the Hyper-V host. You need to manually powers them ON.
Hyper-V will install the necessary drivers on the first power ON.
Step 4: Migrate to production – Then you need to Migration of recovered VM to production.
NOTE: you’ll need probably reboot afterwards once again if it is a Windows VM.
You might be running other backup software than Veeam. Search through the help and see whether there is this possibility! Other software vendors such as Nakivo, Vinchin and others has also the option for migration.
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
If you are SCVMM user, look no further. You have the option. If you’re not using you should know that the installation isn’t the easiest and quickest one. Additionally, it’s a paid product if I’m not mistaken.
Migrate with some converting software!
StarWind V2V Converter is one of those which might help. Example below shows the conversion of VMware ESXi or vCenter Server to Microsoft Hyper-V Server.
Are there other tools you can use? Absolutely, but I have not personally tested them.
VMware vCenter Server converter?
- Yes, to export into OVF file perhaps, but not direct destination of alternate hypervisors is possible.
- Offline VMs only.
Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0
- End of support on this one so, no. Not possible.
PowerShell
- Using this guide from rahilwasir on Github. (Not tested).
Other converting tools exists for sure. They just not listed in this post. Also, there are alternate hypervisor platforms that integrate directly migration tools. (For example, XCP-NG or ProxmoxVE, but perhaps also others).
Other Hypervisors alternatives – what are primary considerations?
- Hyper-V or Azure Stack HCI (we have already mentioned that)
- Cloud-hosted/IaaS on AWS – you’ll be involved with recurrent costs too.
- Red Hat Virtualization
- Cloud-hosted/IaaS on Azure – yes, with recurrent costs.
- Nutanix AHV hypervisor – you pay for the hardware and maintenance/support costs.
- ProxmoxVE Virtualization Environment (VE) – maintenance/support only.
- XCP-NG (Xen based virtualization) – You pay for maintenance/support. Open source. This solution from France, used by many businesses for 10 years, is also very popular in Education. And there is newly added Wizard driven tool to migrate from VMware to XCP-NG! We have reported on its features in our blog post on StarWind blog here. Worth to note that there is an integrated backup solution, however you don’t get the granularity of restores you have with other vendors such as Veeam or Nakivo.
Proxmox VE is becoming very popular in mid-sized organizations. We can see that some backup vendors such as Veeam or Nakivo starting to react to this demand and creating option to backup VMs running under Proxmox. We’ll see what the future brings.
Final Words
With Broadcom/VMware increase of prices of their licensing, many users will consider moving away from the vendor and migrate some workloads somewhere else. As a result, there will be decrease of usage of VMware during the next 12 months.
We do not know where exactly the VMware users will migrate. Probably it will not be a single virtualization platform, but mix of several ones (Proxmox, Hyper-V, XCP-NG …).
Some organizations might already have full migration plans off of VMware and Admins will transition their workloads somewhere else. Others might go slowly and start transition only non-essential workloads and maintain two different environments which might be challenging and resulting higher operational costs.
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