for anyone holding a vmware renewal quote
Your VMware renewal went up how much?
You're not alone, and you're not stuck. Put your own numbers in the calculator to see what leaving would cost against what staying now costs. If the shape of it looks right, a two-week review replaces the estimate with facts.
The calculator is arithmetic, not advice. It's useful for deciding whether to take the question seriously. It is not useful for deciding to move your whole business.
VMware exit cost model
three-year cumulative · estimate
Estimates only. Real figures need an inventory and a dependency map.
Book an assessmentWhy the quote exploded
what changedVMware was bought by Broadcom, and Broadcom changed the rules. You can no longer buy the software outright — it's rent, forever. Pricing switched to a formula that charges many businesses for more than they actually use. And features you never asked for are now bundled into the price whether you want them or not.
The combination is what produces the renewal quotes people are comparing notes about. Three times last year's price is common; some businesses have seen far worse. It isn't a billing error and it isn't personal — it's a vendor repricing its product toward the giant customers it wants to keep. But it is a decision forced on everyone else, and it lands on your desk with a deadline.
There's a clock ticking too: support for the current version ends in October 2027. Businesses that stay have to plan an upgrade under the new pricing anyway. Businesses that leave need enough runway to do it carefully rather than in a panicked weekend. Either way, doing nothing is the one option that quietly expires.
The alternative, honestly described
what you'd move towhat you get
- Proxmox — professionally maintained open-source software that does the same fundamental job VMware does for your servers, used by businesses worldwide.
- Nothing to license, ever. It cannot be repriced out from under you the way VMware just was — the license model makes that impossible, permanently.
- Built-in protected storage: your data kept in multiple copies across your machines, healing itself when a disk fails, with no expensive storage hardware to buy on the side.
- Built-in backups that can actually be verified — not just a green light you're asked to trust.
- Your existing servers, in most cases. This is a software change, not a forklift.
what it is not
- Not a drop-in swap. Some VMware features have rough equivalents rather than exact ones, and the differences need checking against what you actually use.
- Not backed by a big vendor's consulting arm. The company behind it sells software support only — the hands-on help has to come from a practice like this one.
- Not free of skill. Run well, it's excellent; run casually, it will punish you. That's the honest trade for the missing license fee.
- Not right for every program. A few applications are only supported by their vendors on specific platforms, and a vendor support statement is a real constraint. The assessment finds these before they find you.
There are other alternatives — Microsoft's Hyper-V and Nutanix among them — and both appear in the assessment's cost comparison. They win or lose on different grounds, and the answer depends on your business, not on our preference. Among the options a small business can realistically run, Proxmox is the one that keeps your hardware, keeps your way of working, and removes the license bill.
And there's something to gain, not just something to escape. The same new servers can also carry a platform where your own staff build apps. If you're rebuilding the foundation anyway, building it once — on something that can carry both — is cheaper than doing it twice.
What moving actually involves
the work, honestlyCopying a system from VMware to Proxmox is the easy part — a single simple system moves in minutes. The real work is everything around it: preparing each system properly before it moves so it starts cleanly on the other side, finding the ones with license keys or special hardware that tie them down, and getting the new foundation right before anything important lands on it.
That's why the move happens in stages: least critical systems first, grouped so things that talk to each other move together, with a tested way back at every stage and nothing deleted until its replacement is signed off. A trial system carries real work for weeks first — and gets broken on purpose — so the design is proven before your business depends on it.
Where the calculator stops and the review starts
the next stepA calculator can tell you whether the money is worth a conversation. It can't tell you which of your software vendors would object, which program is licensed in a way that complicates things, which four systems nobody remembers the purpose of, or whether your network can handle the new setup at all. Those answers come from actually looking — and that's what the two-week assessment does.
What you get is a report, not a sales proposal: what you have, what it costs to keep, what it costs to leave, whether leaving is realistic, and in what order it would happen. It's written to be useful whether or not you hire us for what comes next — and it's the strongest position to negotiate your renewal from, even if you stay.
Start with the assessment
Fixed price, two weeks, and a written verdict on whether your business can move at all.