If you got your VMware renewal quote this year and thought it was a typo, you're not alone. The question is no longer "is Proxmox worth it?" but "how much does it cost me to stay where I am?".
What actually changed
After Broadcom acquired VMware, three things happened almost at once:
- Perpetual licences disappeared. Everything you buy now is a subscription. What you bought before keeps working, but without support or updates once it expires.
- Products were grouped into large bundles. You no longer buy only what you use; you buy the bundle that also contains what you don't use.
- The partner channel shrank. Many of the small resellers SMEs used to buy through left the programme.
The result, consistently reported by small and medium-sized businesses at the 2026 renewals: increases of two to ten times for exactly the same infrastructure. Not more servers, not more VMs. The same ones.
It's worth saying clearly: VMware hasn't become a bad product. It has become an expensive product, positioned for large enterprises. If you have three nodes and twenty virtual machines, you're no longer the customer it wants.
An honest comparison
| Aspect | VMware vSphere | Proxmox VE |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing model | Mandatory subscription, per core, with enforced minimums | Free software. The (optional) subscription is per socket and gives access to the enterprise repository and support |
| Hypervisor | ESXi, mature, extremely well tested | KVM + LXC, the Linux kernel. Just as solid, a different philosophy |
| Storage | VMFS, vSAN (licensed separately) | ZFS and Ceph included at no extra cost |
| Backup | Third-party (Veeam etc.), licensed separately | Proxmox Backup Server, included, with deduplication and verification |
| Automatic load balancing | DRS — mature, granular | HA and live migration, yes; a full DRS equivalent, no |
| Advanced networking | NSX, microsegmentation | Working SDN, but less feature-rich |
| Integration ecosystem | Very broad — every vendor certifies for vSphere | Growing, but narrower |
| Staff who know it | Easy to find | Harder, especially outside Linux environments |
What you gain
The most obvious gain is cost, but it isn't the only one.
Predictability. Proxmox has no core minimums and doesn't force you to buy modules you don't use. Next year's budget looks like this year's.
Built-in backup. Proxmox Backup Server does deduplication, incremental backup and archive integrity verification. With VMware, that's a separate licence from another vendor.
ZFS from day one. Instant snapshots, checksums on every block, replication between nodes. For ransomware protection, ZFS snapshots are a layer worth relying on.
No single-vendor lock-in. It's open source. If the commercial model changes tomorrow, the code stays.
What you lose
I'll be honest here, because articles that say you lose nothing do you no favours.
DRS. If you run dozens of nodes and rely on fine-grained automatic rebalancing, Proxmox has no equivalent. You get HA and live migration, but not the same automation.
Enterprise-grade support. Proxmox offers support subscriptions, but it's not the same as a VMware contract with an aggressive SLA. For some companies, that matters more than price.
Vendor certifications. If you run a critical application whose vendor certifies only on vSphere, migrating may void your support for that application. Check before, not after.
Team familiarity. An administrator who knows vCenter inside out will be slower for months. That cost is real, even if it never shows up on an invoice.
What migration looks like in practice
Since version 8.2, Proxmox has an import wizard that connects directly to ESXi and pulls the virtual machines across, with no manual export. Where that doesn't work, the classic approach remains:
qm importdisk 100 masina-veche.vmdk local-zfs --format qcow2The order that works, from our experience:
- Start with something unimportant. A test server, not the domain controller.
- Uninstall VMware Tools before migrating, not after.
- Watch the disk drivers — VirtIO needs preparation on Windows, otherwise you get a blue screen on first boot.
- Test a full restore before you switch off the old infrastructure. Not the other way round.
- Keep VMware running until you've been through a full operating cycle, including a month-end close.
The most common mistake: migrating under pressure from the licence expiry date. A rushed migration costs more than an extra month of licensing. If the deadline is three weeks away, buy a month and do it properly.
When not to migrate
There are situations where the right answer is "stay":
- You have critical applications certified exclusively on vSphere, and the vendor refuses support elsewhere.
- You depend on features with no equivalent — NSX for microsegmentation, DRS across dozens of nodes.
- Your team is trained exclusively on VMware and you have no time for learning in the coming months.
- You're in the middle of a critical project. You don't change the foundation during construction.
How we approach the conversation
The first question isn't technical, it's a business one: how much does the renewal actually cost you, and what else could you do with the difference. Sometimes the answer is that the licence, even an expensive one, is cheaper than the disruption.
When migration makes sense, we run it in parallel — the new infrastructure alongside the old, moved in stages, with a way back at every step. Not overnight, not all at once.
We work with both platforms. We have no stake in the answer going one way or the other.
Need a second opinion on your infrastructure? We look at your actual situation and tell you what makes sense — including when the answer is "don't change anything right now".
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