If you run IT for a small or mid-sized company and your latest VMware renewal arrived at a number you barely recognise, it is not a billing mistake. It is the new licensing model Broadcom rolled out after acquiring VMware, and it is pushing thousands of European businesses to plan an orderly exit toward Proxmox.
This article is not about open-source ideology. It is about budget and risk: what actually changes when you migrate from VMware to Proxmox, what you gain, what you give up, and how to do it in phases on a typical 10 to 20 VM estate without stopping the business.
What Broadcom changed overnight
Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023 and reorganised the commercial model almost overnight. The changes that hit smaller IT teams hardest are concrete and easy to verify:
- The end of perpetual licences. VMware moved to subscription-only. You no longer buy a licence you own outright; you rent the right to use it and pay every year, indefinitely.
- Repackaging into bundles. Products you used to buy separately were folded into larger suites. Many companies now pay for capabilities they will never switch on.
- A 72-core minimum licensing floor. Subscriptions are sold against a minimum core count per CPU, with a widely reported 72-core floor per order. A two-host cluster with modern, lower-core processors can end up paying for far more compute than it actually runs.
- The Essentials kit is gone. The entry-level bundle that small businesses relied on for a handful of hosts was discontinued, removing the affordable on-ramp that made VMware viable below the enterprise tier.
The practical result, repeated across technical forums and partner notices throughout 2024 and 2025, is that many renewals jumped several times over the prior year for the same workload. When the cost of keeping what you already have multiplies without your usage changing, the question stops being technical and becomes financial.
Why so many teams are looking at Proxmox now
Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) is an open-source virtualisation platform that combines full virtual machines (via KVM) and lightweight containers (via LXC) in a single management console. It has been in production across companies of every size for more than a decade. It is not an experiment. You can read the full feature set on the official Proxmox site.
Against VMware vSphere, its three strongest arguments for an SME are direct:
- No per-core or per-user licensing. Proxmox is free to use. The only optional cost is a support subscription per server, which is far below the level of VMware licensing and entirely your choice.
- No vendor lock-in. Because the platform is open, you are not tied to one vendor’s commercial roadmap, and one vendor cannot rewrite the pricing rules underneath you, which is precisely what just happened.
- Enterprise features included. High-availability clustering, live migration of VMs, replicated storage with Ceph or ZFS, and built-in backups all ship as standard, with no add-on tiers.
It is not magic. Proxmox has a different learning curve and a different support ecosystem than VMware. But for the workloads a typical SME runs — file servers, ERP, line-of-business apps, virtual desktops — it covers the same ground as vSphere at a fraction of the recurring cost. It is, in fact, the foundation of our NEXVIRT enterprise virtualisation service.
What you gain, and what you’ll miss
An honest decision needs both columns. Here is what genuinely changes.
What you gain
- Far lower recurring cost. The annual per-core licence bill disappears. For many SMEs, the saving over three years covers the migration project itself with room to spare.
- Predictability. No repackaging surprises and no unilateral changes to the commercial model at every renewal.
- Control of the stack. You decide versions and upgrade timing, instead of a vendor forcing you to move when it does not suit you.
- Data sovereignty. Open, auditable infrastructure that you host where you choose — inside the EU and under GDPR, if that is what your customers and regulators expect. It is the same logic behind digital sovereignty for SMEs.
What you lose or trade off
- VMware ecosystem tooling. If you depend on specific products such as vSAN, NSX, or automation tightly bound to vCenter, you need to assess the Proxmox equivalent before you commit.
- Big-name vendor support. Proxmox support is excellent, but it works differently. For an SME without a dedicated systems team, this is covered better by a managed partner than by a vendor ticket queue.
- Occasional certified compatibility. A minority of third-party software certifies only against VMware. These cases are rare, but they belong in your initial inventory so nothing surprises you mid-project.
The reasonable conclusion is not “Proxmox always wins.” It is that for the typical SME workload profile, the balance tips clearly toward migration when the trigger is a VMware renewal that has multiplied.
How to do it without stopping the business
The mistake that turns a sensible migration into a crisis is doing everything at once with no way back. The correct approach is phased, with a rollback path at every step. On a 10 to 20 VM estate, this is very manageable.
- Inventory and dependencies. List every VM, its resources and operating system, and above all the dependencies between VMs and with third-party software. This is where the cases that need special handling surface early.
- Design the target. Define the Proxmox cluster: how many nodes, which storage type (ZFS for a simple start, Ceph if you want distributed high availability), and the backup policy.
- Pilot migration. Move one or two non-critical VMs first, validate performance, and clear the three classic gotchas: Windows VirtIO drivers after the hypervisor change, disk and boot configuration, and getting snapshots and backups working the new way.
- Migrate in waves. Move the rest in batches, leaving the most critical systems such as the ERP until last. Each wave is validated before the next begins.
- Run in parallel, then retire. For a period, VMware and Proxmox coexist. Only once everything is verified in production do you power down the old environment and stop renewing the licence.
Done this way, the real downtime for each system shrinks to its own migration window — usually out of hours — and there is never a point of no return. It is exactly the method we apply in a managed migration with NEXCONSULT: inventory, pilot, waves, and parallel running, with the client’s operations protected at every phase.
And while you’re in there, why stop at virtualisation?
A VMware renewal that spikes is a headache, but it is also the natural moment to ask a bigger question: does it still make sense to pay five separate vendors for virtualisation, backups, email, telephony, and hosting?
Many SMEs use the hypervisor migration as the trigger to consolidate IT vendors and stand up their virtualisation inside a single dedicated infrastructure. That is the logic of NEXCORE, our IT infrastructure pack that brings the essential services under one control plane, with scheduled backups and fast restore included. Migrating away from VMware stops being a defensive expense and becomes the lever to put the company’s whole technology base in order.
And if that infrastructure is going to host AI workloads or sensitive data, keeping it dedicated and under your own jurisdiction is the foundation for doing it without handing your data to third parties — the same calculus that sits behind private cloud versus public cloud for European SMEs.
The questions we get before anyone commits
How much do you actually save moving from VMware to Proxmox?
It depends on the size of your estate and which VMware bundle you held, but the recurring saving comes from removing the annual per-core licence. For many SMEs, what used to be a growing licence bill becomes, at most, an optional per-server support subscription at far lower cost. Do the serious maths over three years, comparing total cost of ownership rather than the first-year quote alone.
Can I migrate my virtual machines without rebuilding them from scratch?
Yes. Proxmox includes tools to import existing virtual machines from VMware, so you do not rebuild each server. What does need attention is the post-migration tidy-up — installing VirtIO drivers on Windows guests, sorting disk and boot configuration, and reattaching backups — all of which you resolve in the pilot phase before touching anything critical.
Is Proxmox reliable enough for critical systems like our ERP?
Yes. Proxmox has run demanding production environments for years and ships high availability, live migration, and replicated storage as standard. The advice is about method, not technology: migrate the non-critical workloads first and leave the ERP and other sensitive systems for the final waves, validating each step.
Do I need an in-house technical team to run Proxmox?
Not necessarily. Proxmox can be run by an internal team or delegated to a managed partner that handles updates, backups, monitoring, and support. For an SME without a dedicated systems department, the managed model usually gives the best balance of cost, risk, and peace of mind.
Does my data stay in the EU if I move to Proxmox?
That is one of the quiet advantages. Because Proxmox is self-hosted, you choose exactly where the infrastructure lives. Run it in an EU data centre and your virtual machines and backups stay under EU jurisdiction and GDPR, with no dependency on a hyperscaler’s regional policy. Where your data resides becomes your decision, not a vendor’s default.
So, is it time to move?
The VMware licensing changes after Broadcom have turned a once-niche decision into a budget conversation that touches almost every virtualised business. Proxmox offers a mature way out — no per-core licences, no lock-in to a single vendor — especially when the migration is run in phases with a rollback path at every step.
Handled well, that migration is not only a saving. It is the chance to put your whole infrastructure in order and take back control of where and how your business runs.
Want to know what you would save by moving your VMware estate to Proxmox, and how to do it with no downtime? Get in touch and a NEXUMIA specialist will review your case and reply within 24 hours.
