The enterprise infrastructure landscape has fundamentally shifted. What was once a stable, predictable environment dominated by established vendors has become a strategic minefield requiring careful navigation. For organizations running VMware, the question is no longer if they should migrate, but where they should go.
The answer isn’t as straightforward as vendors would have you believe. But when you examine the full landscape—proprietary alternatives, hyperscaler clouds, and open-source options—one path emerges as uniquely suited to address the converging challenges facing enterprises today: OpenStack.
The Broadcom Effect: When Your Foundation Shifts
Let’s start with the catalyst that’s driving this conversation. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has fundamentally altered the game. Dramatic price increases, restrictive licensing changes, and strategic uncertainty have transformed what was once the gold standard of virtualization into a source of budget anxiety and operational risk.
IT leaders who spent years building VMware expertise and standardizing on its platform now find themselves facing uncomfortable questions from CFOs and boards. The comfortable predictability that justified VMware’s premium pricing has evaporated, replaced by volatility that makes long-term planning nearly impossible.
The Nutanix Illusion: Trading One Problem for Another
In response to VMware’s upheaval, many organizations have looked to Nutanix as an alternative. On the surface, this seems logical—a modern hyperconverged platform with VMware-like capabilities. But dig deeper, and you’ll find you’re simply trading one set of proprietary vendor risks for another.
Nutanix has its own history of exploring strategic exits—including reported discussions with HPE during 2023 and 2024 about potential acquisition scenarios. It’s another closed-source platform where pricing, features, and strategic direction remain entirely outside your control. For organizations burned by VMware’s transformation, moving to Nutanix feels uncomfortably like repeating the same mistake with a different vendor.
The fundamental question stands: why escape one proprietary cage only to enter another?
Microsoft’s Quiet Retreat
Meanwhile, Microsoft has been sending clear signals about its own priorities. The company’s apparent shift away from Hyper-V toward Azure-focused strategies further narrows the proprietary landscape. As Microsoft deprioritizes its on-premises hypervisor, organizations seeking traditional virtualization solutions find themselves with one fewer viable option.
This isn’t just about Microsoft—it’s a symptom of a broader industry trend. Major proprietary vendors are abandoning on-premises infrastructure in favor of cloud services. The message to enterprises is clear: the vendors you relied on are moving on, whether you’re ready or not.
Why Hyperscalers Aren’t the Answer
The obvious solution seems to be migrating to the public cloud. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer powerful platforms with seemingly unlimited scale. But for many organizations, this path creates more problems than it solves.
The Hidden Cost Trap
Public cloud pricing appears straightforward until you’re actually running production workloads. Compute costs, storage fees, data transfer charges, and dozens of ancillary services compound quickly. What looked economical during migration becomes eye-wateringly expensive at scale.
But the real financial trap is repatriation. Hyperscalers make it easy and cheap to get data in—that’s the point. Getting data out is a different story entirely. Egress fees for moving workloads back on-premises or to alternative providers can run into millions of dollars for large deployments.
This isn’t accidental. It’s the business model. Once you’re in, the economic friction of leaving becomes substantial enough that many organizations find themselves locked in by pure financial reality, regardless of technical or strategic considerations.
The Single Point of Failure Risk
Here’s an uncomfortable reality: when you migrate to a hyperscaler, your business becomes dependent on their operational reliability. Recent events have made this painfully clear.
AWS experienced a significant DNS outage recently that cascaded across services, taking down applications for customers worldwide. These weren’t minor websites—entire business operations ground to halt. Customer-facing services went dark. Internal systems became inaccessible. Revenue stopped flowing.
The worst part? There was nothing affected organizations could do except wait. No failover option. No alternative provider to route to. Just complete dependency on a single vendor’s ability to resolve their internal issues.
When you control your own infrastructure, you control your response to incidents. You can architect redundancy across multiple data centers, implement failover strategies, and maintain operational independence. With hyperscalers, you’re entirely at the mercy of their operational competence and priorities.
Digital Sovereignty in an Uncertain World
Beyond costs and operational risk, digital sovereignty has moved from a niche concern to a boardroom priority. European and Asian organizations in particular are increasingly uncomfortable concentrating infrastructure control in U.S.-based hyperscalers. GDPR, data localization requirements, and evolving geopolitical tensions have transformed sovereignty from a compliance checkbox into a strategic imperative.
Recent geopolitical conflicts and trade restrictions have made these concerns tangible and immediate. Organizations can no longer afford to dismiss the risks of infrastructure dependency on platforms subject to foreign government jurisdiction and geopolitical pressures.
The Open Source Promise—and Its Limitations
This brings us to open-source alternatives. The appeal is obvious: no vendor lock-in, transparent development, community-driven innovation, and true infrastructure control. But not all open-source options are created equal.
The Containerization Trap
There’s a persistent narrative that containers and Kubernetes are the universal answer to infrastructure modernization. While containers represent the future for cloud-native applications, the reality is more nuanced.
Legacy applications, Windows workloads, stateful databases, and specialized software require traditional virtual machines. Not every application can be containerized, and forcing inappropriate workloads into containers creates technical debt and operational complexity that undermines the benefits of migration.
KubeVirt: Too New, Too Risky
KubeVirt attempts to bridge this gap by bringing VMs to Kubernetes. It’s an elegant concept, but the implementation reveals the challenges of emerging technology. With a relatively short general availability lifespan, KubeVirt’s maturity gaps become apparent in production deployments.
Organizations implementing KubeVirt in edge use cases have encountered stability issues and operational challenges. For enterprises requiring proven reliability at scale, KubeVirt represents an unacceptable risk—especially when migrating from a mature platform like VMware.
Proxmox: Great for Small Scale, Limited Beyond
Proxmox has gained a devoted following, particularly in smaller deployments and among technical enthusiasts. It’s a capable platform for certain use cases. But scaling Proxmox to enterprise requirements reveals significant constraints.
The platform’s European-centric support model creates challenges for global organizations requiring follow-the-sun coverage. More critically, Proxmox lacks demonstrated large-scale enterprise deployment experience. The vendor ecosystem and professional services network necessary for mission-critical operations at scale simply isn’t there.
For organizations running hundreds or thousands of VMs across multiple data centers, Proxmox’s limitations become deal-breakers.
OpenStack: The Enterprise Alternative That Actually Works
This brings us to OpenStack—and why it stands apart from other alternatives.
Battle-Tested at Scale
OpenStack isn’t new or experimental. It’s been in production for over a decade, powering some of the world’s largest private clouds. Telecommunications companies, financial institutions, government agencies, and research organizations run hundreds of thousands of cores on OpenStack.
This isn’t theoretical scalability—it’s proven, production-grade capability handling enterprise demands day in and day out.
Feature Parity That Matters
Organizations migrating from VMware need more than basic VM management. They need advanced networking, software-defined storage, high availability, disaster recovery, and sophisticated management capabilities.
OpenStack provides all of this. The feature compatibility enables smooth transitions without operational compromise. You’re not giving up capabilities to gain independence—you’re getting both.
What’s more, OpenStack’s modular architecture gives you choice in how you implement these capabilities. Need networking? Choose from multiple vendor solutions including Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, or open-source options like OVN. Storage requirements? Select from Ceph, NetApp, Pure Storage, Dell EMC, or numerous other vendors—all integrating seamlessly with the same OpenStack control plane.
This vendor diversity for core infrastructure components means you’re never locked into a single vendor’s roadmap or pricing for any component of your stack. It’s infrastructure independence at every layer.
And as AI workloads become increasingly critical, OpenStack now provides robust GPU support, enabling organizations to run machine learning and AI workloads on the same infrastructure as traditional virtualized applications. No separate AI cloud required—OpenStack handles both.
A Global Support Ecosystem
Unlike alternatives with limited support options, OpenStack offers genuine choice. Multiple commercial vendors provide enterprise-grade support globally: Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, Platform9, and specialized providers each offer distinct approaches.
Organizations can select support models aligned with their geographic presence, risk tolerance, and operational requirements. And if circumstances change, you’re not locked in—you can switch providers or bring capabilities in-house.
This flexibility is unprecedented in enterprise infrastructure.
True Independence
Here’s what really sets OpenStack apart: genuine strategic independence. You control your infrastructure roadmap. You avoid licensing surprises. You participate in a global community driving innovation aligned with user needs, not vendor revenue targets.
Can you change your mind later? Absolutely. Can you bring capabilities in-house? Yes. Can you mix and match support providers? Of course.
This level of strategic flexibility simply doesn’t exist with proprietary alternatives.
Sovereignty Without Compromise
For organizations facing digital sovereignty requirements, OpenStack provides complete infrastructure control. Your data remains within your organizational and geographic boundaries, meeting regulatory requirements while maintaining operational sovereignty.
This addresses both compliance mandates and strategic risk mitigation—a combination increasingly essential in today’s geopolitical environment.
The Strategic Opportunity
The convergence of proprietary vendor instability, hyperscaler sovereignty concerns, and the limitations of alternative open-source options creates a unique moment.
Organizations migrating from VMware can establish infrastructure foundations that provide:
- Strategic independence from vendor decisions and market consolidation
- Cost predictability without licensing volatility or surprise price increases
- Operational sovereignty meeting regulatory and geopolitical requirements
- Enterprise-grade capabilities with proven scale and reliability
- Future flexibility to adapt infrastructure strategy as requirements evolve
Making the Decision
The question facing VMware users isn’t whether to migrate—Broadcom has made that decision for you. The question is where to go.
Public clouds sacrifice sovereignty and create new dependencies. Nutanix trades one proprietary vendor for another. KubeVirt is too immature. Proxmox doesn’t scale. Each alternative solves some problems while creating others.
OpenStack is the only option that simultaneously addresses vendor risk, sovereignty concerns, and enterprise operational requirements. It’s not the easiest path—building expertise and establishing operations requires investment. But it’s the only path that leads to genuine strategic independence.
The current disruption isn’t just a crisis—it’s an opportunity. An opportunity to establish infrastructure foundations built on openness, flexibility, and organizational control. An opportunity to break free from vendor decisions that repeatedly reshape your roadmap and budget.
Organizations that act decisively will gain competitive advantage through reduced costs, increased agility, and strategic independence. Those that delay or choose short-term convenience over strategic positioning will find themselves facing similar decisions again in a few years.
The infrastructure landscape has changed permanently. The question is whether your organization will adapt strategically or reactively.
For those ready to take control of their infrastructure destiny, OpenStack isn’t just an alternative—it’s the destination.
