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European Alternatives to VMware

OpenNebula Logo

OpenNebula

Spain
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

OpenNebula is an open-source platform for cloud and virtualization management, developed and managed by OpenNebula Systems S.L. The company's EMEA headquarters is in Pozuelo de Alarcón near Madrid, Spain; it also lists...

Website
Proxmox VE Logo

Proxmox VE

Austria
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is an open-source server virtualization platform from Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH in Vienna, Austria. Martin and Dietmar Maurer founded the company in 2005; the first stable version...

Website
SUSE Virtualization Logo

SUSE Virtualization

Germany
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

SUSE Virtualization, formerly known as Harvester, is an open-source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform built on Kubernetes. It comes from SUSE, which was founded in 1992 and is run from Nuremberg, Germany, with...

Website
XCP-ng Logo

XCP-ng

France
EU
Open Source
Self-Hostable

XCP-ng is an open-source virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor and on the XenServer code. It is developed as a community project and backed by Vates SAS, a French open-source software...

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VMware, with vSphere and ESXi at its core, has been the standard virtualization platform in companies for many years. Broadcom, a US semiconductor and software group, completed its acquisition of VMware on 22 November 2023. On 11 December 2023 VMware by Broadcom announced the move of all products to subscription licenses: perpetual licenses are no longer sold, support and subscription renewals for perpetual offerings ended, and the portfolio was reduced to fewer bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation. Existing perpetual licenses may still be used, but updates and support now require a subscription. For many customers this changed cost and planning, and that is why VMware alternatives are searched for so often.

European VMware alternatives

  • Proxmox VE (Austria): KVM virtual machines and LXC containers with a web interface, clustering, high availability, Ceph and ZFS. No licence fee, optional support subscription, and the most widely used choice among the open-source options.
  • XCP-ng (France): a Xen-based hypervisor with Xen Orchestra for management and backup, and tools to move machines over from VMware. Suited to pools with shared storage.
  • OpenNebula (Spain): a cloud and virtualization management platform for private clouds and several sites. More to learn than a plain hypervisor, but closest in scope to a full VMware setup.
  • SUSE Virtualization (Germany): virtual machines on a Kubernetes base. The best fit for teams that already run Kubernetes or Rancher.

Before migrating

A switch is a project, not a download. Features in use, such as snapshots or high availability, backup tools, storage and network design have to be mapped to the new platform, and a pilot with a few non-critical machines shows where gaps are. The comparison table and checklist are on virtualization platforms.