VMware office in Bellevue, Washington. Image: Getty Images via Ars Technica.

Interest in VMware alternatives has moved from side chatter to board-level planning. A new survey released on October 6, 2026 found that 90% of VMware users are considering other options. The main reason is simple: licensing costs went up after Broadcom bought VMware.

The study comes from Rimini Street and was run by Unisphere Research. Ars Technica covered the findings the same day and added useful context.

At Debugged Pro, we build and support software for clients in India and the USA. Many of those apps sit on virtual machines somewhere. So this is not abstract for us. Below, I cover what the survey says and where it needs a pinch of salt. Then I share how I would plan a move without breaking anything.

What the VMware Survey Found

The report is called the 2026 IT Virtualization Survey: What's Next for VMware Users. Unisphere Research surveyed 269 executives, managers and IT professionals. All of them were using VMware at the time. Responses were collected between December 2025 and February 2026.

Here are the headline numbers from the Rimini Street survey announcement:

90% are considering alternatives because of higher licensing costs.
54% pointed to the end of support for perpetual licenses as another reason.
73% named cost savings as a top priority for their virtualization roadmap.
60% are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy.
47% favor a hybrid setup that mixes hypervisors and containers.
48% have no current plan to move any assets to VMware Cloud Foundation.
66% are using or considering third-party support for VMware.

The picture is clear. Most VMware customers are not ripping everything out tomorrow. They are spreading their bets.

A fair caveat about the source

Rimini Street sells third-party support for VMware, Oracle and SAP. Ars Technica pointed out that this gives the company a reason to show VMware users struggling. That is worth keeping in mind.

Still, an outside firm ran the research. Ars also noted that the results line up with other recent reports. Customers have described VMware price jumps of as much as 1,000%. Many more have reported rises of around 100% to 300%.

Why Teams Are Looking at VMware Alternatives Now

Broadcom changed how VMware is sold. Perpetual licenses gave way to subscriptions, and product bundles changed. For many companies, the renewal quote was the first real sign of trouble.

Cost is only part of the story, though. Gartner analyst Tony Harvey earlier told Ars that many clients see this as "a wake-up call to how dependent they had become on a single vendor." That point matters more than any single price hike. When one supplier controls your whole server stack, every renewal becomes a negotiation you cannot walk away from.

Gartner also expects this trend to grow. Ars cites its recent forecast that 55% of enterprises will run proofs of concept for alternative products to replace VMware-based setups by 2029. That is up from 25% in 2026.

Rimini Street graphic announcing the 2026 IT Virtualization Survey on what is next for VMware users — The 2026 IT Virtualization Survey was produced by Unisphere Research for Rimini Street. Image: Rimini Street.

The Real Barriers to Leaving VMware

Wanting to leave and actually leaving are two different things. The survey is honest about this. Respondents named these as the biggest blockers:

Operational complexity (40%). Years of scripts, backups and monitoring are built around VMware tools.
Multi-vendor management (38%). Running two or three platforms means more dashboards, contracts and on-call knowledge.
Securing a larger attack surface (37%). Every new platform adds new settings to harden and new patches to track.
Team skills (37%). Admins who know vSphere inside out may be new to KVM, Hyper-V or Kubernetes.

"These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini Street said in its announcement.

From what we see on client projects, skills are the most underrated problem. A cheaper platform is not cheaper if your team spends six months learning it under pressure.

Security is part of the cost

The survey makes a sharp point about hypervisors. One compromised host can expose many guest machines at once. That makes the virtualization layer a prime target for ransomware.

VMware ESXi flaws have shown up in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog more than once. Any platform you move to will have its own flaws too. So plan your patch process before you migrate, not after. Our post on patch management lessons from a recent data breach covers the basics of a patch routine that holds up.

Common VMware Alternatives Teams Evaluate

There is no single best replacement. The right choice depends on your workloads, team and budget. These are the options we hear about most often:

Option	Often a good fit for	Watch out for
Proxmox VE (open source, KVM based)	Small and mid-size setups, labs, cost-focused teams	Support model and in-house Linux skills
Microsoft Hyper-V	Windows-heavy shops already paying for Microsoft licenses	Different tooling for backup and automation
Nutanix AHV	Teams that want a packaged hyperconverged stack	Hardware choices and long-term pricing
Kubernetes with KubeVirt or OpenShift Virtualization	Teams moving toward containers but still running some VMs	A steep learning curve for VM-first admins
Public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)	Apps that can be resized or rebuilt for cloud services	Egress fees and surprise monthly bills

Notice how the survey's numbers fit this table. A 60% interest in multi-hypervisor setups suggests many teams will run two platforms for years. And 47% want hypervisors and containers side by side.

If containers are part of your plan, read our guide on building a Kubernetes platform strategy. It explains why the cluster is only one piece of the puzzle.

Proxmox VE 8.0 web interface showing a cluster summary dashboard — Proxmox VE is one of the open-source VMware alternatives many teams test first. Screenshot: Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Is Staying on VMware Still an Option?

Yes, and plenty of companies will stay for now. Not every workload is worth moving. Some apps are old, fragile or tied to vendor certifications.

The survey shows how people are handling this middle path:

Third-party support is popular. 66% are using or considering it. Their top reasons were security (60%), installation and implementation help (57%) and service concerns (54%).
Not everyone wants the full bundle. 48% have no current plan to move assets to VMware Cloud Foundation.
Patching worries are real. 77% of security leaders said they would value real-time threat visibility, not just Broadcom's patch program.

Keep in mind that third-party support is the service Rimini Street sells. Treat these figures as a signal, not a verdict. If you stay, use the time to clean up your setup and make your next move easier.

What VMware Alternatives Mean for Agencies in India and the USA

Agencies sit in an awkward spot here. Some of us run our own infrastructure. Many more build and support apps that live on a client's VMware cluster.

Here is how the shift can show up in your work:

Client budget pressure. A big VMware renewal can freeze other IT spending, including your next project.
Migration requests. Clients may ask you to test their app on a new platform or refactor it for containers.
Hosting choices. If you host dev or staging servers, your own licensing bill may be due for review.
New questions in sales calls. Expect clients to ask where your apps run and how portable they are.

For agencies in India serving US clients, there is one more factor. Many US companies outsource infrastructure support. A team that can move workloads safely between platforms has a clear, practical skill to offer.

A Step-by-Step Plan for Moving to VMware Alternatives

You do not need a giant project to start. Here is the order I would follow:

Check your contract dates. Note renewal dates and support end dates for every VMware product you use.
Build a full inventory. List every VM, its owner, its OS, its size and what depends on it.
Sort workloads into groups. Mark each one as keep, move, rebuild as containers or retire.
Pick one low-risk pilot. A test server or internal tool is a good first candidate.
Test backup and restore first. A migration without a working restore path is a gamble.
Train the team early. Give admins lab time before any production system moves.
Harden and patch the new platform. Set up monitoring, access controls and an update schedule.
Move in waves. Shift a small batch, review, then plan the next one.

Keep a rollback plan for every wave. If a move goes wrong, you should be able to switch back within hours, not days.

Questions to ask before you sign anything

What will this platform cost over three to five years, not just year one?
Who supports it at 2 AM when production is down?
Do our backup, monitoring and security tools work with it today?
How hard would it be to leave this platform later?

That last question is the lesson from the whole VMware story. Joe McKendrick of Unisphere Research put it well. He said the shift "is not simply about replacing one vendor with another." It is about reducing dependency on a single provider.

Key Takeaways

90% of VMware users in the survey are considering VMware alternatives, mainly due to higher licensing costs.
Complexity, multi-vendor management, security and skills are the biggest barriers to moving.
Most teams are diversifying, not leaving overnight. 60% are looking at multi-hypervisor setups.
The source sells VMware support, so read the numbers with care, though other reports point the same way.
Start with an inventory, a pilot and a tested restore plan before moving any production workload.

Planning a migration or reviewing where your client apps should run? Our team offers free software development consulting for agencies and businesses in India and the USA.

About the Author

Nitin Kumar is the Lead Project Coordinator at Debugged Pro. He works with development, QA and infrastructure teams across India and the USA to keep client projects on track. He writes about the tech news that shapes how agencies build and run software.