Two years after Broadcom closed on VMware, the dust has settled and the verdict is in: a lot of shops are not going back. Renewals that used to be routine now arrive with bundled SKUs, multi-year minimums, and price increases that are hard to explain to a CFO. For mid-market customers in particular, 2026 has been the year of the migration plan.
Why the conversation changed
It is not just price. The shift from perpetual licenses to subscription-only, the consolidation of standalone products into large bundles, and the loss of the partner channel many smaller resellers relied on have all pushed customers to ask a question they were not asking before: do we actually need VMware, or do we need a hypervisor?
What Proxmox brings to the table
- Open source core. KVM and LXC under the hood, with a clean web UI and a real REST API on top. No black box, no per-socket math.
- Built-in clustering and HA. Live migration, fencing, and shared-nothing replication ship with the base product, not as a separate SKU.
- ZFS and Ceph as first-class storage. Snapshots, replication, and hyperconverged Ceph clusters are configured from the same UI as the VMs.
- Integrated backup. Proxmox Backup Server does deduplicated, incremental backups of VMs and containers, with verification and offsite sync.
What a migration actually looks like
Most VMware to Proxmox moves we run are staged, not flag-day cutovers. We stand up a Proxmox cluster alongside the existing vSphere environment, migrate workloads in waves using the built-in import tooling, and decommission the old hosts once everything is stable. Networking and storage usually need the most planning — the VMs themselves are the easy part.
Where Richweb fits
Richweb is a Silver-level Proxmox Partner and resells Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server subscriptions across the Community, Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers. If you are sizing a migration or just want a second opinion on your renewal math, the sales team is happy to take a look. Our Proxmox page has more on the platform itself.