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Proxmox or VMware after the licensing change: which to choose

· 7 min read

The short answer. If you run somewhere between one and twenty servers and your VMware renewal under the new licensing came back noticeably higher than last time, Proxmox VE will almost certainly cover the same ground: virtual machines, live migration, an HA cluster, backups. Staying on VMware makes sense when your subscription is already paid for years ahead, your software vendor only supports vSphere, or you rely heavily on vSAN, NSX or Horizon. Below we compare Proxmox vs VMware for a small business on five criteria and show how to migrate VMware to Proxmox without shutting the company down for a week.

What changed in VMware licensing under Broadcom

Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware at the end of 2023 and reworked sales almost immediately. Perpetual licenses are gone; you can only buy a term subscription now. Dozens of standalone products were rolled into a few large bundles (VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere Foundation and a couple of smaller options), and pricing moved to per-core, with a minimum core count per CPU. The partner network got reshuffled too, so not everyone can renew through the reseller they used before.

For a company with three hosts, it plays out like this. Your old perpetual license keeps running, but there is no more support and no more updates on it. To get patches again you need a subscription to a bundle where half the features are of no use to you. Your reseller will quote the exact figure for your setup. We don't guess at numbers, but since 2024 that quote has been the single most common reason people get in touch with us.

Sitting on an old, unpatched version isn't a real option either. Unpatched ESXi hosts have long been a favorite ransomware target, and the ESXiArgs wave in 2023 went after exactly those.

Proxmox vs VMware: five criteria

1. Licensing and cost

Proxmox VE is open source under the AGPLv3. It installs for free with everything included: clustering, HA, live migration, Ceph, ZFS, LXC containers. The paid subscription is priced per CPU socket, not per core. It gets you the enterprise repository, where updates go through extra testing, plus access to the developer's support team. Without a subscription the system works exactly the same; updates simply come from the public repository. For production we still put at least the basic tier in place.

VMware has no real free option for production, and the subscription price depends on core count and the bundle you pick. If each host has two 16-core CPUs, you pay for all 32 cores, even if your VMs would be fine with half of them.

2. Features

On a handful of hosts the gap is smaller than most people expect. Both platforms give you:

  • live migration of VMs between hosts (vMotion on VMware, built-in migration on Proxmox);
  • high availability, so when a host dies its VMs come back up on another one;
  • shared or distributed storage: vSAN on VMware, Ceph and ZFS built into Proxmox;
  • snapshots, templates, cloning and a web console for the whole cluster.

Where VMware is ahead: DRS, which rebalances VMs across hosts on its own, a mature ecosystem (NSX, Horizon, vSAN), certification from software vendors, and a single vCenter console for hundreds of hosts. On three to five hosts you won't notice most of that. One caveat on the Proxmox side: HA needs quorum, which means three nodes, or two plus an external tie-breaker (QDevice). Two servers sitting next to each other won't make a fault-tolerant cluster.

3. Backup

Proxmox has its own free Proxmox Backup Server. It takes incremental, deduplicated backups, verifies them, and encrypts data on the client side before it leaves the host. If you already run Veeam, you can keep it: Veeam Backup & Replication has supported Proxmox VE since 2024.

The 3-2-1 rule, an off-site copy and regular restore tests have nothing to do with the hypervisor. If nobody has ever tried restoring from your backups, you don't actually know whether you have any. How we handle that part is on our backup and disaster recovery page.

4. Migration

Since version 8.2, Proxmox VE ships with an import wizard that connects to ESXi and pulls VMs straight across. That made life a lot easier, though migration still isn't a "move everything" button. Windows VMs need VirtIO drivers, and it's better to install them beforehand, while still on VMware. Linux may rename network interfaces after the move and come up with no network at all. VMware snapshots have to be deleted or consolidated first. Then there's anything tied to hardware: USB license keys for 1C, dongles, licenses bound to a MAC address.

In our experience, a typical move of 5–15 VMs takes 2–4 weeks and happens without stopping the business.

5. Support

VMware support now comes from Broadcom, on subscription, through partners. Proxmox is backed by the Austrian company that develops it, Proxmox Server Solutions: subscription-based tickets, plus a big community and a forum where the answer to most routine questions is already sitting there.

For a company with five servers, though, something else matters more. Neither Broadcom nor Proxmox will show up in your server room on a Saturday night. What counts is who knows your infrastructure and is on the hook for it: your own admin or a provider with an SLA.

When to pick which

Stay on VMware if

  • your subscription is already paid for several years ahead;
  • the vendor of your core system only supports it on vSphere;
  • you use vSAN, NSX or Horizon, and replacing them means rebuilding half your infrastructure;
  • your team knows VMware inside out and retraining doesn't fit right now.

Move to Proxmox if

  • you have 1–20 servers, the VMware renewal is coming up, and the number on the quote was an unpleasant surprise;
  • you use nothing beyond basic virtualization, HA and backup;
  • you run a lot of Linux, or have someone who can look after a Linux-based hypervisor;
  • you'd rather not depend on a single vendor and its next round of price changes.

What about Hyper-V?

If your servers are almost all Windows and you already own Windows Server Datacenter licenses, Hyper-V is a sensible choice too: the hypervisor comes with the license at no extra cost. For a mixed Windows and Linux environment we usually recommend Proxmox.

A migration plan, VMware to Proxmox

  1. Inventory. List of VMs, resources, dependencies between services, guest OS licenses, anything tied to hardware. This is usually where "that one server" turns up, the one nobody remembers the purpose of.
  2. Pilot. We install Proxmox on a test box or a freed-up host and move one or two non-critical VMs. Then we check drivers, performance, backup and restore.
  3. Backup before anything else. A fresh copy of every VM, verified with a test restore. We don't go further without it.
  4. Move in waves. At night or over the weekend, secondary services first, then 1C, email, domain controllers. The old host stays on until the new VM has run cleanly for at least a few days.
  5. Cleanup. Remove VMware Tools, install qemu-guest-agent, turn on HA, monitoring and the backup schedule, update diagrams and server documentation.

Where migrations usually trip up

Storage comes first. Thin-provisioned VMware disks can inflate to full size during conversion if the target storage doesn't support thin provisioning. Then the array that had "plenty of room" fills up halfway through. So we size free space by the full disk size, not by what's currently used.

Networking is second. Every VLAN on the VMware virtual switches has to be recreated on the Proxmox bridges. Miss one and the VM boots fine after the move, but nobody can reach it. The pilot catches this kind of thing, which is why we never skip it.

Third is time. A terabyte over a gigabit link takes two to three hours at best, so the window for moving a 1C database has to be planned with that margin, not on a "we'll squeeze it in overnight" basis. Large VMs are sometimes easier to restore from a fresh backup than to copy live over the network.

How we can help

ITCore supports VMware, Proxmox and Hyper-V, builds HA clusters and moves VMs between platforms. Scope, limits and SLA are on our server and virtualization support page. We don't sell VMware or Microsoft licenses ourselves; a reseller handles that in your company's name. The upside is that we have no stake in which platform you end up on, so the advice follows your needs.

VMware renewal coming up? Tell us how many hosts and VMs you have and when your support runs out. At a first meeting (30 minutes, free) we'll tell you whether moving now makes sense or whether it's safer to wait for the next cycle. Book a meeting.