The virtualization landscape changed dramatically when Broadcom acquired VMware and overhauled its entire licensing model. Traditional perpetual licenses were replaced with subscriptions, bundle options were reduced, and flexibility was significantly limited, no more add-ons or custom configurations. As a result, many clients saw their licensing costs soar, in some cases by hundreds of percent.
Suddenly, organizations who never considered leaving VMware began actively looking for alternatives. At CROZ, we quickly and naturally intensified our focus in this area, because as a BizTech consulting firm, helping clients build long-term, stable, and flexible platforms is the very core of our business. And it’s not just about technical challenges, it’s about understanding costs and ensuring platforms deliver real business value. At that point, platform we recognized as most promising was (and still is) OpenShift Virtualization.
This first blog kicks off our new series, sharing how we started our journey and what happened over the past two years. In each upcoming post, we’ll dive deeper into the technical and business aspects of migrating from VMware to OpenShift Virtualization and why you should consider it.
How it all started
Two years ago, after attending the Red Hat One conference where their CTO announced that Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware had opened “a once-in-a-decade opportunity” we started to look deeply into OpenShift Virtualization as a real alternative to VMware.
After returning, we launched two parallel workstreams, tech and business:
- Our technical team focused on exploring the technology, running performance tests, and understanding its full potential
- Our sales team engaged with every customer using VMware to assess how the new licensing model changes affect them, how concerned they are, and whether they are considering alternative solutions. At the same time, our engineering managers analyzed and compared total cost of ownership and licensing costs for VMware versus OpenShift Virtualization
Tech stream
Our technical team carried out a detailed sandbox project where we compared VMware and OpenShift Virtualization across more than 20 categories, including snapshots, backup and restore, RBAC, DR, networking features, load balancing and HA, resource monitoring, and more. The goal was to understand what each platform offers in every category, which features are included, and how complex each solution is to implement. The result was a detailed 20+ page document, and the final comparison table clearly showed VMware as the winner in most categories.
Performance benchmarks revealed that OpenShift Virtualization is slightly slower than VMware, but the difference is not significant and is almost negligible for most workloads.
Figure 1 VMware vs OpenShift virtualization – part of comparison table
Business stream
The results revealed that most VMware customers are seriously impacted by the new licensing changes, and many expressed significant concern about future costs and support. As a result, organizations are actively exploring alternative platforms to reduce their VMware footprint and mitigate risks.
However, a clear skepticism persists across the board: VMware has become the established standard in virtualization, and at this moment, few see a true replacement that matches its capabilities and reliability. This uncertainty is shaping the market’s cautious approach, with many planning incremental steps rather than full migrations.
From a cost perspective, there is no ideal scenario either. While OpenShift subscriptions are generally less expensive than VMware licenses, the savings are not as significant as one might hope, particularly for organizations that are not fully committed to containerization. The different architectural models often mean necessary investments into infrastructure, and migrations themselves are complex projects requiring additional enablement for staff if the expertise is not already present. Ultimately, the return on investment is not always rapid, and for some, it may not be compelling enough to justify a large-scale transition.
Conclusion (2 years ago)
OpenShift Virtualization holds significant potential, especially because it comes bundled with OpenShift, the undisputed global leader in hybrid cloud application management. The vision of managing both containers and virtual machines on a single platform is truly compelling, particularly given the proven technologies at its core like KVM and KubeVirt.
However, at this stage, OpenShift Virtualization cannot yet be seen as a full 1:1 replacement for VMware, which remains the industry standard in traditional virtualization.
A promising direction and an interesting business opportunity lies with organizations already using OpenShift or planning a strategic move toward containerization.
Deploying OpenShift on bare metal is an excellent long-term strategy: it lets you run critical container workloads without the overhead of a hypervisor while still hosting VMs set for gradual modernization. This approach means modernization can happen at your own pace, aligning IT transformation with real business priorities instead of rushing through a disruptive, one-time migration.
Additionally, by consolidating workloads on OpenShift, organizations naturally reduce their VMware footprint, unlocking more value from existing investments, and preparing for the future.
RedHat closing technical gap with VMware – impressive at least.
Our perspective on OpenShift running on bare metal is firmly rooted in real-world experience. Over the past few years, we’ve conducted a significant number of technical assessments and actively helped clients prepare for and execute migration projects, such as A1 – OCP migration to bare metal.
At the same time, we keep a close watch on the evolution of OpenShift Virtualization itself. The speed and quality with which Red Hat has been closing the technical gap with VMware has been nothing short of impressive. This progress is reflected not only in feature parity but also in the rapid expansion of the entire ecosystem, as ISV partners have broadened OpenShift Virtualization support in all critical areas (see image below).
Figure 2 OpenShift virtualization eco system
Red Hat then made a brilliant strategic move by releasing OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a dedicated OpenShift edition focused purely on managing VM workloads. This came as a direct response to market demand from customers seeking a cost-effective hypervisor, not a full container management platform. This option, which is 92% less expensive than running the full OpenShift Container Platform on bare metal, brought an entirely new dimension to the cost equation for migrating away from VMware.
As we continued our enablement journey and gradually gained greater confidence in OpenShift Virtualization, we began actively encouraging and assisting clients to start migrating their VMs to the platform.
Among the projects we’ve delivered, we’re especially proud of the engagements where our senior solution architects and consultants have partnered with Red Hat Consulting to support one of the largest telcos in France, as well as a global technology giant in Germany. These are large-scale migrations moving thousands of VMs and consolidating them onto future-proof, resilient platforms.
We’ll be sharing more technical details, project insights, and key recommendations from these experiences in our upcoming blogs.
How about now
With all experience behind us, we can confidently say that OpenShift Virtualization is climbing the ranks, and we see this platform in the top-right corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for virtualization platforms.
Not to sugarcoat things, virtualization migration will never be a simple project; it requires careful planning, a thorough understanding of workloads and infrastructure, and strong alignment among operations and engineering teams. This shift needs to be considered from multiple perspectives, both technical and business, and with a long-term vision.
As the saying goes, “eat your own dog food” and we’ve done exactly that. At CROZ, we have fully migrated to OpenShift Virtualization ourselves, which speaks volumes about our trust in the platform.
As already mentioned, with this one, we’re kicking off a series of blogs where we’ll share our project experiences, technical/business lessons, and recommendations for organizations considering this transformation journey:
- Introduction OpenShift Virtualization
- Why are we moving away from VMware?
- Planning a VMware takeout strategy
- Migrations in the wild: Lessons from the field
- What is next? Let’s tame the uncharted
Stay tuned!
