For more than twenty years, VMware was the default answer for enterprise virtualization. It was reliable, well-connected to other tools, and deeply built into how IT teams worked, both large and small. The old saying "nobody gets fired for choosing VMware" held real truth. The platform carried years of trust, which made it feel almost risk-free for a career, even when its price was high.

That "the price is right" thinking changed a lot once Broadcom finished its takeover of VMware and reworked the whole licensing model. The move from one-time, permanent licenses to subscription bundles removed the affordable starting points that smaller organisations had relied on. Support also got worse. Customers reported delays in reaching the Broadcom support portal, trouble getting their Site IDs after the change, and a general feeling that their relationship with the vendor no longer mattered as much.

For larger enterprises, the higher costs were painful but manageable. For SMEs in Flanders, the new pricing is simply not workable. After all, many of them with small IT teams and tight budgets.

Many companies are already leaving. The open question is not whether they will leave VMware, but where they will go, and whether they will get there safely.

If you are looking for alternatives, check out these articles:

• 9 Best VMware Alternatives for Organizations in 2026
• 10 Best VMware Competitors for 2026: Pros and Cons
• Top 6 VMware Alternatives in 2026: A Comparison

In Belgium, the names we often hear are Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Red Hat OpenShift, and of course Proxmox. Most of these articles are US-based, so it is an extra achievement for a European open-source company to get on the list of best alternatives for VMware. It is also interesting to read the strengths and weaknesses of each tool, including Proxmox.

Be sure to do the math and your homework. If you have any technical questions, do not hesitate to contact our Proxmox experts.

Why companies hesitate: 5 real adoption barriers

We examined these strengths and weakness, and the associated migration issues to understand why organisations do not just switch overnight. The barriers are real, and brushing them off as old habits misses the point. Each concern deserves a proper answer.

1. The skills and retraining barrier

The first obstacle is people. VMware administrators have spent years learning vCenter, vSphere, vSAN, and the wider set of tools around the platform. That knowledge lives in their daily workflows, their runbooks, and their shared team memory.

Proxmox works differently. It has its own interface, its own way of clustering, and its own approach to storage. It offers enterprise grade virtualization with technologies that remain close to the Linux kernel. Built on solid open-source software stacks with proven track records, Proxmox can truly be trustworthy alternative to VMware. But retraining a team takes time, budget, and energy that many SMEs do not have to spare.

This is what we might call the hidden cost of switching. It does not show up in any product comparison, but it is often the deciding factor when a company looks at the true cost of moving. Without proper training support, the learning curve becomes a wall.

2. The certification and compliance gap

For organisations in regulated sectors, the lack of formal security certifications on Proxmox is a real worry. VMware holds certifications such as Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2, which are required or strongly preferred for buying decisions in sectors like healthcare, finance, and government work. Proxmox, as an open-source platform, does not hold these same certifications ... yet. We hope that they are working on this.

It is worth saying this clearly: open source does not mean unsafe. Open code can be reviewed, checked, and tested by independent experts in ways that closed software cannot. By the way, open source also doesn't mean that it is entirely free, that there is no support, and that it is for hobbyists, not serious enterprises. This is no longer true, but some people still think this.

Several European government bodies and financial institutions already run Proxmox in production. But the missing official stamps create a perception problem around compliance, and any project proposal needs to deal with that head on.

3. The vendor integration problem

VMware has spent decades building a certified partner network. Backup vendors, monitoring tools, storage systems, and security platforms all publish official support statements for VMware. When a company runs VMware, they know their existing tools will work with it.

The Proxmox ecosystem is smaller and younger. Companies moving from VMware may find that some commercial software they depend on, does not have an official Proxmox integration. In practice many tools work fine, but the lack of official certification means IT teams have to test and confirm those integrations themselves. That adds risk and extra work to the migration decision.

On the other hand, things are moving in the right direction. E.g. Veeam, a popular backup solution, added official Proxmox VE support in version 12.2 back in Q3 2024, putting it alongside VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix as a first-class platform.

4. Migration complexity and downtime risk

Moving virtual machines from VMware to Proxmox is possible, but it is not simple. Older VMs must be exported, converted, checked, and re-imported. Settings must be mapped across platforms. Network paths, storage paths, and high-availability rules all need careful translation.

For organisations running production-critical workloads, the fear of a failed migration is real and reasonable. The question of how to roll back is a big worry. If something goes wrong in the middle of a migration, can the team bring the service back quickly? Without a tested plan and experienced guidance, the answer is often unclear, and that alone can freeze the decision.

5. The trust deficit

Maybe the deepest barrier is cultural. VMware has a long record of production use in demanding enterprise settings. Even though Broadcom's handling of the takeover has hurt trust in the vendor, the platform itself still has a reputation for being reliable. Proxmox, despite its growing maturity and its use across more than 1.6 million hosts worldwide, is still seen by some as newer and less proven.

Changing that view needs more than technical evidence. It needs proof from others: case studies from similar organisations, honest feedback from trusted peers, and visible examples of successful migrations at scale.

This is also why we think a Knowledge Sharing Community around Proxmox is the way to go, useful for new and experienced users, interesting for companies who are planning to migrate, and last but not least also crucial knowledge for our teachers, researchers, students and graduates in SMEs.