The Complete Guide to Migrating from VMware to OpenStack for European Enterprises in 2026

If you're reading this article, you've probably already received the renewal notice for your VMware license with the new Broadcom price list. Or worse, you've already paid for it.

Since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, European companies have faced price increases of up to 1,500%, the end of perpetual licenses, and mandatory bundles that include features no one asked for. Forty-eight percent of VMware users now pay double for the same features as before.

2026 is the year many organizations are stopping waiting and starting to migrate. This guide explains how to do it right.

Why OpenStack is the right choice for 2026

OpenStack isn't a throwaway alternative to VMware. It's a mature cloud infrastructure platform, in production for over 15 years, used by Deutsche Telekom, CERN, BMW, Bloomberg, and hundreds of telcos and cloud providers worldwide.

Forty percent of contributions to the OpenStack project come from Europe—a clear sign of how much the European community and companies are investing in this technology, also driven by the European Union's digital sovereignty initiatives.

What OpenStack offers that VMware can't match:

No proprietary licenses. No imposed bundles. No vendor lock-in. Full data sovereignty with data centers entirely in the EU. Open and standard APIs. A global community that doesn't depend on the decisions of a single buyer.

VMware vs. OpenStack: Key Differences

Before migrating, it's helpful to understand where the two platforms actually differ.

Licensing model. VMware has moved to a mandatory subscription model with minimum bundles starting at tens of thousands of euros per year. OpenStack is completely open source—you only pay for the managed services or support you choose.

Architecture. VMware is a monolithic platform with tightly integrated proprietary components. OpenStack is modular: you can choose which components to use and replace them over time without architectural overhaul.

Scalability. Both scale, but OpenStack is natively designed for large, multi-tenant environments—it's the choice of European cloud providers and telcos for precisely this reason.

Skills. VMware skills are more common on the market, but OpenStack skills are growing rapidly. An engineer with Linux and Kubernetes experience learns OpenStack in weeks, not years.

The three migration paths from VMware

There's no single migration path. The choice depends on the size of your infrastructure, the number of VMs, compliance requirements, and your team's internal expertise.

Path 1 — VMware to OpenStack The enterprise path for organizations with more than 100 VMs, cloud providers, telcos, and service providers. OpenStack offers complete IaaS with Nova for compute, Neutron for networking, Cinder for block volumes, and Ceph for distributed storage. It's the right choice when you need multi-tenancy, API-first, and unlimited scalability.

The migration requires a thorough assessment phase, the design of the target architecture with Infrastructure as Code, and a planned cut-over with near-zero downtime.

Path 2 — VMware to Proxmox VE The fastest and most affordable path for SMBs and MSPs with a VM fleet of 10 to 100 machines. Proxmox VE is an open-source hyper-converged platform with KVM and LXC, native HA clustering, live migration, and incremental backups. Operating costs are significantly lower than VMware, and the learning curve is much shorter.

Many companies use the migration to Proxmox as a first step towards OpenStack — the two platforms are complementary and can coexist.

Path 3 — VMware to Managed Kubernetes The cloud-native path for teams running modern applications, microservices, or AI/ML workloads. If your organization is already containerizing workloads or plans to do so, a direct migration to managed Kubernetes can be more efficient than a VM-by-VM migration.

The 4-step migration process

Regardless of the path you choose, a well-executed VMware migration always follows four phases.

Phase 1 — Assessment Before touching any VMs, you need to understand exactly what you're migrating. The assessment includes a complete inventory of existing VMs, an analysis of workload dependencies, mapping of networking and storage requirements, checking compliance requirements (GDPR, NIS2, ISO 27001), and estimating the costs of the new architecture.

A well-done assessment takes 3 to 5 working days and produces a document that becomes the basis for the entire project.

Phase 2 — Architecture Design Based on the assessment, the team designs the target architecture using Infrastructure as Code. Terraform handles resource provisioning, and Ansible takes care of configuration. Everything is versioned, reproducible, and documented.

Phase 3 — Migration and Cutover Migration occurs progressively, workload by workload. Less critical systems are migrated first, allowing the team to refine the process before touching the more critical production systems.

The final cutover—the moment traffic finally switches from the old VMware infrastructure to the new one—occurs during a planned maintenance window, typically over the weekend, with rollback procedures tested and ready if needed.

Phase 4 — Stabilization andManaged Services The first few weeks after the cutover are the most critical. The team actively monitors all systems, responds quickly to any anomalies, and optimizes configurations based on the actual behavior of production workloads .

How long does a VMware migration take?

It depends on the complexity of the environment, but as a general guide:

Small environments (up to 20 VMs, simple architecture): 2–3 weeks from assessment to cut-over.

Medium environments (20–100 VMs, some critical dependencies): 4–8 weeks.

Large environments (100+ VMs, multi-site, high compliance requirements): 3–6 months for a full phased migration.

In all cases, actual downtime during final cut-over is measurable in minutes, not hours.

Conclusion: The right time to migrate is now

The Broadcom problem won't go away on its own. Multi-year contracts signed in 2024 as a temporary measure are expiring in 2025–2026, and renewals to the new price list are already on the desks of many European CTOs.

Open source—OpenStack, Proxmox VE, Kubernetes—has reached an enterprise maturity that was hard to imagine just a few years ago. The expertise is there, the tools are there, and the community is active and growing.

The question is no longer whether to migrate, but when and how to do it in the safest and most efficient way for your organization.

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