To say that finding a viable alternative to VMware vSphere represents a top priority for many organizations understates the obvious. Further, this push to identify an alternative may heighten in the coming months as their pre-Broadcom VMware support contracts expire.
To help organizations, DCIG plans to shortly release its 2026 VMware vSphere Alternative TOP 5 reports. As DCIG finalizes its research and prepares to release these reports, we have some early insights to share into this research.
Insight #1: Innovation Happening Rapidly in Many Directions
Organizations may not fully appreciate the level of innovation currently occurring in VMware vSphere alternatives. Once Broadcom announced its new software licensing terms after acquiring VMware, organizations began to seek out VMware alternatives in earnest. Then as organizations began to evaluate these alternatives, they quickly identified the gap between VMware vSphere and competitive solutions.
Safe to say, VMware’s competitors also recognized the huge lead in features that VMware vSphere had over their solution. However, they never really had any motivation to try to close that feature gap. This largely stemmed from the cost of doing so.
Broadcom – for better or worse – has removed that reason for competitors to do measured innovation. Due to VMware’s increased licensed costs, organizations have suddenly become much more receptive to adopting VMware vSphere alternatives. Of course, these alternatives must first possess VMware vSphere features that the organization uses comparable to what VMware vSphere offers.
This has prompted providers of VMware vSphere alternative solutions to rapidly introduce new functionality to close this feature gap. However, the specific features that individual VMware vSphere alternatives introduce span the gamut. Some focus on:
- Delivering the VMware vSphere features that enterprise data centers need.
- Specific features that remote and small offices require.
- Introducing fleet management features required by organizations with hundreds or thousands of remote offices.
- Features most requested by managed service providers (MSPs).
In evaluating these solutions, many had their documentation updated just days or weeks before DCIG reviewed them. These updates provided additional details on many of the features referenced.
While noteworthy and encouraging, organizations should exercise caution in how quickly they implement these features. They should minimally scrutinize the maturity of each new feature and its readiness for deployment into a production environment.
Insight #2: Documentation More Difficult to Decipher than Normal
Technology providers have never excelled in their ability to document and explain the features in their respective solutions. So, saying their documentation on new features is more difficult to decipher than normal probably does not surprise anyone.
However, this problem becomes exacerbated by those providers that offer multiple VMware vSphere alternatives. Providers such as HPE, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and SUSE each offer two or more server virtualization solutions.
These different versions tend to target different parts of the enterprises. Some target hybrid environments with abilities to run both on-premises and in the cloud. Others focus on enterprise data center environments while others best fit power user and desktop environments. Still others only support certain guest operating systems and not others.
The documentation on their websites often co-mingles features for different products on the same page. This forces one to try to figure out which version or versions supports which specific feature. To do so, the feature being described sometimes had the software version that supported it in parenthesis at the end of the feature description.
However, organizations will probably need to test the product to ascertain the accuracy of that assumption. In short, one must exercise probably more diligence than normal to precisely determine the features that a specific software version possesses.
Insight #3: Software Licensing All Over the Map
Broadcom’s changes to VMware’s software licensing have largely motivated organizations to seek out VMware vSphere alternatives. However, whatever one may think about Broadcom, it has certainly simplified VMware’s software licensing. In fact, based on the feedback received so far on Broadcom’s new VMware software licensing model, its simplified approach to software licensing somewhat reminds me of this “simplified” IRS 1040 tax form.
While VMware vSphere alternatives may charge less than VMware vSphere, organizations still need to verify how they license their software. The following list highlights the many ways that providers license their server virtualization software. Further, this list did not capture all the options we uncovered and providers may check multiple boxes when licensing their software.
- All-inclusive licensing
- Capacity based – back end TBs (BETB)
- Capacity based – front end TBs (FETB)
- Elastic licensing (can acquire, and then release, additional licenses for short periods of time to meet increased demand)
- Feature- or tier-based licensing (must pay more to access specific software features)
- MSP licensing (licensing options available for managed service providers)
- Per core
- Per physical ESXi server
- Per physical CPU
- Per VM
- Perpetual software licensing with annual maintenance/renewal
- Subscription-based licensing for predefined period (eg., monthly, annual, or multi-year)
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