Video summary

You told me where you went after VMware. Here's what you had to say.

Main summary

Key takeaways

News and Commentary

What the video analyzes

The video examines what happened to VMware customers after Broadcom’s acquisition and the resulting shake-up. The creator uses an evidence-based method by downloading and coding comments from a previous video, then turning them into quantitative charts.

How the data was used (and its limits)

  • 713 of 841 YouTube comments were analyzed (≈ 85%). The missing comments were deleted/withheld/removed or came from inactive accounts.

  • This is not a random sample or a census. Commenters are self-selected—people who watched and chose to respond, often with strong opinions and “war stories.”

  • Only about one-third of respondents shared organization size, so any breakdown by company size is based on a subset.

Where people are migrating (platform “who is winning”)

By mentions (people/platforms currently running or migrating to)

  • Proxmox leads: 51 mentions
  • Hyper-V is second: 31 mentions
  • VMware is third: 24 mentions
  • Other platforms appearing in the long tail include Nutanix, Rock KVM, XCP-ng/XCPG, OpenShift, and several additional less-mentioned options.

Important nuance

  • Hyper-V likely appears underrepresented in “mentions” because it has lower engagement in the comments.
  • VMware’s presence is not only inertia: 15 respondents explicitly said they chose to stay (with reasons discussed later).

Company-size effects

  • OpenShift shows up mostly in enterprise/education use cases.
  • Nutanix is also heavily enterprise within the subset used for size analysis.
  • Proxmox doesn’t fit the “scrappy pick” stereotype: about one-third of identified Proxmox landings are enterprise, including very large environments (thousands of VMs).
  • The analysis highlights that platform fit varies depending on where different buyers land.

Workload “depth” vs “breadth”

When weighting by number of workloads (instead of number of commenters):

  • Total stated fleet size across those who shared it: 82,100 workloads (from 27 commenters)
  • Nutanix dominates by workload share: ~33%
  • Proxmox drops to ~22%
  • Hyper-V drops sharply to under ~5%

Conclusion from this contrast:

  • Proxmox wins breadth (many organizations)
  • Nutanix wins depth (largest migrations / most workload volume)

Sentiment and praise/criticism

  • Proxmox is the most positively received: net +52
  • Several others are net positive: KVM / XCP-ng / Nutanix / OpenShift / Hyper-V
  • VMware is net negative: net -7
  • The biggest unexpected negative outside VMware is HPE Morpheus: net -5

Context for HPE Morpheus: it appears tied to an apparent contradiction—HPE is running aggressive migration incentives (free licensing + hardware support), yet evaluators/users speak negatively. The criticism seems aimed more at HPE as a vendor than at the technology itself.

What the “next migration wave” is really driven by

The most repeated non-platform reason is that VMware 3-year license agreements signed pre-Broadcom expire in 2027.

  • Many commenters interpret this as triggering another mass migration.
  • The creator argues the deeper trigger is likely the overlap of the 2027 licensing cliff with server refresh cycles, since organizations often replace hypervisors when they are already buying new hardware.

Quantified claims about renewal price spikes

  • 12 commenters gave estimates of renewal increases ranging widely (from ~15% up to extreme outliers like 5,400%).
  • The median is said to be around 400%.
  • The creator claims the median and the typical 300–400% band align with external analyst expectations (e.g., Gartner).

Why some stay with VMware (explicit technical blockers)

A significant portion of “VMware staying” is not inertia. Commenters cite blockers such as:

  • Need for a full VMware stack (vSphere + vSAN + NSX + automation) where no equivalent single replacement exists yet.
  • Application certification dependencies tied to VMware storage architecture.
  • VDI-related constraints tied to Omnissa for replacement approaches.

These are presented as stronger counterweights to the idea that leaving VMware is automatically the right call for everyone.

Additional themes: sovereignty, hobby/prosumer use, and operational reality

  • Digital sovereignty shows up as a concrete purchasing requirement (non-US/non-cloud platforms named), spanning multiple continents—described as an under-covered blind spot in English-language discussions.
  • Some comments (12) come from individuals/hobby use rather than enterprises/SMBs, implying a “personal lab” migration pattern that doesn’t fit fleet-size charts.
  • Other recurring concerns:
    • Rising hardware/cloud costs
    • A skills/people gap: for some organizations, the biggest barrier isn’t technology, it’s not knowing the new stack yet
    • At least one reported OpenShift production failure within the comment set

Overall takeaway

  • There is no single winner:
    • Proxmox: broad adoption across many org sizes
    • Nutanix: large workload migrations (“depth”) with friction
    • Hyper-V: “quiet” staying/migration due to inertia and licensing/bundling
    • OpenShift: strong fit in specific environments (e.g., Red Hat-linked shops)
    • HPE Morpheus: incentive-driven contention undermined by customer sentiment
  • The creator frames the market as evolving from a near-single-default option into a multi-platform ecosystem (at least eight meaningful alternatives), created “by accident” during the exit from VMware.

Presenters / contributors

  • Rich (channel/creator; “Rich here.”)
  • Broadcom (referenced as the acquirer; not a presenter)
  • Gartner (referenced analyst; not a presenter)

Original video