Proxmox vs VMware in 2026: Why We Switched (And Why You Should Too)

When Broadcom acquired VMware in late 2023, they did what everyone feared: they killed the free tier, jacked up prices, and pushed everyone toward enterprise licensing. For small businesses running a few VMs, the cost went from manageable to absurd.

We moved our infrastructure to Proxmox VE. Here’s why — and why your business should consider it too.

The Licensing Problem

VMware vSphere now starts at roughly $8,400 per CPU per year under Broadcom’s new model. For a small business running two physical servers with dual CPUs, that’s $33,600 annually just for the hypervisor license.

Proxmox VE is free and open source. Enterprise support subscriptions start at $110 per CPU per year. For that same two-server setup: $440/year vs $33,600.

What You Actually Get With Proxmox

Proxmox VE isn’t a compromise. It’s a full-featured virtualization platform built on KVM and LXC:

Live migration between nodes (just like vMotion)
High availability clustering with automatic failover
ZFS storage with built-in snapshots and replication
Container support via LXC alongside full VMs
Web-based management interface (no Windows client needed)
Backup integration with Proxmox Backup Server

The Migration Path

Moving from VMware to Proxmox is straightforward:

Export your VMs as OVA files from vSphere
Import them into Proxmox using qm importovf
Adjust network and storage drivers
Test, validate, and cut over

We’ve migrated 34 VMs across 8 clients without a single data loss incident. Average migration time per VM: 23 minutes.

When VMware Still Makes Sense

If you’re running a 200-node enterprise cluster with NSX networking and vSAN storage, VMware’s ecosystem is still hard to beat. But for the 95% of businesses running 2-8 hosts with straightforward workloads, Proxmox delivers the same core functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Need help evaluating whether Proxmox is right for your setup? Contact us for a free infrastructure assessment.