It’s been over a year since Broadcom’s VMware licensing changes sent shockwaves through the IT community, triggering one of the largest platform migration waves in recent virtualization history. Many organizations — particularly smaller enterprises and municipal IT shops priced out of Broadcom’s new subscription model — turned to Proxmox VE as their alternative. So how’s it going? We take stock of lessons learned from those who made the jump.
The Migration Experience
Most organizations that migrated from VMware to Proxmox report that the technical migration itself was manageable, if time-consuming. OVF/OVA imports, combined with tools like VMware’s virt-v2v converter and Proxmox’s own migration tools, handled the majority of workloads. The bigger challenges were operational — staff retraining, updating documentation and runbooks, and adjusting monitoring integrations. Organizations with standardized automation (Ansible, Terraform) generally had smoother transitions.
What Proxmox Does Well
Proxmox VE’s web UI has matured significantly over recent releases. Cluster management, live migration, HA configuration, and Ceph storage integration are all handled well within the interface. The lack of licensing costs (beyond optional enterprise support subscriptions) remains a major operational relief for budget-constrained environments. Backup integration with Proxmox Backup Server is clean and efficient, and many migrators cite it as a genuine improvement over their VMware backup workflows.
Ongoing Pain Points
Some pain points persist. Organizations that relied heavily on vSphere’s DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) for automated workload balancing find Proxmox’s HA less sophisticated — manual intervention is more common. Integration with enterprise monitoring tools that had VMware-specific plugins required reconfiguration. Windows Server guest performance has generally been solid, but some edge-case driver issues required troubleshooting that didn’t exist in VMware environments.
The Support Question
Proxmox’s community support (the forums and documentation) is excellent and responsive. For production environments, the Proxmox Enterprise subscription (which also enables the enterprise repository for more stable updates) is strongly recommended. At roughly €400-500 per socket per year, it’s a fraction of what Broadcom is charging for VMware — which is precisely why so many organizations made the switch.
Would They Do It Again?
The overwhelming consensus from organizations a year into the migration: yes. Most report that once the initial migration effort was behind them, operational complexity returned to normal and costs dropped substantially. The few who report regret are primarily large enterprises that relied on VMware-specific integrations with other enterprise software that haven’t yet developed Proxmox equivalents. For municipal IT and mid-market environments, Proxmox in 2026 is a production-ready, cost-effective platform.