VMWare replacement?

[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

With licensing changes coming down, we’ve been given marching orders to get off of VMWare.  Anyone have any decent reommendations?  I’m not a fan of forklifting everything up to Azure, because of cost.

 

Thanks,

 

Joe Heaton

Information Technology Operations Branch

Data and Technology Division

CA Department of Fish and Wildlife

Sacramento, CA 95811

Phone: 916-902-9116

 

Book time with Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife

 

 

[Michael B. Smith]

Hyper-V is quite usable and reliable.

 

That being said, to get the full capabilities of VMware, you are going to need SCVMM. I question whether most people need those “full capabilities”. That requires evaluation.

 

Lots of folks in the FOSS world like Proxmox VE, which is built on KVM virtualization. I deployed it in a lab and it seemed to work ok, but it doesn’t have the tight Windows integration that Hyper-V offers.

 

Really depends on your needs.

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[Henry Awad]

There are several options depending on your current infrastructure situation. If you are a Microsoft shop for the most part, Hyper-V is a good alternative but it's a big shift especially if you are currently using NFS volumes on your storage for VMs. Also, if you are already paying for Windows Datacenter edition then there's no additional cost for licensing. So that would be big savings for your company. Proxmox could be another alternative but you have to make sure that if you have any virtual appliances that you can run then on Proxmox (or any other hypervisor for that matter). Furthermore, make sure that your current backup software supports the hypervisor that you choose so you don't have any gaps in your backups. 

To help ease the migration, I found this freeware tool that will live replicate VMs so that you can minimize downtime during the migration process: V2V Converter / P2V Converter - Converting VM Formats

Thanks,

Henry Awad

Principal Engineer

Technology Services

The Catholic University of America

(D) 202-319-5404

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[Fehlman, Lee]

We're looking into VergeIo and Scale Computing.

On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 9:50 AM 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntsysadmin <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

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[Mike Leone]

On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 9:50 AM 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via
ntsysadmin <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>

> With licensing changes coming down, we’ve been given marching orders to get off of VMWare. Anyone have any decent reommendations? I’m not a fan of forklifting everything up to Azure, because of cost.

We went with Nutanix and their AHV product. But we've been running
VMware on top of Nutanix for years, so for us that was natural.

>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Joe Heaton
>
> Information Technology Operations Branch
>
> Data and Technology Division
>
> CA Department of Fish and Wildlife
>
> Sacramento, CA 95811
>
> Phone: 916-902-9116
>
>
>
> Book time with Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife
>
>
>
>
>

> --
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[Philip Elder]

How many workloads (VMs)?

What are the roles they play? Exchange, SQL, File and Print, VDI, ETC?

Do you have baseline metrics for everything that span at least 1 to 2 calendar years?

How comfortable is IT with the commandline?

How important is talking to a real human for support?

How important is a rather robust product ecosystem (forums, certified experts, frontline support, top line support)?

 

I am biased. That’s a gimmee given my experience putting together high availability solutions on the Microsoft Stack since Windows Server 2008.

 

So, after answering the above questions a bigger picture will emerge that allows one to draw a line between the answers and available hypervisors.

 

NOTE: Windows Server is licensed based on the host no matter the hypervisor running under the Operating System Environments (OSEs – Microsoft’s official name for a VM).

 

So, if Windows Server Datacenter licensing is already in place there is no cost to deploy a Hyper-V Cluster, or Storage Spaces Direct Hyper-Converged Cluster (S2D), hooked up to current SAN infrastructure.

 

We have ways! 😉

 

Philip Elder MCTS

Senior Technical Architect

Microsoft High Availability MVP

MPECS Inc.

E-mail: Phili...@MPECSInc.Ca

Phone: +1 (780) 458-2028

Web: www.MPECSInc.Com

Blog: Blog.MPECSInc.Com  

Twitter: Twitter.com/MPECSInc

 

Please note: Although we may sometimes respond to email, text and phone calls instantly at all hours of the day, our regular business hours are 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Monday thru Friday.

 

 

From: 'Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife' via ntsysadmin <ntsys...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2026 07:50
To: ntsys...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ntsysadmin] VMWare replacement?

 

With licensing changes coming down, we’ve been given marching orders to get off of VMWare.  Anyone have any decent reommendations?  I’m not a fan of forklifting everything up to Azure, because of cost.

--

[Stan Gobien]

I would start by looking at what backup software you use and what hypervisors they support.

I work for a small organization and we are currently migrating VM's from VMware to Proxmox VE.

We have a new 3-node cluster with Ceph shared storage (hyperconverged).

Veeam works well with Proxmox, but it's not on par yet with all the features like SureBackup.

But that goes for Scale & Nutanix as well.

Op donderdag 7 mei 2026 om 23:44:35 UTC+2 schreef Philip Elder:

[KIT Consultants ListServe]

Interested to get more feedback on the StarWind V2V Converter / P2V Converter - Converting VM Formats

 

Looks ideal on the surface, but I couldn’t get it to work on a small 4 Windows VM migration from ESXi 6.7 (standalone – no vCenter) to Hyper-V 2025.

Tried about 3 or 4 times (both live migration and converting VMDKs). Gave up & used the old school new VM & migrate/copy data.

*Live migration DID work on a Linux based VM.

 

Have a larger ESXi to Hyper-V migration coming up soon. Anyone willing to share any feedback?

Thanks - bruce

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[Stan Gobien]

Veeam B&R supports backing up a VMware VM & restoring to HyperV.
You could even use the free community edition version.
https://www.veeam.com/blog/vmware-to-hyper-v-migration.html 

Op 8/05/2026 om 22:31 schreef 'KIT Consultants ListServe' via ntsysadmin:

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[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

We currenly have System Center included in our server licensing from Microsoft, and right now, we’re just using it for ConfigMgr, so adding SCVMM might be another reason that we could keep ConfigMgr, lol.

 

From: ntsys...@googlegroups.com <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Michael B. Smith

Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2026 6:59 AM
To: ntsys...@googlegroups.com

Subject: [ntsysadmin] RE: VMWare replacement?

 

WARNING: This message is from an external source. Verify the sender and exercise caution when clicking links or opening attachments.

 

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[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

I’ll do my best to answer your questions, as well as other folks:

 

Workloads:

  16 clusters

   27 hosts

   394 VMs – However, that will be reduced probably to below 300 when we finally get around to getting rid of old, shutdown guests.

 

Storage:

Dell SAN here in the central datacenters.  Internal storage on our field office hosts, which are Dell towers.

 

Backup:

Azure backup services, but we’re implementing Dell Data Domain. We also recently purchased Rubrik for that realm.

 

Roles:

SQL, File/Print, DCs, web servers, application servers.

 

Appliances:

Not sure of an actual number, but we do have a number of them. Most appliances are running Linux of some kind.

 

Metrics:

Maybe, but probably not.  I have the summary page for the vCenter, showing CPU, memory and storage usage.

 

Command line:

Probably not as comfortable as they should be.  I’m not in the VMWare group, but I’m the old guy, so have experience everywhere here.

 

Support:

Human, interactive support is preferred, but honestly, I don’t think we’ve had that with VMWare for a long time.

 

Licensing:

We have enough Microsoft Datacenter licensing to cover the hosts here in our datacenters. We have Standard licenses to cover our field office hosts.

 

 

We recently went through a week long workshop on Azure VMWare Solution, as I think our management wants to get out of the “hardware” business.

 

From: ntsys...@googlegroups.com <ntsys...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Philip Elder
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2026 2:44 PM
To: ntsys...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [ntsysadmin] RE: VMWare replacement?

 

WARNING: This message is from an external source. Verify the sender and exercise caution when clicking links or opening attachments.

 

How many workloads (VMs)?

.
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[Michael B. Smith]

I’ve deployed Azure VMware via Azure Migrate and with Zerto (I wasn’t primary on the Zerto project).

 

You won’t save any money that way, I don’t think.

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[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

Microsoft claims we will… lol.

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[Henry Awad]

Another option is to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to convert a VMware VM to Hyper-V involves integrating your VMware environment into the SCVMM fabric and then using a built-in wizard to perform the Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) conversion.

Prerequisites

Permissions: You need a Run As account with administrator privileges for both the vCenter server and the destination Hyper-V hosts.VM State: The source VMware VM must be powered off.

Clean-up: You must uninstall VMware Tools from the guest OS and ensure there are no active snapshots before starting.

Compatibility: SCVMM 2022 supports conversion from vSphere 6.5 and newer. Virtual hard disks connected to an IDE bus or stored on vSAN are generally not supported for this method.

Step 1: Add VMware Infrastructure to SCVMM

Before converting, SCVMM must be able to "see" your VMware environment.

In the SCVMM console, go to Fabric > Servers > Add VMware vCenter Server. Provide the vCenter server name and the Run As account.

Once vCenter is added, go to Add VMware ESX Hosts and Clusters and follow the wizard to bring the specific hosts under management.

Step 2: Run the Conversion Wizard

Navigate to VMs and Services > Home > Create > Create Virtual Machines > Convert Virtual Machine. 

Select Source: Browse and select the VMware VM you want to convert.Specify Identity: Name the new VM and provide an optional description.

Virtual Machine Configuration: Set the CPU and memory.Generation 2: Use if the source VM uses UEFI firmware.Generation 1: Use if the source VM uses BIOS firmware.

Select Host: Choose a target Hyper-V host for placement and specify the storage path for the VM files.

Select Networks: Map the VMware virtual networks to the appropriate Hyper-V logical networks and VLANs.

Review and Create: Review the summary. Click Create to start the migration.

Post-Migration Steps

Verify Boot: Confirm the new VM boots correctly on the Hyper-V host.Install Integration Services: If not automatically present, install Hyper-V Integration Services to ensure optimal driver performance.

Network Check: Re-verify static IP addresses or DNS settings as virtual NIC identifiers often change during conversion.

You can also automate the process:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/coreinfrastructureandsecurityblog/automating-vmware-to-hyper-v-migration-with-scvmm/4463237

Henry Awad

Principal Engineer

Technology Services

The Catholic University of America

(D) 202-319-5404 | (M) 571-233-4479

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[Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife]

Anyone look at Platform9?

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