VMware to Proxmox Migrations
With the recent withdrawal of VMware Essentials and Essentials Plus by Broadcom/VMware, Akzium has invested in training our technical resources on the Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) hypervisor solution and Apache Cloudstack.
Broadcom's announced End of General Support for vSphere 8 is October 11, 2027.
What happens if you do NOT renew your VMware VVF 8.x subscription before the renewal date?
Your existing VVF 8.x environment will keep running, but once the subscription expires it will effectively become “read‑only” and unmanageable until you renew or apply new licenses.
Broadcom’s guidance and partner documentation state that when a subscription VMware license (like VVF) expires:
So your environment does not suddenly shut down on the renewal date, but it becomes a frozen footprint that you cannot safely operate as a production platform
Proxmox is, in Akzium's opinion, the most cost-efficient option available to the VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus and Standard installed base customers who no longer have an option for Broadcom/VMware support of their existing platform. It is also a great alternative for many existing VMware customers who do not want to upgrade to VCF 9.x.
Akzium understands that upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x is not only prohibitively expensive for many businesses, but also a major structural change in your VMware setup.
With Proxmox VE 9.x you retain the familiarity of VMware's vCenter, Standard vSwitches and flexible hardware and storage infrastructure options.
Migrating from VMware to Proxmox VE 9.x doesn't mean having to leave your disaster recovery model behind.
By pairing Proxmox with LINBIT's LINSTOR and DRBD 9, you unlock high-performance, asynchronous data replication and automated failover without the crippling licensing costs.
Why Proxmox VE 9.x teams are embracing LinBit's site-to-site data replication solutions:
Backup and Replication:
For backup and replication, there is a growing ecosystem of vendors supporting Proxmox. While Proxmox has its own Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) solution that works extremely well, vendors like Veeam and Nakivo have chosen to adapt their Backup and Replication products to work directly with Proxmox. In addition, by embracing storage solutions such as ZFS, Ceph or Linstor you gain the added advantage of their built-in asynchronous replication engines.
Contact your Akzium rep to discuss the technical differences between your existing VMware hypervisor environment and a Proxmox-based virtualization platform.
Akzium's highly-trained team of virtualization experts will design a migration path to move all of your existing VMware-hosted virtual machines over to Proxmox.
Broadcom's announced End of General Support for vSphere 8 is October 11, 2027.
What happens if you do NOT renew your VMware VVF 8.x subscription before the renewal date?
Your existing VVF 8.x environment will keep running, but once the subscription expires it will effectively become “read‑only” and unmanageable until you renew or apply new licenses.
Broadcom’s guidance and partner documentation state that when a subscription VMware license (like VVF) expires:
- Existing workloads keep running as they are.
- You lose the ability to manage the environment in normal ways: no creating new VMs, no powering on powered‑off VMs, no editing VM settings, and no vMotion or similar changes.
- ESXi hosts lose their connection to vCenter and will require valid subscription keys to reconnect.
- HA and recovery are impacted: if a VM fails or is rebooted, it may not start again without an active license.
So your environment does not suddenly shut down on the renewal date, but it becomes a frozen footprint that you cannot safely operate as a production platform
Proxmox is, in Akzium's opinion, the most cost-efficient option available to the VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus and Standard installed base customers who no longer have an option for Broadcom/VMware support of their existing platform. It is also a great alternative for many existing VMware customers who do not want to upgrade to VCF 9.x.
Akzium understands that upgrading to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x is not only prohibitively expensive for many businesses, but also a major structural change in your VMware setup.
- To move to VCF 9.x you must ingest your entire VMware infrastructure into the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) Manager, which is an additional management layer that sits "on top" of vCenter
- The "move" to SDDC Manager means that your underlying VMware network, compute and storage must meet strict cloud-ready prerequisites before SDDC Manager will allow the conversion.
- SDDC requires all servers in a cluster be of identical hardware (CPU / system board) types
- SDDC requires a MINIMUM of 4 identical ESX hosts (there are some workarounds for this for now)
- While 10GbE is technically supported, SDDC prefers 25GbE or faster network speeds
- SDDC requires specific VLANs to be configured (Management, vMotion, vSAN, Edge) with 9000 MTU jumbo frames enabled
- Only vSAN, Fiber Channel and NFS storage are supported as Primary Storage, iSCSI is relegated to secondary storage
- VCF 9.x prefers SAML 2.0 / OIDC federated identity and authentication via Entra ID, Okta, PingIdentity or ADFS
- Fiber Channel arrays must be registered via vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) to allow policy-based management
- Storage arrays must support vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) natively
- VVols have been deprecated
- VCF 9.x only support NSX network switches. Standard vSwitches and Distributed Switches have been deprecated.
With Proxmox VE 9.x you retain the familiarity of VMware's vCenter, Standard vSwitches and flexible hardware and storage infrastructure options.
Migrating from VMware to Proxmox VE 9.x doesn't mean having to leave your disaster recovery model behind.
By pairing Proxmox with LINBIT's LINSTOR and DRBD 9, you unlock high-performance, asynchronous data replication and automated failover without the crippling licensing costs.
Why Proxmox VE 9.x teams are embracing LinBit's site-to-site data replication solutions:
- Near-Native Performance: DRBD delivers blisteringly fast, hyperconverged block storage with ultra-low latency.
- True Multi-Site DR: Seamlessly build stretched clusters for continuous availability across datacenters.
- Simplified Management: LINSTOR orchestrates your entire storage footprint directly within Proxmox.
Backup and Replication:
For backup and replication, there is a growing ecosystem of vendors supporting Proxmox. While Proxmox has its own Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) solution that works extremely well, vendors like Veeam and Nakivo have chosen to adapt their Backup and Replication products to work directly with Proxmox. In addition, by embracing storage solutions such as ZFS, Ceph or Linstor you gain the added advantage of their built-in asynchronous replication engines.
Contact your Akzium rep to discuss the technical differences between your existing VMware hypervisor environment and a Proxmox-based virtualization platform.
Akzium's highly-trained team of virtualization experts will design a migration path to move all of your existing VMware-hosted virtual machines over to Proxmox.